Pretty cool idea - instead of exploring officially approved photos on the travel agent’s Web site, see what the hotel looks like in a short video. TVTrip is founded by Expedia alumni, and has videos of the hotels from around the world. They claim 3,825 videos so far, and include a variety of destinations including some motel in Palo Alto as well as Radisson SAS in Paris, France.
Slashdot had a story on brain control headsets coming out soon from Emotiv. The company seems to have done a fair bit of research in linking various neural activity to explicit emotions. They’re targeting gaming market, and hoping to introduce game that analyze your emotions as well as kinetic signals that the brain is sending towards the other body organs. What’s also cool is they’re launching an SDK:
Additionally, Emotiv has announced the commercial availability of its full SDK. The SDK has been upgraded significantly since it was first announced in March 2007 at last year’s GDC. The commercially available version of the kit now includes:
- 2 beta-version neuroheadsets
- Software toolkit that exposes the APIs
- Full access to detection libraries
- Suite of development tools for effective creation and integration of applications with content
The Emotiv EPOC is the world’s first consumer neuroheadset. It detects and processes human conscious thoughts and expressions and non-conscious emotions. By integrating the Emotiv EPOC into their games or other applications, developers can dramatically enhance interactivity, gameplay and player enjoyment by, for example, enabling characters to respond to a player’s smile, laugh or frown; by adjusting the game dynamically in response to player emotions such as frustration or excitement; and enabling players to manipulate objects in a game or even make them disappear using the power of their thoughts.
Headset itself will cost $299 once released into commercial production, the SDK details are available here.
Might be coincidental, but looking through the logs of a few sites I host, I noticed Cuill, a new search engine with supposedly faster indexing methods, going through quite a few pages:38.99.13.123 - - [25/Dec/2007:17:21:10 -0800] “GET /page.php HTTP/1.0″ 200 17123 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)”Looks like there are a few other folks perplexed with the intensity of Cuill indexing (it wasn’t anything to stress about in my case, but was pretty noticeable).
I went to my first Plug and Play Tech Center Web 2.0 event (a handful to say) tonight. Sunnyvale’s Plug and Play Tech Center is a project by Amidzad Partners, and if you don’t know who they are, but always wondered how downtown Palo Alto manages to have so many rug stores, New York Times had the answer a few months back. The center’s Web 2.0 event is monthly, and features a handful of startup presentations, and a keynote speech. The keynote tonight was from Ramu Yalamanchi, founder and CEO of Hi5. Ramu is a serial entrepreneur and shared his common-sense advice on starting and running a business. He seemed to favor the business models that did not require raising tons of money right away, and starting his newest venture in 2004 taught him to concentrate on profitability right from the start.
As far as the presenting startups, the topic for the night was widgets and applications, embeddable in social networks. TripWiser presented their social traveling Facebook application Going Places, that allows you to specify places you’ve been to, places you want to go, and see what your friends are up to as far as travel activities. Minekey presented their Facebook application iThink, and announced a promotional $300 giveaway in order to drive up usage of their app. iThink allows the user to agree or disagree with controversial statements (”Women are better drivers then men”, “Angelina Jolie is over-rated”), providing a clearer picture of who your friends are, and what they think.
The College Freeway allows its users to log in using their Facebook IDs, but is a destination site. A few people in the audience seemed to think that this required a special deal with Facebook, but allowing Facebook logins on third-party sites has been in the API long before the Facebook Platform was released. The College Freeway allows students to upload class notes for their college, and considers itself a service to the universities and professors, just like OpenCourseWare is. Pollection is another company that presented a Facebook application that’s already pretty successful - Polls.
Two event startups - imThere and MadeIt. First one focuses on mobile event interaction, the other one is all about creating easy full-blown Web sites for specific events, where people can add photos, videos, audio, etc. for an event and meet new people via events they attend.
Two companies helping application/widget developers to reach markets - gigya offering interfaces for embedding practically any JavaScript/Flash widget on a social networking or startpage site, and Social URL aggregating social networking profiles into one place, and providing some services on top of aggregation.
InnerCircle.cc solves the problem of e-mailing some content or photos over and over to the same people. It allows you to set up a special e-mail address on their server, and then forwards each message to that address to a number of recipients. iPling pitched itself as the first iPhone-only company. It allows users to set up their current mood and express their thoughts anonymously, and then charges for anonymous SMS. So theoretically if you’re at a party and looking for a date, you can set your status to “Seeking date”, and someone else could send you an anonymous SMS expressing their interest.
Overall, interesting businesses and interesting business models. It’s worth noting that even nowadays, at the heyday of Internet advertising market, many startups are thinking about alternative monetization methods, such as subscriptions and add-on services.
Recently it seems everybody is experimenting with the ways to sell international and long-distance VOIP through some non-traditional ways. Perhaps this was triggered by Vonage getting sued, which is going to change the way residential VOIP is offered. Jajah was the first (or among the first) to offer Web-based call origination without being a Web-based VOIP provider, like Yahoo! Messenger with Voice, where you need a broadband Internet connection to call. Raketu is among the latest companies to do the same. You enter your phone number and destination phone number, your phone rings and then you get connected to the destination phone number. No speakers or PC microphone involved - you need to be connected to the Web to initialize the call. Raketu runs some kind of promotion right now:
Starting Monday, August 20, 2007, customers who purchase credits for Raketu’s prepaid voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) dial out calling service will receive up to 1200 minutes of free calling per month for three months to locations in 40 countries. To be eligible for the promotion, Raketu customers must purchase credits of either $9.95 or $24.95 to use towards Raketu’s ultra-low global calling rates.
I haven’t tried Raketu, but some time ago I tried out Jajah and was reasonably happy with the quality, so for $9.99 commitment it’s worth checking out.
The inventor is Jay Jorensen and the one-product company is Java Jacket out of Portland, OR. You get the coffee sleeve for free whenever you buy a beverage at a coffee shop, but according to Entrepreneur magazine, the company’s revenues were estimated at $12-15 million dollars back in 2003. The company got started with $15,000, back in 1993 when the patent got granted. The venture got started after an unfortunate accident with hot coffee, Fast Company magazine says:
One morning, I spilled the coffee in my lap. I didn’t get burned badly, but I thought, Maybe there’s a better way of doing this.
Spock, ZoomInfo, and Wink presented at tonight’s SearchSig. The event was hosted by Google on its Mountain View campus, and moderated by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. Each startup presented their own vision of personal search, with Spock collecting all sorts of personal information from public Internet sites, ZoomInfo crawling various directories and corporate sites in order to create a business-oriented people directory, while Wink is also parsing all sorts of public sites in order to aggregate a single profile, which they then allow the user to own.
If you like Arrington as TechCrunch writer, you’d definitely love him as panel moderator. He’s not confrontational, but he definitely cuts through marketing bs in order to get his questions answered. All participants kinda stumbled around monetization, but then agreed that currently they maintain somewhere between $1.50 and $2.00 CPM. ZoomInfo also sells premium subscriptions to some of the business-related information, and currently is profitable.
Not too many people are sure how to monetize the people search - you generally can show some contextual ads on the celebrity profiles, since you roughly know what the visitors are looking for, but search for a relatively generic name (your former coworker, classmate, etc.), and that opportunity is hardly monetizable. The Wink demo was particularly attesting to this, as the CEO was browsing the site, the only contextual ads that would show up on the right would be dating ads served by Google AdSense.
At the same time, many agreed the opportunity is there - anywhere between 1.5 billion and 2 billion searches a month are for people. If you saw Dustin’s slide from Facebook tech tasting, you know that Facebook alone generates 600 million searches a month (with actual share of people searches not being disclosed). Spock seemed to think it’s going to be great to allow people to tag other people, and Arrington pressured them into the scenario when someone would be tagged as “pedophile” or “unethical”, at which point the CEO did a little of arm-waving, referring to the “community process”. I want to see that tested when thousands of diggers would get a chance to tag anybody employed with RIAA/MPAA, or thousands of slashdotters get to tag an employee of SCO or Microsoft. It didn’t look like anybody had any good idea on dealing with tag spam, malicious tagging, or misrepresentation by claiming someone’s profile on Wink or Spock.
Overall, looks like the industry is in fairly early stage, with more questions than answers. Pressured by big search engines from one end, and social networks from another, people search engines need to come up with some winning value proposition that makes customers either reach for their credit card, or spend more time on the engines themselves, consuming some ads meanwhile.
ExtremeTech reviews five online video editors: EyeSpot, Cuts, JumpCut, MotionBox, and One True Media. Their conclusion? “Jumpcut offers the strongest editing and enhancing tools of the services we tested for this roundup. Unfortunately, it’s still in beta, and we ran into some uploading difficulties.” EyeSpot wins the format wars with support for ASF, AVI, DivX, DV, FLV, MOV, MPEG, MPG, MP4, RM, WMV, 3GP, and 3G2.
Associated Press profiles NeuroSky, a company that started selling a brain activity sensor and an algorithm library to analyze it. The current application is better video games, where a golfer incapable of concentrating on the game would make an inferior move, or a scared Grand Theft Auto player would lose the precision in his aim. An EE Times article from 2005 says the company hired the top neuroscience experts from Moscow and licensed their inventions in order to produce a device that is capable of recognizing and interpreting brain activity.
Earlier this year some German scientists used brain surveillance techniques to determine whether the test participants decided to add or subtract a number, and reached 71% rate.
The New York Times today runs a story on a pretty exciting company that is playing to revolutionize the movie business. It’s no secret that the movie-going experience has been declining, while the number of HDTVs sold has been rising steadily. A company called Vudu, ran by a guy who started TiVo, is now building a box for peer-to-peer download of movies straight from the studios. Theoretically that enables the movie studios to make the movie securely available to the viewers on the day of the release, and improves on the download experience offered by other shops, like Amazon Unbox, MovieLink and others:
DVD sales began to stagnate because studios had finally plowed through their entire backlog of movies that could be released on the shiny discs. The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners. And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.