TechPulse 360

If you want a glimpse of what’s coming next, stop by the TechCrunch50 conference (photo courtesy of TechCrunch) this week in San Francisco.

Young (very young) Internet startups of every ilk unveiled an astonishing array of upcoming products and services set to redefine what we do online.

But don’t expect your journey to be easy. The conference’s wireless network was down most of the day and navigating your way about the exhibit floor of budding companies was difficult.

The show is in its second year and this week is hosting an impressive lineup of startups with next-generation Web products. Take Picad, for instance, a 1-year-old New York City company hoping to germinate a business linking pop-up ads to the photos people see as they browse the Web.

Brush your mouse across a photo of Hawaii and up might come a small ad from a travel agency. A photo from a Detroit car show could bring a tiny box with an ad from an auto company.

The goal is to link advertisers and publishers, and to deliver relevant ads, said Raymond Chan, Picad co-founder. As if publishers aren’t frantically looking for new ways to make money!

Another winning idea came from Snipd, founded in February and now headquartered on the couch of one of its co-founders. Snipd wants to let you clip images, passages of text, or snippets of videos that you find on the Web and then display them on your Facebook page or elsewhere.

The aim is to foster sharing, said co-founder Alex Schliker, who hopes to launch his service (at least in an early form) in two weeks.

At Hangout Industries, teenagers will be able to create virtual 3D spaces for their friends to come and, well, hangout. The service is in testing, but should be live by October, said co-founder Pano Anthos.

Visitors create “avatars,” or computer personas, when they arrive, and owners of a space can decorate their surroundings with pictures and furniture.

“Business don’t want to use avatars, but kids do,” said Anthos, who hopes to make money from companies willing to pay to have their products used in the online chambers. Makers of clothing, shoes, furniture and televisions are obvious candidates, he said.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

The search giant says it already does this for books and maps. “Now we’re going to do this with newspapers,” said Marissa Mayer (pictured), vice president of search products and user experience. “I think this is really good for newspapers.”

Mayer made the announcement on the first day of the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. She said the service includes millions of articles from the newspapers The St. Petersburg Times and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

It will allow people to search for articles from archives and bring new users to the papers, she said. Google will share ad revenue with newspaper companies.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

Fast growing startup EchoSign will unveil a new version of its software by the end of the month, said Eran Aloni, head of product management.

The Silicon Valley startup, which exhibited this week at the Office 2.0 conference, now has 500,000 users of its online contract-signing service and expects more growth.

The new release will add reporting features, so users can keep track of who received and signed a contract, Aloni said.

EchoSign, of Palo Alto, was formed three years ago and expects to grow its paid customers eight to 10 times this year – about the same growth as 2007.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.

Java inventor, James Gosling, throwing off some t-shirts to the audience!

The theme for this year’s JavaOne conference is “JAVA + You”… Actually, I would have replaced the “You” by Mobile. Mobile is just everywhere for JavaOne’s 12th edition, in the opening keynote, the sessions and the show floor with booths from Motorola, Sony/Ericsson, RIM, Sprint, AT&T, etc. Aside from a sizeable Oracle booth, there’s not much of an enterprise presence anymore. I also have the impression that this show is much smaller than last year’s. [Sun folks are telling me that total attendance is at about 12,000 people]. Agree?

Anyway, Java in mobile phones has been going for years. According to Sun, Java is already running on 85% of the mobile phones and 91% of desktop computers, totalling more than 6 billion Java enabled devices worldwide. But, did Sun really keep up with Java’s original promise of “Write Once, Run Everywhere”? To me, talking to developers, Java is more of a “Write Once, Debug Everywhere” world. As usual, I’ll be asking the hard questions to Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and team when I see them later today

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After a couple of interviews this morning in Palo Alto with execs from Pubmatic and Nominum, I’ll be on my way to Las Vegas… again!

This time it’s to attend Interop, the tradeshow for enterprise networking products and services with over 500 exhibitors expected to participate. It sounds like Interop is back, so does the networking world… feels like post-bubble

In his keynote at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, Tim O’Reilly (pictured, by Duncan Davidson) described the Internet as THE global plaform for everything connected, that will harness collective intelligence. This “open” plaform will make everybody smarter akin to literacy. Here are O’Reilly’s top 3 deep trends to look for in Web 2.0:

- Web 2.0 in the enterprise. It’s not just for consumer applications. Now some companies get it and his advice to them is to let customers access to their back-office;

- Cloud computing. THE computer is all the computers and devices linked together through the Internet operating system. Without this Net/Grid/Cloud a device is useless. What matters is not the software on a single device but the software in the cloud, as a service;

- and the Mobile Web and mobile does not equal the phone.

One more thing…Think BIG!

“Don’t follow the headlines to see what’s hot… Don’t be afraid to tackle on big hard problems… And if you win or if you loose make a difference, make a difference”.

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In his keynote at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, Tim O’Reilly (pictured, by Duncan Davidson) described the Internet as THE global plaform for everything connected, that will harness collective intelligence. This “open” plaform will make everybody smarter akin to literacy. Here are O’Reilly’s top 3 deep trends to look for in Web 2.0:

- Web 2.0 in the enterprise. It’s not just for consumer applications. Now some companies get it and his advice to them is to let customers access to their back-office;

- Cloud computing. THE computer is all the computers and devices linked together through the Internet operating system. Without this Net/Grid/Cloud a device is useless. What matters is not the software on a single device but the software in the cloud, as a service;

- and the Mobile Web and mobile does not equal the phone.

One more thing…Think BIG!

“Don’t follow the headlines to see what’s hot… Don’t be afraid to tackle on big hard problems… And if you win or if you loose make a difference, make a difference”.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to EFF co-founder, John Gilmore (pictured), speaking at SOFCON, one of the reason the municipal WiFi project failed apart was that it was tied to tracking the location of everyone using the network and keeping that information forever in big Google database in the sky. And in addition to creating that privacy violation, trying to make money selling ads to those people.

“It was not a public utility… why in free municipal wireless network does it need to know who you are? And when we raised this issue with the city and Google… they were unwilling to budge on it. And that was one of the issue that hung us up all the way to the Board of Supervisors. And then Earthlink decided that they were any money to make anyway… I don’t trust them with my information”, said Gilmore.

GPS, receive only

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Verizon promises to “openly” connect places to people to devices and in any of these combinations. The carrier also claims 65.7 million wireless subscribers (out of a total of 255.4 million in the U.S.) and that 55 per cent of its retail customers actually carry broadband-enabled devices.

But is Verizon really changing?
At the SOFCON conference, Verizon executive director of Internet and Tech Policy, Paul Brigner, reading out of a scripted presentation (I guess some things NEVER change), gave a glimpse of the telco operator’s next generation wireless plan.

And first, to illustrate that Verizon is really “changing with the marketplace”, Brigner reminded us how much Verizon is now banking on “data” versus voice for its future.

“It took 7 years to get 10 billion text messages transfered on our network on a single month. But it only took 7 more months after that to hit 20 billion messages in a single month. So we’re seeing a hockey stick effect here and the data usage is really growing to the roof. Our data revenues currently comprise 20% of our revenue”, said Brigner.

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After the jump i’ve put the presentation Microsoft’s Iron Ruby Guy and Open Source Evangelist, John Lam (pictured), gave at SD Forum’s Ruby conference.

Hard core Ruby fans would certainly enjoy it. The others should just pass

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