Amit Singhal, Google’s senior VP of search, today announced that Google’s Knowledge Graph will start exposing a number of statistics as graphs on the search results pages today. Google is also adding Polish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese to its lineup of supported Knowledge Graph languages.

With regard to the statistics, Singhal said the system will also try to predict what your next question will be and add related statistics to the graphs. Say you want to know more about how many people live in India, Google may also show you stats for China.

Singhal also recapped a number of Knowledge Graph features that expose users personal information – the kind of information Google Now would usually expose, too. These are currently available in beta and uses can sign up for it here.

The Knowledge Graph, Singhal said, has enabled Google to move beyond keywords. “It allowed us to answer questions we couldn’t previously answer.” Clearly, Google has been investing heavily in this technology and the company also today announced its new voice-enabled conversational search feature that makes it even easier to find answers from the Knowledge Graph.

Singhal also stressed that this is just the beginning. Google’s investment into making its search smarter is “immense,” he said. While there are still many problems to overcome, Google is clearly pursuing these new kinds of search experience (while de-emphasizing social search, it seems).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Bing recently introduced its updated people search feature and today, Microsoft is adding a few improvements to its people search that will make it even easier to find information about celebrities, politicians, athletes and many people with public LinkedIn profiles. Bing’s search box now auto-suggests names as you type. Because many people share the same name, this also means that it’s now easier to tell Bing who exactly you are looking for before you even hit the return key.

According to the Bing team, about 10 percent of searches on Bing are currently about people. This makes it the second most important search category on the service, right after navigational queries.

Microsoft has invested heavily in improving its people search and other semantic search features on the site, which now compete directly with Google’s Knowledge Graph. Bing’s Satori Entity Engine powers all of these features, which are typically revealed in Bing’s Snapshots bar (that is, in between the regular web links on the left and the social sidebar on the right).

In many ways, Satori’s mission is akin to Google’s Knowledge Graph, as it aims to help Microsoft understand more about the world. As Microsoft’s director of online services Stefan Weitz told me when the company released its last update to Satori, Google’s Knowledge Graph is a “kick-ass encyclopedia,” but Bing wants to go a step further and make all of this information “actionable.”

This new update, Microsoft notes in today’s announcement, was co-developed by its Search Technological Center (STC-E) in London in close collaboration with the User Experience team in Bellevue, Wash.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

GoPollGo, a real-time polling tool that lets brands and media properties collect and analyse feedback, has announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo. The news comes just one week after the search giant announced the acquisition of mobile personal organization app Astrid, as part of its ongoing acquisition spree. It comes at the same time that Yahoo has confirmed the acquisition of travel site Milewise. For now, GoPollGo says that it will be shutting down its services on its site, as well as its embeddable widgets and mobile app.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. While Milewise is joining Yahoo’s operations in New York, GoPollGo will be at its Sunnyvale HQ.

“Today Milewise and GoPollGo joined the Yahoo! mobile team. GoPollGo created a cool social polling app and the team has joined our mobile org in Sunnyvale,” Yahoo told us in an emailed statement on the two deals. “Milewise created a great app to make travel planning easier and personalized. They have joined our New York mobile team.”

GoPollGo, which was launched in 2011 and has received some $425K in funding from IdeaLab and CrunchFund (the VC run by TC’s founder Michael Arrington), has run millions of polls in its time. In January this year, after launching an iOS app, the company released a beta of a premium service it called Promoted Polls. Like Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, this let pollsters pay a little extra to insert their questions into a stream of other, non-paid polling questions.

For now, it’s not clear how GoPollGo’s technology is going to be used in the startup’s new home. The three founders, Ben Schaechter (a former developer at TechCrunch), Sam Grossberg and Paul Kompfner, are relatively vague about this point in their note on the site: “We’re so excited to bring the knowledge and experience we’ve gained at GoPollGo to Yahoo!” they note. “We share an enthusiasm for building delightful user experiences, and we couldn’t be happier to join forces.”

But you can see where this might fit into Yahoo’s wider business strategy if it does get used. For one, the company is trying to increase ways to keep users interested in its content and more engaged, the current buzzword for the digital ad industry. GoPollGo has done things like power polls that ran on ABC.com’s site alongside the presidential debate. The idea is that these polls, instead of seeing users jump to other sites to watch coverage and how people interact, or turning off altogether, they stay tuned in there with the poll being one way to keep their interest up.

On the other hand, it’s interesting that GoPollGo had already introduced a paid service with Promoted Polls. With companies like Google and Facebook largely dominating online advertising right now in areas like search and display, smaller players like Yahoo (similar to Aol, TechCrunch’s owner) needs to get more innovative and creative with how they target would-be advertisers with services that they will pay for. Adding polls as, effectively, another marketing/advertising unit would be one way to do that.

Interestingly, the whole area of polling has been one that others have eyed, but have been less than successful in tackling. Facebook launched, and then pulled, a Polls product between 2007 and 2009. Then a follow-up/adjacent product, Questions, was similarly launched in 2010 but then shut down in October 2012, effectively giving in to competition from the likes of Quora. Most recently, Facebook’s foray into canvassing opinion, the ability to create threaded comments and replies on Pages, can effectively be used as a template for Q&As (bringing to mind Reddit’s AMA events), and, yes, polls.

More to come. Note on GoPollGo’s site is below.

GoPollGo Team is Joining Yahoo! Mobile
We are excited to share some big news: We’re joining Yahoo! For two years, we’ve worked incredibly hard to make it as easy as possible to get feedback from friends and followers. It has been so rewarding to build a product that scaled up to millions of people and supported large media properties and diverse brands — all while staying true to promise to deliver fun, engaging, real-time experiences.

We’re so excited to bring the knowledge and experience we’ve gained at GoPollGo to Yahoo!. We share an enthusiasm for building delightful user experiences, and we couldn’t be happier to join forces.

Huge thanks to all our users, partners and customers who helped us realize our vision. As of today, we’ll no longer be supporting GoPollGo’s properties on the site, embeddable widgets or mobile app. If you have any questions or want to get in touch, shoot us an email to hi@gopollgo.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Google And The World Brain” is a new documentary about Google’s plan to scan all of the world’s books, which triggered an ongoing lawsuit being heard today. The hair-raising film sees Google import millions of copyrighted works, get sued, lose, but almost get a literature monopoly in the process. It’s scary, informative, and worth watching if you recognize its biased portrayal of Google as evil.

The film is getting wider release as Google continues to fight the Author’s Guild in court today. The organization is demanding $3 billion in damages from Google for scanning and reproducing copyrighted books. Google is asking the court to not prevent the group from filing a class-action suit.

“Google And The World Brain” premiered at Sundance this year, which is where I saw it, but more people finally got to see the documentary yesterday at the Vancouver DOXA festival. From the second it starts, director Ben Lewis’ opinion is clear: Google Books is as an insidious plot for data domination. See, Google didn’t just want to make a universally accessible library. It wanted to use all the knowledge to improve its search and artificial intelligence projects.

The film opens with ominous bass and a high-pitched drones that lead into historic footage of futurist and sci-fi writer H.G. Wells describing the “world brain” as a  “complete planetary memory for all mankind.” But for all its benefits, Wells also warns that the world brain could become powerful enough to displace governments and monitor everyone.

Seemingly innocent, Google approaches university libraries, including Harvard, asking to digitize their books for free. They pitch it as a way to avert disasters like the burning of Alexandria or the flooding of Tulane University’s library during Hurricane Katrina. Gorgeous shots of some of the world’s most prestigious libraries position them as infinitely valuable. Head librarians appear in interviews, giddy with intellectual excitement, and they hastily agree to Google’s offer. Soon 10 million of their books were being fed into secret Google scanning machines.

Google began showing parts of these scans online, and that’s when the backlash started. Six million of the books were under copyright and Google hadn’t attained permission to scan or reproduce them. In 2005, The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed lawsuits claiming Google was essentially stealing the books. Libraries began to turn on the search giant.

Internet scholar Jaron Lanier explains “A book is not just an extra long tweet,” and others begin to speculate that Google wants to hoard the books primarily for its own purposes, not to democratize their information. The reveal of the film’s thesis would have been more shocking and perhaps better received if it hadn’t been so blatantly foreshadowed.

After three years, the plaintiffs settle with Google for $125 million, but within the 350-page court document are shady stipulations that Google now has the exclusive right to sell scans of any out-of-print book it’s digitized — even copyrighted ones. The film labels this as a “monopoly on access to knowledge.” It asks “do we want the universal library in the hands of one company that can charge whatever they want?”

The documentary’s climax centers around New York District Court Judge Denny Chin’s choice of whether to approve the settlement or not. The director does a remarkable job of making it seem exciting by positioning the outcome as one man’s decision about the fate of all knowledge.

[Spoiler alert if you didn't read the newspapers in 2011]: Scored by a barrage of victorious brass music, Judge Chin announces that he rejects the settlement, preventing Google’s supposed “monopoly,” and all the interviewed pundits rejoice.

Google And The World Brain ends on a harrowing note, though. Even if Google can’t reproduce or sell the copyrighted works it scanned, Google Search and its artificial intelligence initiatives have already sucked up all the knowledge. As a Google engineer told author Nicholas Carr, “We’re not scanning all those books to be read by people. We’re scanning them to be read by our AI.”

The film is a bit sensationalist, and takes several detours to explore things like whether scanning books in English is an assault to classical European languages in which classic works were originally written. Still, it condenses a fascinating question about who owns information and the long battle for the answer into quite a stimulating film. You might leave feeling a little more afraid of Google than before, especially if you don’t take the more heavy-handed fear-mongering with a grain of salt. But at the very least, you’ll stand up reaffirmed that Google is destined to change humanity in ways much larger than it does today.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google’s bound to pull back the curtain on some goodies at its annual I/O conference next week (though it’s being characteristically quiet about the whole thing), but could a redesigned version of Google Maps be one of them? That’s what the folks at the (completely unofficial) Google Operating System blog hint at — they’ve come into possession of a pair of screenshots that supposedly depict Google’s new approach to mapping, and if true they point to some serious modifications.

If true, then Google is ditching he traditional sidebar altogether. Instead, the company may be putting greater emphasis on the map itself and shifting pertinent information — think location data, photos, and Zagat reviews — to a series of cards that hover in the top left corner of the screen.

Oh, and the yellow streets are gone too. I’m just as bummed as you are.

As always, I’d recommend firmly grasping a grain of salt as you pore over the images, but they the visual advances seen in them seem just measured enough to give them some credence. The images depict a version of Google Maps that falls in line with some of the other design choices the folks at Mountain View have been running with lately.

Google’s been pushing those cards quite a bit lately — Google Now was the first service to run with the card metaphor, and the search giant recently revamped its Google Play Store Android app to put individual app and song listings into cards as well. We haven’t really seen those cards invade the desktop yet (unless you count those right-aligned boxes that Google’s Knowledge Graph results live in), but persistent rumors and leaks point to a desktop web version of Google Now that could go live any day now. Hell, even Google Glass uses what the company refers to as timeline cards to encapsulate and display information from Glass apps. All that said, it would hardly be a shock to see Google turning to Maps as the next service to get a card-centric facelift.

And hey, it’s not like Google has been all that great at keeping its secrets behind closed doors lately. Who could forget the completely unexpected Chromebook Pixel reveal that had journos and pundits scratching their heads back in February, not to mention the early Google Play Store redesign leak and the prematurely released video that touted Google Now for iOS that appeared just weeks later. This latest batch of screenshots may leave you with more questions than answers, but I suspect that all will be revealed before long.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The head of Mark Zuckerberg’s enigmatic political lobby took the stage of TechCrunch’s Disrupt New York conference. “It’s incumbent on us to make the knowledge economy as inclusive as possible,” said FWD.us head Joe Green.

FWD.us joins a crowded landscape of politically aggressive trade associations pressing Silicon Valley’s agenda on Capitol Hill. Since the organization’s launch with a rare op-ed from Zuckerberg, there have been few details about FWD.us’s agenda, though that hasn’t stopped it from gathering an exhaustive list of technology’s most influential executives, including the recent additions of Bill Gates and Sean Parker.

FWD.us’s stated mission is to better prepare America for the knowledge economy, taking up the cause of high-skilled immigration as a first step. ” In a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country,” wrote Zuckerberg. To that end, Green took the stage with Vice President of Engineering at Dropbox, Aditya Agarwal, who shared a heartstring-tugging personal story about the madness of America’s current immigration system.

“We learned something really, really simple: do not start a company in this country if you do not have a green card,” Agarwal said. The sentiment is unfortunate, since immigrants have founded many of Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies, from Google to PayPal.

Immigration reform is priority number one for the new congress, and is currently snaking its way through the bureaucratic process. A draft of comprehensive reforms hit the senate earlier this month, which promises to give the technology industry most of what it wants, including more visas for science graduates and a special visa for startup founders. After congress returns from recess, it’ll be taken up again and according to our sources on the Hill, will likely be ratified sometime in the summer, if it passes at all.

There are still far more questions than answers about this new (potentially powerful) political interest group. Immigration will be their first test, and we’ll be watching. See their presentation below:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The idea of matching prospective dates based on shared interests is about as old as dating itself. But understanding how one set of interests relate to another, certainly at scale, is arguably something that machines can do a lot more efficiently than humans, so why not harness that capability for match-making purposes. Loveflutter, which soft-launched in New York last month, and gets a UK push today, aims to do just that.

Powered by Freebase, the 37-million strong open database of people, places and things acquired by Google in 2010 and now part of the search giant’s Knowledge Graph, the online dating site connects people based on shared interests.

After importing your Facebook “Likes” or entering interests manually, Loveflutter goes to work to show you matches who like the same kinds of music, books, movies, TV shows, and sports, in addition to utilising standard demographic data and your location. If you like what you see, you can click the “smile” button on someone’s profile or take the first step by messaging said person, although the latter requires paid-for credits or a subscription.

If the attraction is reciprocated, Loveflutter can suggest places to go on a date, based on local venues it pulls in from Foursquare.

So far, so “me-too”, you might rightfully argue.

However, the site’s use of Freebase allows its interest matching to go a little deeper. When an interest is added to your Loveflutter profile (e.g. your favourite band, book or movie), by tapping the power of Freebase, other structured data is also included, such as genre, author, or director. This is then used to make “semantic connections” between users, which provides the framework for Loveflutter’s interest-matching process.

It also enables a more flexible level of granularity when employing a user’s “interest-graph”. On the first level, exact matches of shared interests are sought e.g. two users both like the band “The Black Keys”. But the system can also zoom out a little to use broader interest criteria, such as both users like the same genre of music. That way Loveflutter is able to offer up more matches than it might otherwise, which is pretty crucial for a dating site not to feel like a ghost town (or perhaps an empty night club).

Other features of the dating site include “Verified Profiles” to denote when a user has signed up via Facebook, thus helping to reduce spam and fake profiles, something that plagues the online dating industry. There’s also Instagram-style photo filters, and badges — 24 in total — for various achievements, such as listing enough films to be deemed a movie lover and so on.

Lastly, it would be remiss not to mention the rather silly Facebook campaign that kicks off to coincide with the UK launch. For a limited time, Loveflutter says it’s only allowing “interesting people” to sign-up. To find out if you’re interesting enough to join, you’re required to take Loveflutter’s QI Test on Facebook and receive a Quirky-Interesting score.

Yes, really.

Loveflutter is co-founded by David Standen and Daigo Smith. The startup is based in London and currently bootstrapped.

(Note: For readers interested in trying out Loveflutter, I’m told that the first 1,000 who sign up using the code TECHCRUNCHLOVE will get 15 messaging credits free as well as bypass the “QI” test.)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Leaders from Facebook, Google, and other tech giants today announced they’re banding together to form a political advocacy group called FWD.us, designed to promote policies that will keep the American workforce competitive. The bipartisan group’s first priority is pushing for comprehensive immigration reform, but it will also support education reform and scientific research.

Leaked information about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s involvement in the formation of the group, pronounced “Forward U.S.”, was first published two weeks ago by the San Francisco Chronicle. But now FWD.us campaign manager Rob Jesmer tells TechCrunch it’s formally launching. It’s activities will include engaging the tech community in online advocacy, policy and fundraising.

Zuckerberg published an op-ed in the Washington Post this morning describing the group’s mission “to build the knowledge economy the US needs to ensure more jobs, innovation and investment.”

The hope of FWD.us is that by easing immigration for foreign talent, enticing native entrepreneurs to stay in the country, and improving education, the American economy and people will prosper. By pooling their considerable wealth and influence, the group’s members can better support candidates and lobby for legislation that could fix the broken policies impeding the country’s success. Though the businesses of FWD.us members stand to benefit from improved domestic education and easier visas for foreign talent, the group insists the real beneficiaries are American workers and students.

Tech’s Most Influential Unite For Change

Former Causes and NationBuilder co-founder and current Andreessen Horowitz entrepreneur in residence Joe Green will serve as the president of FWD.us, which will operate as a 501(c)(4) non-profit social welfare organization that can receive unlimited donations. Green says “People in tech have often felt a cultural disconnect from the political process, which is a shame considering we are naturally idealistic; you often hear tech founders talk about how their motivation to create companies and products is to change the world. Our goal with FWD.us is to organize and engage the tech community in the issues where we can contribute to the national debate.”

Founders of FWD.us include Zuckerberg, Green, Aditya Agarwal (Dropbox), Jim Breyer (Accel Partners), Matt Cohler (Benchmark), Ron Conway (SV Angel), John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), Reid Hoffman (Greylock/LinkedIn), Drew Houston (Dropbox), Chamath Palihapitiya (The Social+Capital Partnership), and Ruchi Sanghvi (Dropbox).

Amongst its major contributors are Brian Chesky (Airbnb), Chris Cox (Facebook), Paul Graham (Y Combinator), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Chad Hurley (AVOS/YouTube) Josh James (Domo/Omniture), Max Levchin (PayPal/Yelp), Joe Lonsdale (Palantir), Andrew Mason (Groupon), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo), Mary Meeker (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), Dave Morin (Path), Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX), Hadi Partovi (Code.org), Alison Pincus (One Kings Lane), Mark Pincus (Zynga), Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures), Hosain Rahman (Jawbone), David Sacks (Yammer), Eric Schmidt (Google), Kevin Systrom (Instagram), Padmasree Warrior (Cisco), and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures). They’ll all be participating as individuals, and not representing or drawing on resources of their companies. A full list of the FWD.us staff can be found in the press release attached below which will go out later this morning.

Some of the founders and contributors have participated or fundraised for political causes or candidates before, and a few of their companies including Facebook have their own political action committees and spend millions on lobbying efforts. What’s unique about FWD.us is the shear magnitude of their combined power, and the idea that its being harnessed for a bipartisan agenda.

Focusing On Immigration

Jesmer tells TechCrunch that FWD.us plans to spring into action immediately, as the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on immigration reform on April 17. FWD.us is expected to support the Gang Of Eight legislation, which includes a pathway to citizenship, much tougher border security, and guest worker programs for low- and high-skilled talent. Immigration reform, including easier access to H-1B temporary visas could help solve the talent crisis facing Silicon Valley. Right now it’s difficult for tech companies to bring in talent from overseas, and it can be tough for foreign entrepreneurs to set up companies and create jobs in the United States.

Beyond immigration, FWD.us plans to campaign for policies that will produce more math, science, and technology graduates, and ensure every child gains a great education from high-quality teachers in accountable schools. It will also support scientific research to foster innovation and technological breakthroughs. These projects could create new jobs in America, and boost engineering instruction so thee next generation has a place in the world economy which is increasingly going digital.

Zuckerberg sums up the need for FWD.us, saying “In a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country. A knowledge economy can scale further, create better jobs and provide a higher quality of living for everyone in our nation.To lead the world in this new economy, we need the most talented and hardest-working people. We need to train and attract the best.”

To join with FWD.us and receive information on its initiatives, sign up on its web page

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Some people believe that Google’s practices when it come to search are mystical and unfair, or sometimes evil, but what the company wants to do is surface the most important information for you when you perform a task on its most important product. With the introduction of Knowledge Graph last year, Google started showing information on the right-hand side of search results to help you figure out if you’re searching for the right thing, be it a person, place or thing.

Today, Google announced that it’s now filling up its Knowledge Graph with information about non-profits, which will help people find the right organization that they’d like to check out and potentially donate to.

In its announcement, Google said that this is still in its early roll-out phase, with more information being added all of the time:

We’ve just started to add information about nonprofits to the Knowledge Graph. When you search for a nonprofit organization on Google.com, you will start to see information to the right side of the search results that highlights the nonprofit’s financials, cause, and recent Google+ posts. Start following the organization on Google+ directly from the panel by clicking the Follow button. To learn more about related nonprofits, click on one of the organizations under “People also search for” and a carousel of similar organizations will appear at the top of the search results. Over time, we’ll continue to work on bringing more nonprofit information into your search experience.

In addition to key information about non-profits, including their category and tax deductibility code, Google is promoting their Google+ pages as well. This means that Google+ could immediately become a hot spot for non-profits to find new volunteers, avenues for fundraising and more importantly, awareness for their campaigns and causes.

While all known non-profits aren’t available in Knowledge Graph as of yet, it looks like most of the big ones are. You’ll notice that Google is also publishing the last Google+ post from the organization, allowing people to jump right into a conversation:

This is yet another example of how Google has strategically, and with precision, started to stitch together all of its products to create a world where people can spend just a little bit of time and get better results and information quicker. It’s also an example of how Google+ has become the connective tissue to make all of these connections happen.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer SHIFT today announced the SHIFT Open Marketing Cloud, a suite of applications from partners covering media buying, community management, social promotions, analytics and more.

The collaboration platform brings together apps from 11 other companies: Aggregate Knowledge, Convertro, Curalate, Expion, Fan Appz, Kenshoo, Moontoast, Offerpop, Optimal Analytics, SocialFlow and The Trade Desk. SHIFT’s own social advertising tool, GraphEffect is also available through the stack.

SHIFT, which rebranded from its former company name GraphEffect in October 2012, offers open APIs for developers to make their software more collaborative — essentially creating a version of Open Graph for the enterprise so that actions within work-related applications can be shared with internal and cross-organizational teams. The company is positioning itself as an emerging alternative to marketing clouds like Salesforce and Adobe, which own all the applications they offer. SHIFT aims to be open and bring together tools from a number of different developers, taking a percentage of revenue that is generated from developers who sign up new users through the platform.

Adknowledge to buy SocialWeekend

Adknowledge announced Monday that it has agreed to acquire SocialWeekend Labs, which offers tools for app developers to acquire and retain users. Adknowledge also owns AdParlor, a Facebook ads PMD, which runs paid media campaigns several large app developers as well as brands. San Francisco-based SocialWeekend has also built its own Facebook applications in the past, such as Birthdays+ and Wisdom of the Buddha.

Tigerlily brings post insights to platform

Facebook pages and apps PMD Tigerlily last week introduced post-level analytics to its Insights platform. The product helps page owners understand the performance of their posts, letting them set goals, compare results and get actionable information to improve their metrics.

Moontoast hires

Facebook PMD Moontoast announced the following hires this week:

• Ramzi Saba, VP of Engineering – former director of technology at Sapient
• Kevin Metz, Sales Director for NYC – former national sales manager, east at Ampush

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook