Scribd Reaches Profitability, Hiring (video)

October 15, 2009
Scribd is storing 10 times more words than Wikipedia!

Scribd is storing 10 times more words than Wikipedia!

At Dow Jones’ VentureWire Tech Showcase event yesterday I met with Scribd co-founder Jared Friedman to talk about the San Francisco, Calif.-startup’s latest news: reaching profitability and hiring engineers.

“Scribd is the largest social publishing website where anyone can publish original writings and documents and share them with the world,” explains Friedman.

What is sometimes referred as the YouTube for documents has so far raised $13 million and stores more than 10 million documents which translates to more than 35 billion words – 10 times the size of Wikipedia! “We’re storing 1% of all public documents on the Web.”

How Scribd deals with piracy; sees Amazon, Google as main competitors

As for piracy- uploads of copyrighted documents – Scribd has developed technologies to help prevent copyright infringement.

“When infringing works are uploaded to Scribd they are matched against a huge library of reference database that we’ve assembled that has a huge list of works that are copyrighted. And if they found to be a match they are taken out immediately,” adds Friedman.

For Friedman, Google (with its Books initiative) and Amazon (with the Kindle) will ultimately be Scribd main competitors.

The 40-employees startup reached profitability in the second quarter this year, monetising through targeted ads – which displays on the side of every documents – and revenue share for every document sold on its service.

The other good news is that Scribd is actively hiring engineers!

Follows is my interview with Friedman.

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Posted by TechPulse 360

Wikipedia Prepares To Add Video To Crowdsourced Text

July 31, 2009

Wikipedia became the 10th most popular site on the Internet by mining the wisdom of the crowd to develop text-based encyclopedia entries.

Now is it ready to take on video.

Video expected before the end of the year, says Kulturas Ron Yekutiel

Video expected before the end of the year, says Kultura's Ron Yekutiel

The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation is expected to add technology in the next several months to let volunteers add video and multi-media to the general reference posts that in June alone drew 61 million Americans to the property.

There are a lot of components that need to come together, says Ron Yekutiel, CEO of Kaltura. But the plan seems on track for implementation by the end of the year.

Kaltura, the maker of open-source video management software, is supplying its software to the initiative. Yekutiel says there are many complexities, such as storing a history of the editing process for each clip posted.

In essence, the system will work the way the software does that Wikipedia uses to post text today. Editors will be able to follow changes to the material so as to understand how entries are created.

But while text is one thing, multi-media opens a new can of worms. Video clips can be editing in numerous subtle ways, and their source isn’t always obvious.

It will fascinating to see how thoroughly they can be policed – and exactly what value they bring. Will a picture indeed be worth a thousand crowdsourced words?

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Posted by Mark Boslet

OpenStreetMap Wants To Be The Wikipedia Of Maps

March 10, 2009

Wikipedia redefined the encyclopedia business by relying on an army of online volunteers to post entries. OpenStreetMap hopes to do the same for maps. And CloudMade hopes to turn the data into a business.

The two-year-old Menlo Park startup CloudMade relies on the OpenStreetMap project and its 97,500 volunteers in more than 30 countries to fill out maps of communities around the world.

The plan is to give away the map data but charge for services

The plan is to give away the map data but charge for services

It also thinks big: its hopes OpenStreetMap will finish the U.S. by 2010 as a step toward transcribing the entire globe. Already Germany is near completion and the United Kingdom is well on its way.

“This is going to be the map of the future,” says founder Steve Coast of his company.

The advantage of using map-making volunteers is their local knowledge. Many live in the neighborhoods they chart and add details such as footpaths, post office boxes and buildings.

They also can update maps more frequently, since a volunteer can log in at any time with new data. Traditional mapping companies update their local surveys every 18 months or so, says Coast.

This is the map of the future, says Steve Coast

This is the map of the future, says Steve Coast

But it’s also a daunting task. CloudMade raised $3.5 million from Sunstone Capital, but, well, the world is a large place.

Businesses, such as Google and Microsoft, typically rely on one of two cartography firms for mapping data – Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ – striking deals that can climb into the millions of dollars. At present, both Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ seem to dismiss CloudMade, much the way Encyclopedia Britannica dismissed Wikipedia.

But if the 50-person company is successful, this relationship may change. Coast says the goal is to give away the OpenStreetMap mapping data for free and charge for services.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Powerful Shift Taking Place In The US Economy Even As The Pace Of Business Slows

November 17, 2008
Google is part of the new economy, says Paul Saffo

Google is part of the new economy, says Paul Saffo

With stocks plummeting, unemployment at 6.5 percent, cars sales off by nearly a third and retailers suffering the biggest monthly drop in business in 26 years, it is clear a significant downturn has gripped the U.S.

Less obvious is that America is migrating to a new kind of economy, just as it has several times in the past century or so, says futurist Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster.

Saffo says the central character of the new economy isn’t the consumer, who was at the center of the previous economy, or the worker, who helped drive the industrialization that took place in the economy before that.

The central actor will be the “creator,” he said – sometimes ordinary people who create things even while they consume or pursue other activities. Look at Wikipedia, for instance, the online encyclopedia created by volunteers. Or YouTube, where content comes from amateurs making their own videos.

Saffo singles out new economy companies such as Google, where people create something of value even while they are consuming. That something of value is the “search string” they type into the search engine, which Google then uses to monetize its business.

In the new economy, the biggest companies will be the ones that can harness the smallest bits of human activity, he says.

And there will be a company that will dwarf the size of Google, maybe by harnessing a single click as a creative activity, says Saffo.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

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