A Russian startup called Unface.me has created a new social network inspired by the Gossip Girl TV series which lets users create an alter ego to — let’s face it — troll their friends, or even post even worst types of gossip entirely anonymously. The site connects with Facebook and Russian social network VKontakte so it can pull in users’ genuine friend networks, then furnishes them with a series of tools to poke fun, dish salacious gossip or vote on who of their friends is coolest and therefore who is not. Y’know, teen stuff.

Teens powered the rise of social networking giant Facebook. But today’s teens are arguably starting to be less enamoured with the platform their siblings spent  all their time on, what with so many other, more flexible ways to ping and poke each other. Facebook’s insistence on real names, and its standard comms toolset of public posts, private messages and IM isn’t helping here. Looked at through the hyper layered and stratified teenage lens, it’s pretty limting. Which is giving startups the opportunity to crowd in.

Zuck and co were also not as quick to respond to the growth in mobile messaging as they should have been. The long and short of it is that today’s teens are spoiled for choice; they don’t need Facebook to stay in touch — they have a whole arsenal of creative digital tools to get around being grounded.

Facebook’s difficulty, of course, is that it can’t keep up with the kids without risking alienating its massive user base of oldies. With such a whoppingly huge user base  that spans multiple age-groups comes a big responsibility not to put segments of users off. Keeping things fairly simple is the compromise path, but that too risks boring the kids — so they go looking to get their kicks elsewhere, whether it’s Snapchat or Unface.me.

Now it must be said that Unface.me is pretty rough round the edges — and focused pretty squarely on the Russia market for now. It isn’t necessarily anything more than a curiosity. It’s just come out of a closed beta, so its user base is small, with a test group of around 20,000 that it’s now looking to grow — having just opened up to the public. It says it’s also starting to advertise to get the word out. But as an experiment in extending social networking by adding an element of privacy it’s interesting to watch — also bringing to mind secret-sharing app Whisper.

Unface.me’s founders are three computer science graduates from Moscow State University, with respective specialisms in marketing, business development and web development. The startup is currently bootstrapped with funds from founders, friends and family.

“The inital idea came from the Gossip Girl series, but we decided to go further and develop a place where people can share their feelings freely and get honest opinions from their friends, but sharing secrets and gossips can be done too. We strongly believe that anonymity loosens up and helps discovering new facts about friends and yourself,” Unface.me’s Dmitrii Ponomarev tells TechCrunch.

The site has been in development for around a year and a half, with the closed beta kicking off six months ago.  The “mission” is to “let every person discuss freely anything or anyone”. And, judging by some of the public posts, there’s certainly plenty of that going on already. Indeed, it’s pushing into some pretty unpleasant territory, which is generally  what happens when you mix teens and gossip, regardless of the medium they’re using.

The key twist here is the mixture of unknown and known, says Ponomarev. Since the users are interacting with their real friends, pulled in from third party social networks, not random online strangers. From there they can choose to chat and post anonymously or under a fixed alterego. Or indeed using the real name they use on the linked social network.

“A user can anonymously write a story about his friends on yesterday’s party, share it anonymously via sms and watch the discussion,” explains Ponomarev. “Or he or she can post a photo of his new look and get really honest responses from friends because the are anonymous. Or he can start an anonymous chat with his friends and discuss something that matters with his friends but no one will know each others’ names… We’ve gone much further than just posting anonymous text messages.”

Teens are famously creative in their communications. Even within the Facebook straitjacket they find subtle and not so subtle ways to hack the limits — by ‘being in a relationship’ with all their BFFs, say, or asking each other to like a post for feedback on what they look like and so on. Unface.me looks like it’s picking up on that preference for teens to gamify their communications — and giving them even more layers to interact with each other.

Facebook can still be part of the mix, of course — as one of the foundation networks that Unface.me is using as its jumping off point. However, if more teenage chatter ends up going on anonymously outside Facebook’s walls that’s not an outcome that will end up pouring coin into Zuckerberg’s coffers as it restricts the flow of data. Addressing the innovation challenge posed by upstart startups that are offering cooler, more teen-friendly ways to do stuff is the sort of war that is  looking impossible for a single, central dominant service like Facebook to win. When it comes to the social networking/social messaging space, it’s definitely time to get the popcorn in.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’re all familiar with the bill shock associated with roaming abroad with our cellphones. There are plenty of players that allow you to swap out your SIM card and use cheaper traffic, including Cubic Telecom. However, that process is tedious. So Cubic has secured new funding to enable a range of tablets and notebooks to have their technology built into partner devices. To do this they’ve raised a further $5.2 million in funding from Enterprise Ireland, Qualcomm Incorporated, ACT Venture Capital and TPS Investments.

The money will be used to expand globally, and invest in the technology which essentially allows Cubic to operate like its own global mobile phone carrier, not an MVNO. As a licensed mobile network operator (MNO), Cubic Telecom partners with Tier 1 mobile operators to provide coverage in 230 countries. Its Software Defined Network (SDN) works across multiple technologies (3G, 4G-LTE, CDMA and WiFi).

The Dublin based company has also secured contracts with a number of leading Fortune 100 tablet and notebook manufacturers to be in-built into their devices, though these partners have yet to be announced.

The embedded nature of the service means any changes to the internal SIM can be Over The Air (OTA).

Barry Napier, CEO of Cubic Telecom, says they will “enable the latest devices and applications to be always connected anytime anywhere.”

In plain English, that means Cubic Telecom devices can integrate with content and apps. Thus, imagine a word where an app provider asked Cubic to allow its use to be free on Cubic dvices. All it would require would be a simple OTA update form Cubic to its customers. That could be a very powerful place to be.

The company also announced that it will create a total of more than 70 new jobs over the next 3 years, as part of an investment supported by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation through Enterprise Ireland.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Some of the Internet’s most notable personalities are bringing attention to the need for immigration reform in a 36-hour social media marathon, The March for Innovation. It’s an issue we know our readers care about, so we’re thrilled to give you the opportunity to join part-time superhero, full-time mayor of Newark, definitely-maybe Senate candidate, and one of The Most Innovative People In Democracy, Cory Booker, in a rousing town hall. Mayor Booker and I will be answering questions on Twitter and responding to a few reader questions in our comments (officially begins Noon PT).

Background

As I’ve written about before, the United States definitely has a costly tech-talent shortage, which can only be filled by attracting the best and brightest from around the world. Despite near unanimous support for more high-skilled immigrants, the United States Congress could not move forward without a comprehensive package that included all foreign-born workers.

A set of proposed drafts that will eventually become a single comprehensive bill is currently winding its way through both chambers of the Congress; sticky issues on agriculture workers, border security, gay rights, and an abusive high-skilled visa system threaten to derail any progress at all.

How To Influence

As Senator Jerry Moran (CrunchGov Grade: A) told me, policymakers really do respond to public pressure, especially social media. The March For Immigration isn’t about advocating a particular position, but about letting Congress know that the electoral consequences of failing to pass a bill will be greater than passing an imperfect one.

To participate in the discussion, comment below and/or tweet Booker (use hashtag #iNewark).

Talk Amongst Yourselves

Here are a few very important questions that citizens should be asking

1. Is immigration reform a voting issue for you? If so, why? If you have a personal story, please tell us on Twitter or in the comments.
2. Do you believe that high-skilled immigrants create or take jobs from Americans? One large union, the AFL-CIO, has supported a 90-day hiring wait period to force employers to seek out Americans first (calling the tech industry “greedy” for opposing it). This waiting period has consequences; for the first time in decades, the U.S. is bleeding high-skilled talent because immigrants don’t feel welcome. Immigrants, over the long run, have founded extraordinarily profitable companies, such as Google and PayPal, so the question is complex.
3. Should rights for foreign-born same-sex couples be included? Recently, the Senate rejected a provision to grant the right for same-sex couples to petition for citizenship, on the fear immigration reform would not pass. Is it worth risking the bill to include equal protection?
4. We know the current visa system is prone to abuse. What can we do to prevent such abuse and make an immigration bill more appealing to concerned lawmakers?

We look forward to your insightful ideas.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ok, admittedly, the headline is a slight misrepresentation. However, in the best online dating tradition, not only did it hopefully catch your attention but it has more than a grain of truth, too.

YouLike, a startup backed by the founders of Turkish eBay clone GittiGidiyor (which in 2011 was acquired by the online auction giant for $217 million), describes itself as an interest-based social network and dating site that takes into account a user’s dislikes, as much as what they do like, when helping to find likeminded people to friend or date.

Unlike a lot of other dating sites that ask you to fill out a lengthy and data-heavy questionnaire or simply pen an open-ended profile, YouLike presents a series of fun questions ranging from what activities you love or hate, your food and entertainment tastes, or your relationship preferences. Each question requires a simple multiple choice response — “love”, “like”, “dislike”, “hate”, or “skip” — which forms the basis for how YouLike matches users.

This home-grown approach to generating a user’s interest graph is also intended to produce less so-called dirty data that simply importing a user’s Facebook ‘Likes’ (a technique used by other dating sites and interest-based social networks) can produce. Not only is the site intentionally starting out clean, but Zuckerberg’s social network famously lacks a ‘Dislike’ button, which for YouLike’s match-making purposes would only tell half the story. After all, they do say that opposites attract.

So, for example, YouLike might ask a user to rate an activity related to “cooking” or “shopping”, or to express their disposition to “waking up early” or “never being late”. Other questions drill down to a user’s dating preferences more explicitly, such as “a guy should always make the first move” or whether or not “kissing on the first date” is the done thing.

This data is then employed when visiting another user’s profile. Members can compare their rated likes and dislikes with those of a prospective match. The results are displayed as “you both like”, “you both dislike”, “you like but he/she dislikes”, and “you dislike but he/she likes”.

The idea is to surface not only a user’s interests but their “morals, habits and beliefs… and the things that make them angry or happy,” says the Istanbul-based startup. Arguably that’s a much better reflection of how people really click (or don’t) in real life, since not all differences of opinion or taste are weighted equal in importance and aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker when it comes to matters of the heart.

However, whether or not this amounts to enough of a USP for YouLike to cut through the plethora of online dating sites (or broader interest-based social networks) that already exist is a different question entirely. It’s also a question that YouLike isn’t shying away from. “Online dating is a highly saturated industry with many competitors fighting to find people looking for love online,” says YouLike co-founder Levent Gültan. “Many start-ups try to differentiate themselves by playing the innovation card, however very few to none has successfully replicated the track record of OkCupid or HowAboutWe.”

As canned statements go, that’s an unusually honest appraisal of the status quo and the difficulty faced by any new entrant in the online dating sector. But that isn’t stopping Gültan and YouLike’s other co-founders, which include Ersan Özer who previously founded a Turkish dating network, from giving it a shot. In the end, however, the site’s success will ultimately hinge on if users like, dislike or skip it entirely.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Richard Bennett is a Senior Fellow with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and co-author of ITIF’s 2013 report, “The Whole Picture: Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand.” Follow him on Twitter @iPolicy.

We’ve all heard the story: America’s broadband networks are second-rate. We pay exorbitant prices for shoddy service because broadband providers print money and hold innovation in a death grip. While America languishes, our competitors in Europe and Asia are racing ahead to a user-generated content utopia. The only way forward is a government takeover, or, failing that, a massive dose of regulation.

So go a number of recent treatises such as Susan Crawford’s “Captive Audience”; works by like-minded Internet aficionados Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler; reports by public interest advocacy groups Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the Open Technology Institute; as well as numerous tech bloggers.

The only problem with this story is that it’s almost completely untrue.

Granted, as recently as the late aughts, the story was plausible: In those dark days, our rankings in terms of both broadband subscription growth and speeds were falling. Increased demand for data capacity and a technology lull combined to push our average Internet connection speed down to 22nd in the world at the end of 2009, according to Akamai’s measurement of “Average Connection Speed.” Since then, the speeds of such shared connections have nearly doubled from 3.9Mbps to 7.2 Mbps, raising the U.S. to eighth place.

Akamai’s Average Connection Speed measures individual TCP streams over IP addresses that are often shared — and doesn’t sum simultaneous streams — so it’s more a measure of usage than of network capacity, however. To see the capacity of the underlying broadband network, it’s best to look at Akamai’s “Average Peak Connection Speed” metric.

The distinction between these two metrics flummoxed Ars Technica’s Cyrus Farivar, who maintains that the shared-connection measurement is the more meaningful indication of “user experience.” Farivar is clearly wrong about that, and Akamai’s “Average Peak Connection Speed” is the better indicator of network improvement.

The Average Peak measurement shows performance in the U.S. tripling over the past five years, up to 31.5Mbps in Q4 2012. We don’t know where the U.S. ranked on this scale before mid-2010, but it’s currently 13th. The tripling of network capacity combined with a doubling of “shared speed” says that networks are getting faster, as the U.S. is simultaneously using them more heavily

America’s broadband speeds are improving for two reasons: first, broadband providers have installed newer technologies, such as Verizon FiOS, DOCSIS 3 cable modems, and AT&T U-verse that are four or more times faster than the technologies they replaced; and second, users have begun to demonstrate a preference for higher-speed broadband by opting into higher-speed upgrades. Some upgrades are costly and others are not; Comcast recently doubled the speeds of most of their Bay Area broadband plans for free.

While our networks are improving, we’re retaining low prices for entry-level broadband plans first noticed by the Berkman Center’s “Next Generation Connectivity” report: the U.S. is currently second in the price of broadband for entry-level users. The nation is also third in network-based competition, second in the fiber-optic installation rate, first in the adoption of next-generation LTE, ahead of Europe in broadband adoption, and doing quite well in Internet-based services.

While U.S. cable TV companies still lead telcos in new broadband subscriptions, fiber-based telco broadband is gaining subscribers at a faster rate than cable. U.S. broadband providers are profitable, but much less so than Europe’s or Korea’s, where applications like YouTube must pay ISPs for access to residential customers. Significantly, we’ve gained ground on competitors despite an enormous disadvantage stemming from America’s very low urban population densities, which make U.S. broadband networks much more expensive to build and maintain than those in most nations.

Amazingly, the European Commission’s top telecom regulator, Vice President Neelie Kroes, tells a story much like the tales of woe we hear from American broadband critics, but with the roles reversed: Kroes laments Europe’s declining standing relative to the U. S., where “high-speed networks now pass more than 80 percent of homes; a figure that quadrupled in three years.” To facilitate private investment in networks, Europe has developed a “Ten Step Plan” for a single, cross-border market for broadband that mimics our interstate, facilities-based broadband market.

But these facts are glossed over by the critics of U.S. broadband policy in large part because they directly contradict their neo-populist narrative of rapacious, profit-hungry broadband monopolists gouging consumers. The long tradition of American populism distrusts private provision of “essential” services and refuses to believe that competition can ever be brought to bear on infrastructure markets. Crawford in particular relies too heavily on a strained analogy with electricity, a genuine natural monopoly that is as different from the competing information networks we have in the broadband space as any network can possibly be: Can you get electric service over the air?

Critics also come up short on research, generally refusing to consult updated primary sources in favor of blog posts and news articles from inside the echo chamber that simply reinforce the traditional narrative. “Confirmation bias” is rampant in broadband criticism.

Broadband advocates would do better to focus their efforts on real problems, such as our dismally low level of interest in the Internet, the primary reason non-subscribers give for refusing to go online. Ideally, these efforts would be combined with initiatives to increase computer ownership among the poor — the second reason so few Americans use the Internet. The world’s high-subscription nations, such as Korea and Singapore, aren’t the price leaders for entry-level Internet services as we are, but they’ve led successful outreach efforts to spread computer ownership, digital literacy, and Internet awareness across their entire populations.

Getting all of America online is a goal that all Americans can support regardless of party creed or ideological doctrine. If we can make as much progress with online participation as we’ve made with speed, Europe will have a second Internet crisis on its hands.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s a rare fall rainy day in Palo Alto and SAP Executive Board Member Dr. Vishal Sikka is as sick as a dog. It’s less than a week until SAP Sapphire in Madrid and the community around him are like a worrying family. I had told them that it is okay. I could make the trip another time. But they were insistent I make the trip.

Fast forward to May. It has been several months since that cold rainy week in Palo Alto. We’re on the eve of the next Sapphire conference in Orlando this week. Last week, Plattner and Sikka held a press conference, announcing the new HANA Enterprise Cloud.

HANA is an in-memory database that Sikka and Plattner developed with a team of about a dozen people around the world. SAP has built four data centers for HANA — two in Europe and two in the United States.

It would not be an overstatement to say that HANA is SAP’s future, the first technology in a long time from the German giant that is getting buzz for what it can do. It potentially puts the company into play as a key developer platform for real-time analytics in the evolving world of technology spanning both consumer and the enterprise services that are the company’s legacy (and slightly stale bread and butter). The big question is can SAP show the world that HANA is a bona fide developer platform with visionary use cases and clear customer examples.

Jon Reed is a longtime SAP Mentor and expert about the company. He is a great sounding board, someone who talked me through a lot of this story. He has a lot of respect for Sikka and Plattner. But he is skeptical, too, as am I about HANA and its direction. The potential is without question. And Sikka shows signs he has that rare combination of intellectual curiosity, technology credibility and passion that makes for a great leader. And he’s a humanist. He is impassioned about the potential for cancer research with HANA as much as he sees SAP transforming from an inward looking business software company to one that is outward facing, used for research and predictive analytics.

“It makes him a compelling figure,” Reed said. “You do get the sense that if the work is not purposeful, he won’t stick around. He really does believe HANA and interrelated innovations can change the world.”

But at the same time Sikka has to address profitability and revenues, Reed said.

Back in Palo Alto, Sikka arrives and he ushers me back to his office and sees that Hasso Plattner’s office is available. Plattner is the chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board and co-founder of the company. Sikka is the kind of guy who gets excited about those little things. Like the chance to look out across Palo Alto from his mentor’s office at the Stanford University campus where he received a master’s degree in engineering. We sit down and Sikka starts telling me about this accident that changed his life.

A Car Accident In Costa Rica

Sikka had gone to Costa Rica for a vacation with his family in 2008 over the winter break. He was CTO of the company. But he was unsettled about the direction of the enterprise giant. And then something happened on the way back to the hotel after a day by the ocean.

“On the way back I overcorrected and crashed into a pole,” Sikka said in a follow-up interview last month. “Thank God everyone was okay. At that point I realized I had to change something in my life.”

He called Plattner and said it was over — he needed to move on. The son of a railroad conductor, Sikka grew up in India, came to the United States and studied at Syracuse University. He graduated in three years. He then went to Stanford, built a startup with his brother and later sold it. He joined SAP in 2002. But by 2008, Sikka had second thoughts about the company’s technology direction. The accident pretty much sealed it. Or so he thought.

SAP is traditionally an application provider. It made its billions managing transactions but in recent years the disk I/O had become a bottleneck, slowing the application. The amount of data needed to make decisions had accelerated, pointing to the need for better, faster performance and results.

It’s a problem faced across the market. Machine-to-machine data is now more than transactional data, requiring a new approach to the application layer and the underlying database. Sikka had wanted to explore how to solve this problem. Developing a new database was that opportunity.

According to Wikipedia, Plattner, a consummate technologist, worked at IBM in the AI department, working on an enterprise-wide system based on the technology Xerox acquired from Scientific Data Systems (SDS). In 1972, after IBM decided to exit the business, Plattner, with four other German engineers, decided to leave the company and continue the project. IBM took 8% in founding stock in exchange for the engineers to use the software. Plattner and his colleagues called the company Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung (“System Analysis and Program Development”).

Plattner is a different character than many founders. The Hasso Plattner Institute gives him the opportunity to spend tine with students, which keeps him interacting with young people and open to new ideas.

Plattner is also, like Sikka, doggedly persistent. During the winter of 2008, over dinner in Aspen, as Sikka tried to explain that he wanted out of SAP, Sikka said Plattner banged his fist on the table, challenging him to intellectually renew the company. But what did that mean? It took several months to figure out. They knew it had to be something new, something galvanizing. By the summer of 2009 they settled on HANA. The product launched in November 2010 and became generally available in 2011.

As for Plattner, he needed Sikka. Plattner has never really left SAP: although he retired in 2003 he has continued to serve as SAP’s chairman of its supervisory board. With Sikka, Plattner has a technologist who can manage the development of a new ecosystem and commands respect throughout the organization. Sikka, in turn, reports to Plattner, who can provide cover from the political dynamics of this $15 billion company.

This has bred an interesting basis for the development of HANA, which sits outside of much of what the rest of SAP does. It’s not like the two have complete autonomy but it is enough for them to define HANA’s technology direction and fold in its mobile strategy, cloud initiatives and begin the hard work of creating a developer ecosystem and startup culture. To do this, they have a team that operates in a separate wing at the Palo Alto campus, an independence that gives them the flexibility to build out their projects in a way that is different from the other SAP product groups.

When I visited last fall, I met a few of the team members, all hand-picked by Sikka. They are fiercely loyal to Sikka and reverential of Plattner. It’s this that Sikka has used to form the foundation for the intellectual curiosity that Plattner has insisted is so vital to the company.

Out of this, SAP is building its own startup culture. It launched AppHaus, an office that looks like a condominium building set in a neighborhood of the quaint community of Los Altos. Inside they are building consumer mobile apps. Last year, SAP launched a second AppHaus in Dublin. More are planned around the world.

SAP Ventures is seeding startups that are using HANA as the database for their technology. SAP Ventures Managing Director Nino Marakovic says Sikka was instrumental in helping it get started.

So where does this all bring us today?

First, the competition is intense. IBM, Microsoft and impressive startups like MemSQL and SiSense are offering their own brand of analytics. Workday is growing at a clip with consistent updates to its platform.

The SAP Palo Alto campus is where the innovation is happening. But the corporate executives in Waldorf are expecting results. And that sometimes seems like it is slowing SAP’s drive to work more aggressively with startups.

SAP is developing a cloud platform and a platform-as-a-service (PaaS). It’s these efforts and its focus on startups that will create the wellspring and potentially the scale that Sikka needs for SAP HANA to be a success — both in the market and with the chiefs in Waldorf.

And that’s Sikka’s challenge. Creating a company that is compelling and can grow to something far more than was ever dreamed of when Plattner and his colleagues spun off from IBM and created SAP in 1972.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon and his wife Princess Mette-Marit were in Silicon Valley this week, and I asked them about their hopes to bring more startups and innovation to their home country.

I interviewed Haakon and Mette-Marit at Norway’s Innovation House Silicon Valley, a co-working space in Palo Alto for Norwegian startups looking to enter the US market. The couple saw demos from several startups — the prince even tried on some Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles — it was part of Making View‘s demo of its technology for capturing and exploring 360-degree video footage. (He said it was “pretty awesome.”)

Haakon actually lived in the Bay Area a decade ago, when he was attending UC Berkeley. He told me that he also attended the opening of the Innovation House 18 months earlier — since then, it has been used by more than 25 companies. Norway is “constantly trying to foster a culture of innovation,” he said.

When I asked what kind of relationship they would like to see between Norway and Silicon Valley, Mette-Marit said:

I think it’s important that we have this house as a starting point. But obviously, we also have examples of companies that have been doing very good here before this house came … I think that’s important that you have some companies that have done well and are willing to take on a sort of mentoring role for the other companies coming after.

I didn’t get a chance to go into too much depth with the couple, but I though it was interesting to see them discussing these issues at all. The video concludes with a short interview and demo of technology from Elliptic Labs, one of the companies at the Innovation House. It’s developing gesture-based controls, sort of like Leap Motion, but designed to integrate with tablets and smartphones.

By the way, you might notice that I usually refer to the crown prince and princess in the third person. That’s because I was told that’s the polite way to address royalty, though I suspect I still messed it up somehow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’re sitting on a bunch of bitcoins that are burning a hole in your digital wallet, you now have another way to spend them. Today, mobile gift card company Gyft has partnered with BitPay to start accepting bitcoins within its app.

This is a big partnership for both, as BitPay’s CEO, Tony Gallippi, says that the company currently processes $5 million per month in bitcoin transactions for its merchants. Gyft allows you to purchase gift cards at more than 50,000 retail locations in the U.S., including Brookstone, Lowe’s, GAP, Sephora, Gamestop, American Eagle, Nike, Marriott, Burger King and Fandango. So, technically, you’ll now be able to use bitcoin to pay for a Whopper. That’s progress, right?

The new bitcoin payment option is only available on the Android version of Gyft, but is as easy as choosing your choice of payment once you’ve chosen the gift card that you want to buy. Simply pick bitcoin and then use your wallet to pay for it.

This means more purchase activity within Gyft, as well as setting itself up for the future, in case bitcoin were to go mainstream: “Gyft is proud to be a pioneer in the bitcoin universe and we are excited about the possibilities for further innovation on our platform,” said Gyft CEO Vinny Lingham.

I spoke with Gallippi about BitPay’s role in the future of bitcoin, and how long it might take consumers to jump on the train:

TC: Are these the types of deals that you’re focused on now to make bitcoin mainstream? Will there be more like the Gyft announcement coming?

Gallippi: We are looking for ways to increase business acceptance of bitcoin. Most retail point-of-sale systems are legacy, and so integrating bitcoin would take some effort. However, if we can easily convert bitcoin into a tender that business can already accept, that will help drive bitcoin adoption more quickly.

TC: How long do you suspect it will take until the average consumer gets educated on bitcoin and uses it?

Gallippi: Bitcoin is hard to use today, and that’s a good thing. There are still bugs and it is too risky for the average consumer. The infrastructure of bitcoin cannot handle hundreds of millions of users at this time, so a gradual adoption is better.

TC: What are some of the hurdles that stand in the way of mainstream bitcoin usage?

Gallippi: It still is difficult to purchase bitcoins. This would be easier if banks were more accommodating to let people choose what do to with their own money. Bitcoin is voluntary; you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.

TC: Since this lets you convert into a gift card, how long do you think it will take to be able to make direct purchases using bitcoin?

Gallippi: E-commerce will adopt new direct bitcoin payments faster than retail, since e-commerce already has payment gateways in place for software-only payments.

TC: How do you feel about the recent stories of DDOS attacks that have affected bitcoin and how that’s perhaps scared some people away from the currency?

Gallippi: Bitcoin companies suffer from DDOS like all banks do. However consumers actually are inconvenienced less with a bitcoin wallet DDOS. With your online banking, if your bank is down, you cannot access your money. However with bitcoin, if you are in control of your private keys, if the wallet you use is down, you can upload your backup into a different wallet that is up, and have immediate access to your funds. That is possible with bitcoin, but not possible with any other type of traditional bank.

———–

The fact that it’s Android-only shows that we’re still a long way off for bitcoin in the mainstream. It’s going to take a lot for Apple to one day accept any type of wallet integration into its own apps.

For bitcoin, this is a big step forward, as real goods and services can now be purchased using them, even if it’s relying on a gift card as the middle man.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In November 2011, Identified emerged out of public beta on a mission to create a better professional job search engine. Built on top of Facebook data, Identified set out to nibble at LinkedIn’s lead in this space by giving both job seekers and companies a better way to connect — and find talent. To do that, the startup offered a product that it promised would become something akin to the “Google Page Rank for people,” assigning a numerical rank (out of 100) to professionals and companies based on their education, career path, social footprint and more — a la Klout.

By the following summer, Identified had attracted three million active users and had imported 10 million profiles from Facebook, which it used to secure a sizable $21 million series B financing round, led by VantagePoint Capital and Capricorn Investment Group, along with participation from Tim Draper, Innovation Endeavors, Chamath Palihapitiya and more. After this early buzz and validation subsided, however, Identified was met with the challenge of having to convince and incentivize the younger generations to claim and fill out their Facebook-derived profiles on its platform — not such an easy task when so many people already have a litany of online profiles to manage.

But doing so is critical for Identified, because without users claiming their profiles and adding more data, an Identified profile isn’t worth much more than any other. Plus, it means the company has fewer data points with which to work when trying to assign an accurate score or effectively tracking a user’s career progress. As such, Identified has spent the last nine months in relative silence, hiring data scientists and designers and building out its team in an attempt to create technology that would set it apart from the field and enable it to begin monetizing.

Today, Identified is finally unveiling what it’s been working on over the last year: Patent-pending artificial intelligence technology called “SYMAN,” which aims to organize the masses of disparate, incoherent professional data that lives in our social media profiles in order to identify new insights into the job market. Essentially, Identified co-founders Brendan Wallace and Adeyemi Ajao tell us, SYMAN is an attempt to provide a solution to a problem many social media companies have struggled with for years: Unstructured, disorganized and inconsistent data.

For the enterprise, startups (or really any company) to make use of social media data in a way that’s actually valuable and contains actionable insight, that unstructured, messy social data needs to be cleaned and structured in a way that makes sense. For example, “dirty data” as the co-founders call it, makes it difficult to deliver high-quality search or analytics products — part of the reason why Facebook’s GraphSearch hasn’t yet seen substantive adoption from recruiters and partly explains why LinkedIn’s career map didn’t take off, respectively.

By putting social media data in a clean, organized format, companies can more effectively ingest this data to power recruiting, human capital management, CRM, marketing and a host of other enterprise products. To help solve this problem, Identified partnered with a team of former LinkedIn data scientists to develop SYMAN. Inspired by some of the early work that LinkedIn did on its professional dataset, the startup is applying that methodology to a much larger trove of professional data: Facebook.

While one might not think of Facebook as being the go-to site for professional information (especially as many are keen to keep their social and professional profiles separate), with over one billion people on the social network, there’s still an enormous amount of professional data to be gleaned from its profiles. Facebook’s dataset is, as one might expect, more than five-times the size of that of LinkedIn, far less structured and much less complete.

That’s all well and good, but how does it work? Without revealing all the nuts and bolts behind the patent-pending technology, SYMAN’s data architecture enables a machine to draw inferences about the meaning of a particular data entry based on context in much the same way the human brain does. In other words, knowing that someone wrote “Analyst” as their job title on Facebook might not be of much help when making predictions about their ideal professional career. However, by considering complementary and related data, like their education, company and friend, SYMAN can infer that the person is in fact a “Systems Analyst” at Cloudera.

Comparing biographical, professional and educational data against the career path of a “typical” systems analyst, Identified can now predict that Palantir, for example, might be the best (and most logical) next step in the career path for that particular analyst. The data schema and learning algorithms behind SYMAN, Wallace says, are inspired by pioneering neuroscience research proposed by Jeff Hawkins (the founder of Palm and Handspring) and Ray Kurzweil, who recently joined Google to develop a similar technology and apply it to pattern recognition.

Identified has also developed SYMAN to create and inform a new product, which is currently in beta and tested by 50 or so clients, called Identified Recruit. Just as LinkedIn used its enterprise recruiting tools to begin monetizing its dataset, the startup hopes to use its new product to enable recruiters to more easily and effectively search and identify candidates based on professional information culled from Facebook. In other words, Identified wants to turn Facebook into a candidate database just as LinkedIn has converted its own for similar uses.

The product is currently being used by enterprise health clients, like Kaiser Permanente for example, to find healthcare candidates, who traditionally have shied away from building LinkedIn profiles, like nurses and patient care professionals, in particular. To give an example of how its new product is being applied in this context, SYMAN was able to find 562 ways in which nurses self-identify on Facebook (how they say “I’m a nurse, in other words).

The technology then maps these 562 different terms to 15 unique categories or “15 different types of nurses that recruiters are actually looking for,” Wallace explains, enabling recruiters to find more in one search than they would be able to otherwise, using GraphSearch, for example. At present, Identified has only “cleaned” healthcare data via SYMAN, but going forward, the company intends to apply the technology to other industries, like finance, education and life sciences — to name a few on the near-term roadmap.

Moving forward, the co-founders tell us that they’re also keen on integrating other datasets, applying SYMAN not only to Facebook, but to LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Quora, Github and others. Though this will take some time, one can also see the company using its new tech to develop analytics products for professionals and companies, like, say, products that would them optimize their workforce and view leads, candidates and more in a centralized dashboard.

Also on the roadmap, Wallace says, is the development of an API for a variety of social media sites, which would allow companies to use SYMAN to clean and organize their data, on-demand. Data-cleaning-as-a-service, in other words. The founders also hope that, through its future API, SYMAN could enable companies to monetize their data for enterprise applications in a way they’re currently unable to do, as well as allowing developers and third-parties to build B2B tools, apps and tools on top of SYMAN’s technology.

Of course, in the big picture, the applications for SYMAN are just beginning to take root, so it’s still too early to say just how effective and attractive this kind of technology will be to other companies. But, based on where Identified was a year ago, it certainly feels like a step in the right direction, especially if it means to monetize in any significant way. Sure, it’s easy to talk about what could be, making Identified’s future plans for its technology seem like pie-in-the-sky-type conceptualizing at this point.

However, the startup does seem to have assembled a team of experienced data scientists and engineers, and the recent addition of two new board members from well-known recruiting and human capital companies may be a sign that the startup is at least moving in the right direction. To that point: This quarter, Wallace says, the company officially added Jobvite CEO Dan Finnigan and Max Simkoff, the founder and CEO of Evolv, to its board of directors (as board observers).

As to what he sees as the potential for SYMAN, Simkoff says that he thinks the technology could solve a problem “that plagues big social data and which no other social or professional network has really been able to solve effectively,” and as such, could “uncover powerful insights and relationships buried deep within the Social Web, which have the potential to change how companies pursue talent, manage their workforce, and understand their competition.”

For more, find Identified at home here, more on its recruiting product here and a brief video demo below:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

How much is your car worth?

It’s an easy enough question to answer. Punch in the details at Kelley Blue Book, hit submit, and bam — question answered, ego stoked (or not.)

But how do they know how much it’s worth? For the most part, even the tried-and-true sources like the ol’ Blue Book are kind of a black box.

PriceHub wants to make the process more transparent. They’ll tell you how much your car is worth, and give you a mountain of data to back it up.

Update: Whoops! Looks like we crashed their server. The PriceHub team says they’re working on getting it back up ASAP.

Like many a car valuing service, PriceHub pulls its transaction data from all sorts of sources. Some of it comes from users; some of it comes from dealerships, or used car auctions. The vast majority of it, says the company, comes from DMV records.

Unlike most other services, though, PriceHub makes a ton of this data available directly to the user for their own perusing. Want to see the transaction details for 10,000+ Honda Civics sold in the past 18 months? Sure. Want to limit it to just 2009-model Civics sold in California? Hey, why not.

PriceHub actually came into existence with little to no fanfare a few years back, built as something of a hobby project by Myron Lo, then the VP of Innovation at ZipReality. It lived the first few years of its life in a rather humble form; black text spilled across the white background, with a modest data set of around 50,000 transactions.

Over time, however, it became clear that this lil’ pet project could be something more. As the site naturally grew toward its 50,000th registered user, the team behind it decided to dive in headfirst. They applied to Adeo Ressi’s Founder’s Institute, got in, and have spent the last few months being “whipped into a start-up by Adeo” (their words!)

In that time, the team has added all sorts of new tricks to PriceHub’s repertoire:

• The old, Geocities-tastic design has been overhauled into something significantly more modern
• They’ve bumped their data set up 10X, from 50,000 records to 500,000
• They’ve added model research records, bringing in things like recall alerts, safety ratings, cost estimates, and service bulletins.
• They’ve added depreciation charts for each model year of a car, giving would-be buyers/sellers a rough idea of how quickly the car in question is losing its value
• The team has grown from one to three: the aforementioned Myron Lo, as well as Telly Chang (former Product Marketing lead at Yahoo! Autos) and Sandy Lo (currently also Marketing Lead at the Salesforce-backed Financialforce)

Speaking of depreciation, the company mentioned a work-in-progress feature that I find particular interesting: depreciation alerts. If you’ve told PriceHub that you own a certain car and their data starts to suggest that its value is startin’ to turn, they’ll soon be able to fire off an alert to let you know that it might be good to sell sooner than later. Also on the roadmap: mobile apps (of course), and Zillow-esque sale price vs. time-on-the-market data.

Anecdote time! Around half a year ago, I sold the first car I’d ever owned: a 2002 Honda Accord, which I’d more or less driven into the ground. I sold it to the first person with a stack of cash and a pretty smile, letting it go for a bit over $2.5 grand. According to PriceHub’s records for cars of that year with similar mileage, I probably could’ve gotten another two thousand bucks out of the car if I’d been patient. Whoops!

PriceHub isn’t alone in this space, of course. Transparent or not, legacy offerings like Kelley Blue Book and Edmunds have held the throne for decades, with relatively new folk like TrueCar chipping away at their lead for a few years already. What do you think: is data and transparency enough to make PriceHub standout?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch