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Posts Tagged ‘O Reilly’

AMEE Gets $5.5m Series B To Go Global With Realtime Carbon Engine

AMEE, the US/UK-based startup that aims to build the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions, has secured a $5.5m series B financing lead by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside existing investors, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. AMEE will use the funding to expand its geographic reach and platform.

The prize AMEE is aiming for, known in the sector as “enterprise carbon management”, is expected to reach $4 billion by 2017 because of government and consumer pressure to address climate change. AMEE’s engine is now being used by companies offering carbon accounting or business intelligence software, as well as governments, multi-nationals and SMEs.

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Web 2.0 Panel: Humans as Sensors

This post is sponsored by IBM’s A Smarter Planet blog.

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Media ran a panel called Humans As Sensors. With him were four organizations doing innovative applications using sensors: Markus Tripp (Mobilizy), Deborah Estrin (Computer Science Department, UCLA), Sharon Biggar (Path Intelligence), Di-Ann Eisnor (Waze).

Each of the speakers started by explaining what they do.

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Waze is a real-time crowd sourcing and live mapping application. It works on iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android. Di-Ann Eisnor explained that their service does "transactional cartography." It was initially launched in Israel, then launched in the U.S. just a few months ago.

Eisnor said that Waze aimes to take sensor data from "entertainment to action." It started out being used to map objects, then people, now processes.

Path Intelligence is bringing online innovation to the real world, according to co-founder and the Chief Operating Officer Sharon Biggar. They are targeting the retail market – specifically shops in malls. She said that the online world is good at collecting data on user experience, but the local mall doesn’t have that data.

What Path Intelligence is doing is analogous to Google Analytics, said Biggar. It works by collecting sensor datas and anonymous pings from cellphones – it doesn’t require downloads.

Biggar said that what they are measuring is real-time behavior, "right now." One of their current aims is to help the offline retail industry cope with recession. At mall sites they respond directly to the way shoppers are behaving. They do this by installing sensors and accurately locating mobile phones indoors. They use that data to help businesses improve in the real world and in real time.

Mobilizy makes the AR browser Wikitude, which we have covered extensively here on ReadWriteWeb. It works on mobile phones that have GPS and a compass. As we’ve explained before, Wikitude is overlaid information on the real world.

What’s next for the product? Mobilizy manager business development Markus Tripp said that they plan to open it for the public, so people can create content for AR. It will be in the same format as Google Earth.

Deborah Estrin from the Computer Science Department at UCLA was on next. She explained that they are doing a lot of research into "participatory sensing." They are taking it from aggregators to personal apps. The use cases include specific civic and citizen data campaigns. She suggested that what they do is "twitter with a purpose," although she admitted that this was a cynical thing to say.

Example apps include whatsinvasive.com – enabling users to provide data on what plants are invasive (weeds etc) – and Biketastic.

Discussion

The panel then had a discussion on where sensor and mobile-generated data is headed on the Web.

Brady asked the panel about how users can trust the data, whether it be implict or explicit.

Estrin from UCLA said that giving people visibility back into the data is key. Let people have legible feedback on the data. She also remarked that they always have "eyes on the process" – in other words, humans in the loop. So what they do is not entirely automated.

Waze has learned from web 2.0 that you need to apply different weighting for different people.

Brady asked next: what type of critical mass of people is needed for these kinds of apps?

Di-Ann Eisnor from Waze said that it really depends on the app and its goals. She noted that for them Israel was an incubator / test bed. So they shot for half a percent of the market.

Sharon Biggar from Path Intelligence agreed that it depends on the app and what you’re trying to achieve. For them their focus is retail, so their comparison point (in terms of data) is what users had before they came along.

Deborah Estrin from UCLA remarked that as you get more data, you get more value.

Brady asked the magical Web 2.0 question: how do you all plan on making money?

Sharon Biggar from Path Intelligence explained that their business model is built into what they do: retail. She said that retailers will pay for the data they provide. However she noted that these companies "need to get the sensors out there, somehow" – which is a cost to those businesses.

Di-Ann Eisnor from Waze said that the "navigable data market" is worth $4B and is dominated by the big map data companies like Navteq. Waze sells their data at low cost, but she noted that Google is trying to disrupt the market. She admitted that this is shaking things up for Waze, but she thinks that location based services are coming into their own (which they are indeed, according to Morgan Stanley).

Markus Tripp from Mobilizy said that they are a very new business, but he said they are generating revenue. He said that the main goal with Wikitude is to get reach and as much content as possible into its system.

Brady asked as a final question: is Twitter the ultimate sensor?

Sharon Biggar from Path Intelligence said that Twitter data is "another indicator of interest" – another piece of data to add to the equation.

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Web 2.0 Summit Opens: Today’s Revolution Akin to Web 2.0 in 2004

We’re at the 6th annual Web 2.0 conference, now known as the Web 2.0 Summit. John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly opened the event. O’Reilly spoke about being at another transition point for the Web. They have termed this "web squared", a.k.a. "web meets world." O’Reilly said that in the current era "we’re starting to instrument the world." He referenced a quote from VC Fred Wilson, that we are currently in a "golden triangle of mobile, social and real-time."

O’Reilly remarked that we’re seeing "what may be the next wave of internet business models." Speaking about the evolution of both the conference and the web 2.0 trend, he noted that the "revolution we’re seeing today is as great as the one we saw five years ago."

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We at ReadWriteWeb have been noticing something new in 2009 too. At the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit last week, I spoke to a number of startups and smart Web people. There was a real sense of excitement and innovation in the air, which reminded me of the first Web 2.0 conference I attended in 2005 (I wasn’t there for the first 2004 event, although I followed it on the Web at the time).

Last month we ran a series of posts outlining the 5 biggest Internet trends of this year: Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, Internet of Things. Effectively this was ReadWriteWeb’s State of the Web 2009.

We compiled the main points into a single presentation, available on Slideshare and embedded below. We think these trends show that we are indeed at an inflexion point of the Web, as Tim O’Reilly noted at the Web 2.0 Summit today. We’ll be exploring more of these and other cutting edge Web trends over the coming months on ReadWriteWeb.

1. Structured Data
2. The Real-Time Web
3. Personalization
4. Mobile Web & Augmented Reality
5. Internet of Things

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TC50 Backstage: Well, Tell us How you REALLY Feel, Tim O’Reilly

Conference organizer, publisher and investor Tim O’Reilly doesn’t mince words. In this video he talks candidly about what he hated at TechCrunch50 today, what he loved and what excites him about the Web right now.

O’Reilly is a consummate thought leader in the Valley so the interview is interesting for anyone. But if you’re planning on actually pitching O’Reilly on anything this is required viewing.

Oh, he also explains what he and the Cookie Monster have in common. Video is on the jump. (Sorry for the abrupt edits. Trying to keep these interviews on the short-side.)

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

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Weekly Wrapup: 10 Exciting Web Apps, Top Twitter Clients, State of Netbook Market, And More…

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we poll our readers on their 3 most exciting web apps or services, analyze the latest Twitter client stats, report on MySpace’s acquisition of Facebook app iLike, review the state of the netbook market, talk to Tim O’Reilly about his vision for a government web platform, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Purchase The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Our First Premium Report for Businesses

Recently we released our first premium report: The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management. Businesses seeking to engage with online communities on their own websites or all around the social web will find the guide invaluable in getting up to speed on the state of the art and making sure their employees have the foundation they need to be effective.

The report is a 75 page collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community. You will also get a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web. All of this is available for purchase at a price of $299. You can download a free sample section of the report here.

Web Products

Top 10 Most Exciting Web Apps or Services

This week we asked what 3 web apps or services you find the most exciting right now. Not your 3 most used or favorite, but the apps that currently make you tingly with excitement. We got some great responses in the comments, so in this post we picked out our top 10 from your choices. We chose 5 services that got the most number of mentions, plus 5 lesser known web apps or services which got multiple mentions.

How to Use Facebook: 5 Tips For Better Social Networking

Facebook is a social networking site that is enormously popular, but it can be a frustrating user experience. The design of Facebook leaves a lot to be desired and there are almost too many choices for things to do on Facebook. So how can you best utilize it and find the good apps? In this post we aimed to find out.

iLike Acquired by MySpace

This week MySpace announced an agreement to acquire iLike, a social music discovery service. iLike is one of the top apps on the Facebook platform, so how will this affect the competition between the two social networking rivals? We live blogged a press conference with MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta to find out more.

The Top Twitter Client Is Still the Web

According to a new study from social media solutions provider Rapleaf, the most popular Twitter client is the web via Twitter.com – with 65% of tweets attributed to this method. As far as the third-party clients go, only a small handful of clients had enough users to warrant their own slice of the pie chart, and those slices were in the single digits.

Tr.im to Go Open Source, Community Owned

After weeks of controversy concerning a possible closure of the service, URL shortener Tr.im this week announced that it’s open sourcing its code, handing ownership of its domain name over to a community nonprofit organization and making clickthrough data freely available in real time. The new Tr.im may be the most exciting thing to happen in URL shortening since now market leader Bit.ly itself launched.

5 Reasons to Get Excited about Linux on the Netbook

Late last year, we boldly proclaimed that your next computer might be a Linux PC. Thanks to the ever-growing market for the low-end machines dubbed “netbooks,” this seemed like a real possibility at the time. In this post we take a look at the state of the market. 

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We’d like to thank ReadWriteWeb’s sponsors, without whom we couldn’t bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• WeeBiz, a business community where you can find and share new business opportunities.
• Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
• Codero, Dedicated Hosting with Backup & Managed Services.
• Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• hakia is a semantic search engine.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
• IronScale, Managed Hosting. The Cloud Gets Physical.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

15 Fluid Apps You Can Build for Your Business

Fluid is a simple application for creating site-specific browsers (SSBs) on your OSX desktop. Fluid is really for anyone, but the low barrier to entry and the effect it has on productivity make it an attractive tool for getting things done. Though it’s been around for a while, few businesses have really taken advantage of its full potential.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

6 Awesome Apps Begging to Be Developed

Y Combinator’s getting pretty fancy with their very detailed Request for Startups idea, which was somewhat like their “Startups We’d Like to Fund” post of yesteryear. While we can’t offer funding, it would make us picky little Internet geeks terribly happy if someone developed any of the six apps listed below. You know, while we’re waiting for the flying cars and food replicators.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Trends

How Tim O’Reilly Aims to Change Government

Some people go to Washington to try to make the government more honest; others try to make it smaller. Technologist Tim O’Reilly is spending time in Washington, and bringing Washington officials to San Francisco, to do something different – perhaps something more realistic. O’Reilly is trying to help government become a platform for innovation. A “government as platform” would supply raw digital data and other forms of support for private sector innovators to build on top of.

What Does Google’s High Customer Satisfaction Rating Mean for Bing?

According to the results of a new survey by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, Google’s users are extremely happy with their search engine. Google scored 86 points out of a possible 100, followed by Yahoo with 77 points. While this survey was conducted before Microsoft’s Bing arrived on the market, they clearly show the problems Bing faces in a marketplace where most consumers are perfectly happy with Google.

Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business: Part 4

In this fourth part of our investigation into the ongoing changes in the book publishing business, we look at the author’s point of view. What are they getting today? What would they like to get? What can they reasonably expect to get as this drama unfolds? Authors are the creative juice of the whole eco-system. If they don’t create material that people want to read, no one will make any money.

Race To Data Portability: Google Chrome vs. Mozilla Weave

Google announced bookmark sync to the Chrome browser this week. Chrome users can sync their bookmarks across various machines and store them alongside Google Docs. While the feature is not a new concept amongst browsers, the significance is that yet another player is storing your data in the cloud with the ability to distribute it across networks.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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Weekly Wrapup: Real Time Delicious, Read/Write Digg, Web Squared, And More…

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we analyze the impact of real-time information on the Web, investigate ‘web squared’ (when web 2.0 meets Internet of Things), tell you why cloud computing is the future of mobile, look at Delicious’ new Twitter re-design, check out Digg’s read/write API plans, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Purchase The ReadWriteWeb Q2 2009 VC Funding Report

Our Second Premium Report for Businesses

We’re excited to announce the availability of ReadWriteWeb’s Q2 2009 VC Funding Report, our second premium report powered by data from ChubbyBrain. We have been tracking early-stage investment in Internet, mobile and SaaS since the financial crisis in September 2008 and we believe that this report is unlike anything else you’ve seen.

Our Report gives you the facts on 240 deals closed in April, May and June – who invested, in what company, how much they invested and when. Read on to see what’s included in the guide and how to purchase it.

Web Trends

Could Real Time Information Be An Unfair Advantage?

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a ban on a stock market practice known as “flash trading,” where supercomputers get access to information milliseconds before other traders. This raises similar issues about the growing prominence of real-time information on the web.

Web Squared: When Web 2.0 Meets Internet of Things

Recently Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle released a white paper entitled Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On. It’s a none to subtle attempt to re-brand web 2.0. But less cynically, the report also nicely applies Web 2.0 principles onto the emerging Internet of Things.

Twitter’s Most Active Users: Bots, Dogs, and Tila Tequila

Only 5% of Twitter’s users account for 75% of all the activity on the service, and almost one third of all the tweets posted by the most active users come from bots that each generate more than 150 tweets per day. According to a new report, one quarter of all the messages posted on Twitter are currently generated by bots.

As the EBook Market Matures, Amazon Will Face Stiff Competition

eBooks and eReaders are slowly but surely becoming mainstream. However, while Amazon is the current market leader among early adopters of this technology, there will be a lot of opportunities for other players in the market – including Sony and large mass-market retailers like Walmart.

Why Cloud Computing is the Future of Mobile

The term “cloud computing” is being bandied about a lot these days, mainly in the context of the “future of the web.” But cloud computing’s potential doesn’t begin and end with the personal computer’s transformation into a thin client – the mobile platform is going to be heavily impacted by this technology as well.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We’d like to thank ReadWriteWeb’s sponsors, without whom we couldn’t bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• WeeBiz, a business community where you can find and share new business opportunities.
• Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
• Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• hakia is a semantic search engine.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
• IronScale, Managed Hosting. The Cloud Gets Physical.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations. Sponsored by Socialtext.

Enterprise 2.0: Awareness is Easier Than Execution, Says Nielsen

In a new report studying social networking on intranets, Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen asserts that despite broad awareness, real execution of Web 2.0 in the enterprise is still rare at this point. This is a sobering reminder of just what it takes to make change happen in business.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

How to Scale Without Losing Your Shirt

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

There comes a time for every venture when the owners have to decide whether hockey-stick-like growth is feasible or not. In your initial plan, you indicated a sudden surge in revenue at a certain point in time, i.e. where the hockey stick shows up. You have now reached that point. You may have a great business, but will it hit the big time?

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

MySpace to Unveil Integration With Sites Around the Web, Using Open Standards

MySpace will announce in the next few weeks a major new feature being added to its MySpaceID product that will allow third-party websites to write updates into the MySpace activity feed just like Facebook Connect, but will also incorporate open semantic microformat code too.

Delicious Reborn as Real-Time News Tracker

Yahoo’s social bookmarking service Delicious launched a new home page this week, combining recent tagging activity and cross-referenced links on Twitter to deliver what it calls the hottest news from around the web in real time.

Digg Opening Up? New Read/Write API Coming Soon

The social news community at Digg.com may be on the verge of opening up. A forthcoming Digg API will allow people to “not only read data, but also contribute data, too.” In other words, a Read/Write API.

SchoolRack Gives Teachers, Students, Parents Interactive Resources Online

SchoolRack is a resource for grade school and high school teachers to create their own websites where they can communicate and interact with their students and those students’ parents.

Spotify to Close Up to $50M Round Before US Launch

In anticipation of the company’s US launch, the on-demand music streaming site Spotify is finalizing what is rumored to be a $50 million dollar round of investments. This will value the Swedish company at $250 million dollars.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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Web Squared: When Web 2.0 Meets Internet of Things

Recently Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle released a white paper entitled Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On. It focuses squarely, pardon the pun, on the intersection of social web technologies with the emerging Internet of Things (real world objects connected to the Internet).

The ‘web squared’ moniker is, commercially speaking, a none to subtle attempt to re-brand web 2.0. This had to be done so that the conference series of that name, which O’Reilly and Battelle jointly run along with the company TechWeb, remains relevant. But less cynically, the report also nicely applies Web 2.0 principles onto the emerging Internet of Things.

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The term ‘web squared’ is defined in the report as "web meets world." The squared bit also references that "the Web opportunity is no longer growing arithmetically; it’s growing exponentially."

Collective Intelligence 2.0

The report starts by noting what O’Reilly and Battelle believe was the core proposition of ‘web 2.0′ back in 2004: "Web 2.0 is all about harnessing collective intelligence." The pair go on to say that web 2.0 is currently being applied to areas they hadn’t predicted in ‘04, such as mobile and internet-connected objects.

Specifically, sensors are providing a new source of data for web 2.0 techniques. As the report puts it, "collective intelligence applications are no longer being driven solely by humans typing on keyboards but, increasingly, by sensors."

Where the report differs from the traditional view of Internet of Things is that it doesn’t view sensor data as just mechanical data from RFID tags and other non-human sources. The authors argue that humans are producing sensor data of their own, in particular using their mobile phones. They note that today’s smartphones "contain microphones, cameras, motion sensors, proximity sensors, and location sensors (GPS, cell-tower triangulation, and even in some cases, a compass)."

No matter what the source of sensor data, after it’s gathered collective intelligence can be applied to it. The authors term this a "virtuous feedback loop," whereby sensor-based applications get better the more people use them.

Information Shadows

Another key point is that, much like in Web 2.0 apps, there is an entire ecosystem that uses and builds off the data. Real world objects have “information shadows” on the Web (this is a term originally coined by Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM).

The example in the report is a book, which has information shadows "on Amazon, on Google Book Search, on Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing, on eBay and on BookMooch, on Twitter, and in a thousand blogs."

Do We Need RFID? It’d Be Nice…

One contentious point in the report is when it questioned whether RFID is actually required to make an Internet of Things. The authors argue that it isn’t:

"A bottle of wine on your supermarket shelf (or any other object) needn’t have an RFID tag to join the Internet of Things, it simply needs you to take a picture of its label. Your mobile phone, image recognition, search, and the sentient web will do the rest. We don’t have to wait until each item in the supermarket has a unique machine-readable ID. Instead, we can make do with bar codes, tags on photos, and other “hacks” that are simply ways of brute-forcing identity out of reality."

This line of thought seems to parallel the argument usually put forth by web 2.0 proponents against the top-down Semantic Web: that it isn’t practical to expect publishers to enter metadata into their content, instead let it bubble up with a mix of collective intelligence and machine processing.

To hammer home this point, the report claims that "evidence shows that formal systems for adding a priori meaning to digital data are actually less powerful than informal systems that extract that meaning by feature recognition." They use the example of a book: "an ISBN provides a unique identifier for a book, but a title + author gets you close enough."

Good enough has always been a design principle on the Web, so this makes sense. However, much like the battles back in ‘04-’05 to define web 2.0 (or dispute the existence of it) ultimately it’s a moot point. RFID tags will become more common place, it’s just a matter of time.

Let’s face it, a ’smart’ RFID chip on a bottle of wine – one that knows its production and travel history, its temperature, its price relative to similar bottles of wine, etc – will beat human hacking anytime. But, as the report rightly notes, don’t expect that level of automation via RFID any time soon. Our recent post examining the current state of RFID clearly showed that it’s years away.

Conclusion

To say that sensor data can be both machine generated (e.g. by RFID chips) and human generated is perhaps trying too hard to force the web 2.0 world into the new emerging Internet of Things. But that’s neither here nor there. Where the ‘web squared’ report is spot on, is its point that applying collective intelligence to sensor data will be a rich vein of opportunity in the coming years.

Clearly the web 2.0 philosophy can and will merge with Internet of Things. The report by O’Reilly and Battelle is a great primer for that.

Read more about Internet of Things

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