Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.

The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section.

Where the Anroid app really shines is with the photo capabilities. The updated Google+ app now has the auto backup, highlight, enhance and “auto awesome” functionality that the desktop version has. It’s really handy to be able to enhance your photos directly within the app, rather than waiting until you get back to your computer or relying on Google to do its magical synthetic wrinkle removal, even though it’s cool.

To make it easier to “make plans and meet,” Google+ has broken “Locations” out into its own section. Now, when you share your location with certain Circles, your friends can easily find you by tapping on that section. Naturally, it drops everyone’s location onto a Map, which makes it seamless:

Location is something that hasn’t been a great piece of Google+ to date. The service currently picks up where you are and asks you for your explicit location, not really telling you who will get to see it. With the Location section and controls, it’s easier to manage and can turn into an experience similar to that of Foursquare.

The stream is getting all of the features from last week, too. The auto hashtags will let you drill into new content, hopefully sucking up all of your free time. It turns the Google+ experience into something like Wikipedia, where you can just keep tapping on relevant content and hopefully find some new people to follow along the way. While you’re not going to get the new three-column layout on your smartphone, the drilling down is actually fun.

We’ll await the iOS update, but expect the same items to find their way into that version. All of these enhancements are made to entice you to do a little bit more in Google+, as the company doesn’t really expect you to jump ship from one network to another. The features are more complementary to one another in this update, giving a better experience to new users, which is the most important demographic for Google to focus on right now. Those of us who have tried Google+ already have our minds made up as to whether it’s useful or not. It’s the stragglers who haven’t seen it from the beginning that need to be wowed.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

GraphLab, the open-source distributed database, has received $6.75 million from Madrona Venture Group and NEA for its machine learning technology used to analyze data graphs for recommendation engines.

Developed five years ago at Carnegie Mellon University five years ago, the open-source data analysis platform takes semi-structured data that describe relationships between people, web traffic, product purchases and other data. It then analyzes that data for services to provide online recommendations.

Graph databases, similar to Graphlab, have increased in use as more data needs correlating to better understand its meaning. Wikiepdia describes graph database in the context of graph theory. It applies mathematical structures “used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of vertices or nodes and lines called edges that connect them.”

It’s the ability to make the connections between billions of nodes and lines that forms the basis for making recommendations.

Dr. Carlos Guestrin is GraphLab’s CEO. He is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Washington, who developed the technology at Carnegie Mellon. He says it is GraphLab’s flexibility and better machine learning capabilities that makes it better in comparison to other data analytics tools such as Mahout, the open-source machine learning technology.

GraphLab has gained adoption in the market. It is used by a number of consumer services to drive millions of transactions. Pandora and Walmart Labs are cited as users of the technology.

(Graph image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

OpenStreetMap, the Wikipedia-like crowdsourced mapping service, announced a couple of changes today that will make it easier for anybody to contribute. Starting today, you can easily suggest corrections when you browse maps on OpenStreetMap. In the spirit of crowdsourcing, these proposed corrections will be farmed out to the service’s volunteers. Then the organizations, writes Harry Wood in today’s announcement, “a local mapper can visit the location to check the suggested information, and then update the map.”

This new feature is meant to allow more users to participate in the mapping process, even if they don’t have the time or skills to get involved in the details of creating a local map. Users who spot issues just have to click on the “add a note” button in the bottom-right corner of the window and suggest the change.

It’s worth noting that these suggestions don’t have to follow any specific format and users don’t need to have an OpenStreetMap account to suggest changes. Notes, Wood writes, “are free-form natural text, read by other people, making this a very simple way to communicate any problems we notice about the map without needing to get to grips with OpenStreetMap and its tagging system.”

Later this year, OpenStreetMap also plans to launch a new HTML5-based map editor, which will also make it significantly easier to create and edit maps.

“By making it even easier to add to the map, we’re increasing the amount of on-the-ground knowledge we can capture – further distancing OSM from the traditional map data companies and their lack of local expertise,” Simon Poole, the chairman of the OpenStreetMap Foundation said in a canned statement today.

Google Maps, of course, also allows users to report problems with its maps, and the company constantly updates its maps. It can often take quite a while before the team gets to look at all the reports that come in.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook today announced a deal with Rovi Corporation to use Rovi Video, a database of information about movies, TV shows and celebrities that can be used to improve search and discovery across its platform.

Rovi’s data helps power experiences like on-screen TV guides, iTunes, Flixter, BestBuy.com and many others. Facebook has been building out its “entity graph,” which are all the people, places and things that are represented with pages. Users primarily connect to these objects by Liking them, but now Facebook is making a push for users to do so through actions like “watch/want to watch,” “read/want to read” or “listen/want to listen.” Improving the metadata associated with these objects could give Facebook new opportunities when it comes to search, News Feed relevance, recommendations and offering new features for developers

Before the Rovi deal, Facebook used Wikipedia and Freebase to populate information about movies, TV shows and other entities, for example for the module on the “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” page below. However, those sources are community-curated and not necessarily as reliable as what Rovi provides for many of the largest companies in the world.

Facebook is clearly setting itself up to be a greater player in the entertainment space. The company recently made movies, books, TV shows and music a larger part of users’ Timelines and About pages and introduced structured status updates for people to share what they’re watching, reading or listening to, among other activities.

“We see the social interaction with movies, TV shows and video entertainment growing immensely over the next couple of years,” Facebook said in a press release. “With this in mind, we’ve sought Rovi as a valuable source for TV and movie information to help provide the backdrop that we need to enable developers to create a connected experience for consumers in their apps and services.”

With Rovi data, Facebook and third-party developers could start creating more social TV applications and other entertainment discovery experiences. In the past, Zuckerberg and other Facebook employees have described a vision where a user can turn on their TV and instead of viewing a typical schedule or flipping through channels, they could see what their friends Like or have watched. In 2011, Facebook Director of Platform Partnerships EMEA Christian Hernandez Gallardo talked about an idea that would let users indicate they wanted to watch a TV episode, invite their friends, get reminded, and then alert their friends when they’re watching. There’s a lot that Facebook or developers could ultimately offer once a foundation of data is in place.

For its part, Rovi will be able to gain a more comprehensive list of Facebook page IDs, which it can associate with Rovi IDs so customers can include links to the movie or TV shows’ Facebook pages.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Today, Google has introduced a few new features for when you’re searching on the go. The ability to find the information that you want on the fly is something that is required for mobile searching and the company continues to tweak its result pages to help you get to the details that you need to make decisions or perform another search or task.

All of these tweaks are speeding up mobile search, 30% over the last 12 months, the company says. With Quick links and Quick view, that 30% might increase.

An example of the new features, starting with “Quick links”, you’ll find “In Theaters” underneath a search result for say, Rotten Tomatoes, when you’re looking for movie reviews. The links expand and then give you the information that you need right away. From those quick views, you can then find a list of movies in a theater near you. By taking out a few extra steps of tapping, Google wants to send you on your way happy and satisfied.

Along with those Quick links, Google is experimenting with something it calls “Quick view” which shows a badge that links to a bit of information pulled directly from Wikipedia. In this example, a Google search can be used as a “cheat sheet” for things like a list of poker hands:

Once you tap on the Quick view, you’ll see an overlay of info like this:

Google says that this is an experimental project, which makes mobile sites come up in around 100 milliseconds, and is only available for Wikipedia results when you search in English on Google.com. More sites are coming soon, and the company is working with webmasters on bringing more sites in, and they can sign up here for details.

As more users start playing around with Google Now, Google’s mobile “Siri”, people are going to expect their search results to get smarter and more in tune to what they’re really thinking. Over the years, Google has focused on bringing people answers to their questions, as that’s how most people perform search queries. With these new features, someone could be asking “What do people think about Jurassic Park 3D,” and when the result is coupled with a quick link to purchase tickets, a great review serves as an advertisement.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Forrester recently predicted that the online retail market will grow to $370 billion over the next four years, up from $231 billion this year — a 10 percent compound annual growth rate. In other words, the message is clear: The eCommerce juggernaut ain’t slowing down any time soon. In 2013, every business needs some kind of online presence; the problem, of course, is that many small business owners don’t have the technical know-how (or capital) to set up their own eCommerce marketplace.

It’s this problem that gave rise to services like Etsy, Weebly, Wix, Zaarly and one million more, who aim to make it easier on businesses and merchants to sell online. It’s an service that The Economist apparently just discovered, which left out a slew of similar companies (that have been around for years) in its coverage today. Founded in 2005, one of the largest players in the create-your-own-online store space is Shopify, a service that allows anyone to set up an online storefront in a few minutes, quickly adding the products they want to sell, accept payments through PayPal and others, add images and more.

The company has flown under the radar of late, partly due to the fact that it’s been quietly preparing a huge update to its platform. (In fact, the company tells us that the redesign has “literally been years in the making.”) In private beta since October, today Shopify is pulling back the curtain on v2.0 and officially making it available to the public.

Based on feedback from the 50,000-plus merchants who have created online stores using Shopify, the company has added over 60 new features, beginning with a complete redesign of its dashboard and the addition of a live theme editor and more intuitive administrative functions. The founders tell us that the new platform was built using a JavaScript MVC framework, which was developed in-house before being open-sourced for public consumption. The new framework was designed to be allow the company to develop prototypes and create applications more quickly, while providing increased scalability for its high-volume merchants.

The new redesign is the product of the company’s $22 million Series A and B rounds as well as last year’s acquisition of mobile app developer, Select Start Studios, which has helped the company accelerate its mobile strategy — a fundamental part of its overall redesign. The team helped develop Shopify’s new iPhone app, which was released last year, and has since focused on adding new responsive themes (i.e. templates) to the company’s theme store.

Along with building out its mobile platform, Shopify is also changing up its pricing model and will now offer a cheaper “Starter” plan for businesses (which includes 24/7 support) — both of which aim to make its platform more affordable and accessible to small businesses. Of its new pricing, Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobias Lütke said:

For years, Shopify’s least expensive plan cost $29/month. With the release of Shopify 2, we now offer a ‘Starter’ plan for $14/month, which gives merchants the same eCommerce platform, minus a few of the more advanced features and functionalities … The idea being that we want to offer options for merchants regardless of where they are in the lifecycle of their business, and, with our new, less expensive option, we want to remove the barriers for those who are new to selling online.

On top of its new “Starter” plan, Shopify is also introducing an Enterprise plan to cater to high-volume clients, priced at $1,000/month. While one would assume that a service like Shopify would cater mostly to small businesses, big-ticket brands want access to the same functionality and are eager to reduce the cost of paying for expensive third-party eCommerce software — or having to build their own.

As a result, Shopify has recently become home to a growing number of big-ticket brands, including Budweiser, Gatorade and Wikipedia, the CEO tells us, which are increasingly looking to swim downstream to hosted SaaS solutions. The two new plans bring the total to five (Starter, Basic, Professional, Unlimited and Enterprise. (Plans broken down by features here.)

Beyond pricing, Shopify’s redesign includes a host of new features, including the ability for merchants to now offer partial refunds without having to use PayPal, along with improved search functionality across the site and improved admin functionality (like meta descriptions, an example of something that users previously had to pay for). The biggest additions, the CEO tells us, are features like a live theme editor, which allow merchants to build and customize the look of their store in a live preview window before publishing. Merchants can now edit colors, fonts, spacing, images and so on, instantly seeing how these changes would look.

The company has also completely overhauled its order management system, which now offers abandoned checkout management, merchant-side order editing, refunds and improved fraud detection. The other key, the CEO tells us, is that Shopify has, fundamentally, re-built the platform from scratch to allow for more flexibility and to allow it to expand across all forms of eCommerce.

The CEO also revealed some historical growth stats, which show that Shopify went from 18,000 active stores in 2011 to 41K active stores in 2012, and projects to hit 80K this year. Its gross merchandise value — or total sales across its storefronts — grew from $275 million in 2011 to $742 million in 2012 to what it projects will be $1.5 billion by the end of the year.

Ultimately, after briefly poking around Shopify 2, it’s easy to see that a lot of time has been put into building the new platform. The design is much approved, as is the user experience; it’s much easier to navigate. As alluded to earlier, there is now a long list of competitors in this space, and Shopify may not have helped itself by taking so long to push its redesign.

But it’s clear that the company is now trying to take on the “Bigcommerce” players like Magento and Volusion. Whether or not those big-ticket enterprise clients are willing to consider it as an alternative remains to be seen, but the new pricing is certainly a step in the right direction — on both sides of the spectrum.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook today began adding weather forecasts to upcoming events and current weather conditions to place pages such as parks, cities and neighborhoods, a spokesperson tells us.

Events that have a designated location, and which will occur within 10 days, will now offer a general forecast and estimates for high and low temperatures. Users can click to visit Weather Underground for full conditions and other information. This will be available for event pages on the web and mobile.

Users will be able to see the weather forecast during the event creation process as well, which could help them better plan their event.

Facebook will also display current weather conditions on place pages like parks and cities, which do not have an admin. These unclaimed community pages offer information from Wikipedia and social context, such as which of a user’s friends have been to the place and photos taken there. City and neighborhood pages also have local search features. Now with the latest weather updates, these pages have more information that could make them a useful destination for users looking for more information about a place. See an example for San Francisco.

Users can also quickly check the weather from the main search bar on Facebook.com. The social network displays Bing web results without sending users offsite.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Microsoft’s Bing search engine now knows quite a bit more about people and places, thanks to an upgrade to its Satori entity engine and a partnership with LinkedIn. This means Bing now features the profiles of “web-active” users, professionals and celebrities in its Snapshots bar and has a significantly better understanding about places and things. Today’s update, Microsoft says, marks the “most significant updates to Satori (which you will see show up in the Snapshot feature on Bing) since its introduction.”

The updated Bing doesn’t just show this information, though. It also makes it available through complex natural language queries like “Who won best actor in 2009?” The search engine is smart enough to understand that you are talking about the Oscars and knows that you are probably looking for Sean Penn. Because it also knows more about places, you can also ask it “What is the deepest lake in the world?” and get the answer immediately. For many of these questions, it is worth noting, Google doesn’t find an answer in its Knowledge Graph, though there are obviously some parallels between Knowledge Graph and Microsoft’s Satori project, which forms the basis of today’s updates.

In the view of Microsoft’s senior director of online services Stefan Weitz, Google’s Knowledge graph is indeed a “kick-ass encyclopedia” that’s great at highlighting facts. That, he said, “is interesting and hard and cool,” but he wants Bing to go a step further by not just linking all of this information together, but also by making it actionable. Restaurant data, for example, includes a link to reservations. Movie listings show you where you can rent online, and results about a school will show you where you can apply. And starting today, Bing is expanding this by adding more information about people, things and places to Satori, its answer to Google’s Knowledge Graph.

People On Bing

Currently, Weitz told me earlier this week, people searches account for about 10 percent of all searches on Bing. When it comes to people, profiles and Bing, the company that probably comes to mind first is Facebook, given that Microsoft already has a close relationship with the social network. However, most of the people searches on Bing, Weitz argues, involve people who are tying to find professional information about somebody, and that’s where LinkedIn has a major advantage (he did not exclude the possibility that Microsoft would add information from other sources later on, though).

Just showing information about people, of course, doesn’t sound so hard, but most names are ambiguous and could refer to numerous people. Because of this, Microsoft often shows you multiple options in the sidebar and then allows you to choose the one you are looking for, similar to what Google does with the Knowledge Graph. Once you choose the right person, the search results will then update to show you relevant results.

Bing also, of course, still uses data from Wikipedia for historical figures and celebrities. For celebrities and some “web-famous” people, the search engine even goes one step further and offers links to their Facebook and Twitter profiles, as well as their Klout scores and other information it can find (think spouses, children, specific events they were involved in, etc.).

For regular Linkedin users, the Snapshot feature will show you the usual biographical stats you would expect, including a person’s current job, work experience and education background, as well as a list of related people searchers looked for on Bing (for me, that’s my TechCrunch colleagues Rip Empson, Anthony Ha and John Biggs, for example). Search results from LinkedIn that don’t immediately trigger the Snapshot feature but appear in the regular search results can now be expanded to show all of this information, too.

Sidenote: Earlier this week, a number of people spotted what looked like author images on Bing. While it does indeed look like Bing is testing this feature, this isn’t part of today’s launch, though it is likely based on data from Satori. Chances are we’ll hear more about this project in the near future.

Places On Bing

As for places, including landmarks, rivers and mountains, Bing now incorporates a large amount of additional information and can show you more data about local airports, attractions and other cities people search for in the Snapshots bar. Microsoft started adding some of this information to Bing last December, but today’s release adds a lot more information to these Snapshots.

All of these attributes, Microsoft writes in today’s announcement, “reflect Bing’s understanding of peoples’ intent when conducting queries about this specific type of entity versus another.” This also means much of this data is now available through natural language queries.

The Power Of Satori

People and places, however, are only a small part of this wider project (code-named Satori, Japanese for understanding) around entities that Bing embarked on a while back. The long-term vision of Satori is pretty bold. As Weitz told me, Microsoft wants to try to “make sense of the physical world by using the digital world as a very high-definition proxy.” Ideally, Bing will one day allow you to find out anything about any object. For the most part, that information is available today, Weitz said, but it’s spread across thousands of unique sites.

As Dr. Richard Qian from the Bing Search Team writes in today’s announcement, Microsoft believes that “the sum of these updates equates to a greater level of understanding about the world around us. This is a long journey, and we expect to deliver a number of additional improvements in the weeks and months ahead.” Qian also notes that “over time, Satori will continue growing to encompass billions of entities and relationships, providing searchers with a more useful model of the digital and physical world.”

While Weitz wouldn’t tell me what exactly the team would launch next, he did hint that the team is looking at adding information about wine to Satori next. The Bing team is also looking at adding more action type functions to the search engine to make more of this information actionable.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’re looking for stuff to do, in a new city or your own, there are various ways to get that info, including Yelp, Zvents, Frommer’s guides and more. Waterloo-based Rebellion Media would rather all that data was collected in a single hub, however, where travelers could get a quick look at everything they need for trip planning in a single place, based on a map-centric interface that’s fast and easy to use, which is why they created TripWhat.

TripWhat is a travel-oriented search engine for iPhone and web. There are lots of different travel apps out there, which is why I asked TripWhat co-founder Chris Reid about the decision to add another one to the mix. After all, even if there’s still a lot of demand for travel products out there among consumers, it’s beginning to get harder to distinguish yourself as an app in the travel category.

“One problem we really see is that a lot of this information is siloed, so you’ll have something like SeatGeek, you’ll have Wikipedia, you’ll have Yelp, you’ll have Urbanspoon and you’ll have OpenTable,” he said. “So everyone has their own siloed data set, a little bit of info and a little bit of value-add that the other one doesn’t, so if you’re trying to figure out what’s best in a region, normally you’d have to search across all these siloes to piece it together.”

TripWhat’s goal, then, is to unify all this data across separate contexts, meaning that if there’s a band playing an event that SeatGeek knows about, for instance, TripWhat will eventually be able to draw that info in and combine it with data pulled from other sources like Wikipedia and Last.fm for richer context. The ultimate hope is that travelers will be able to go to any city, enter a broad search term related to their interest, and be provided with smart results properly filled out with signals from any relevant data source, to help them build their perfect trip.

With TripWhat’s version one product, you can see the seeds of that larger goal at work; in densely populated areas, it already returns a number of results, and does so quickly, spanning events, restaurants and attractions. Users on mobile can also save their trip for later personal use, and on the web they can do the same, but there trips will be saved to the server and pushed back down to the iPhone app. Eventually, TripWhat hopes to be able to offer community-curated trips searchable by keyword – already it has built some of its own to show how this will look once the curation elements are in place.

Rebellion Media, which is a conglomerate of various startups from the Kitchener-Waterloo area, is using a lot of the natural language and data processing techniques it acquired when it picked up gadget shopping comparison startup Sortable last year. Its project with TripWhat is big and ambitious, but it’s starting with some solid ingredients, including a Google Maps for iOS-inspired design that suits the travel purpose of the app. If it can flesh out this first release to match its larger vision, it stands a chance of distinguishing itself in this crowded market.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Digg.com and other links from its website have disappeared from Google’s search result pages, following a recent update to Google’s algorithms. It’s unclear at this time exactly what caused the site to be de-listed, though the current speculation is that it has to do with Digg pointing to bad or spammy links. [UPDATE: See below, Google says it will fix the problem].

You can see the issue right now if you Google the keyword “digg” – the site is no longer the top search result. Instead the top results are the Digg Wikipedia page, its Twitter account, and other links that are highly ranked for the word “digg.”

In addition, if you Google “site:digg.com,” Google will display a message saying no results are found.

Some conspiracy theorists out there are even pointing out that the de-listing came shortly after Digg’s announcement that it would build a replacement to Google Reader, but that’s more than a bit crazy. For Google to drop the site from its index, it would have to be a technical error of some sort, or something to do with the links Digg is hosting.

As one person on Hacker News points out:

Doing a site:digg.com/news/ search on Bing shows a lot of pages like these: http://digg.com/news/gaming/ing_bank_i_ilanlar and even more duplicate tag and rss pages for “site:digg.com/tag/” and “site:digg.com rss”.

These /news/ pages 302 redirect to many different sites (some are bound to contain spam or be of lower quality).

302 redirects for these links is bad practice. Some link shorteners (ab)use 302 Found (instead of 301 Moved Permanently) to hoard content that doesn’t belong to them. The content for these links can’t be found on digg.com, so they too use the wrong redirect and associate themselves with all pages they link to.

Besides that: Digg.com acts like a single page webapp for most of its content. There are no discussion pages or detail pages for the stories. The content that does appear is near duplicate to other content on the web, especially with popular stories, where many blogs just copy the title and the first intro paragraph.

Another user on Hacker News noted that Digg’s robots.txt file now reads: User-agent: * Disallow, which would imply an issue on Digg’s part, not Google’s.

However, Digg GM Jake Levine tells us that he suspects the issue might have to do with the links the Digg is hosting from the old Digg.

“We’re chatting with Google to work this out, but my guess is that it has something to do with the links we’re hosting from the old Digg. When we acquired Digg we inherited tens of thousands of links to old Digg submissions, some of which ranked well in search,” Levine explains. “We decided the right thing to do was to redirect all of those links to the original source URLs. This may have tripped up Google’s index. I’m sure we’ll be able to get this sorted out shortly.”

“The good news is that it doesn’t really impact us all that much,” he adds. “The vast majority of our traffic is direct (like 90%+) so it’s not a huge deal for us from a business/user perspective.”

Digg is still waiting for Google to respond at this point, so we’ll know more soon.

Despite Levine’s assurance that most of Digg’s traffic is direct, and the Google de-listing won’t affect the site, I’ve seen first-hand the effects of a change like this can do when a big-name site is involved. Several years ago, when I worked at ReadWriteWeb (now ReadWrite), an article on the site became the top hit for Facebook in Google. Since many people don’t actually type a URL (they just Google a site name), thousands of confused users fled to the comments complaining they couldn’t log in and what has happened to Facebook!? Years later, we’re still getting a good laugh about this.

UPDATE: Google has provided an official response:

We’re sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the webspam action to the whole site. We’re correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly.

UPDATE, 2:20 PM ET: Digg has now returned.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch