Bloom Energy
After spending eight years operating in “stealth mode,” Sridhar’s Silicon Valley outfit finally unveiled the Bloom Box, a device that converts natural gas into electricity with drastically lower carbon emissions. The box can work anywhere, from greenifying the headquarters of big corporations (Google, eBay, FedEx, Wal-Mart, and Coca-Cola are already customers) to electrifying developing nations, where an estimated 2.5 billion people live off the grid. Sridhar, 49, is aiming to have his mini-power plants in every home within 5 to 10 years.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Googles API periodic table ...all things Google
MG Siegler13 hours ago
Google is a behemoth. They’re a behemoth with a massive amount of APIs that millions of developers use around the world to build millions of apps and services. There’s simply no good way to keep track of them all. But Google comes close with a pretty nifty way: a periodic table.
As you can see on this page, Google has a full periodic table built out showcasing their APIs and developer products as of January 2011.
Along the top are various categories that the APIs or products fall under. Included are: Mobile, Search, Gadgets, Data APIs, Social, Misc, Ads, Geo, Tools, and Chrome. Hovering over any of these will highlight the corresponding “elements” on the table below it. You can then click on any of the elements, and it will take you to the page dedicated to that API or product.
Again, nifty. And useful.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Qwiki hits No.1
TechCrunch Disrupt Winner Qwiki Hits No. 1 On Google Trends ‘Hot Searches’ In The U.S.
Buoyed by news that early Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin led an $8 millioninvestment in the startup, TechCrunch Disrupt winner and visual search startup Qwiki has hit no.1 on Google Trends ‘Hot Searches’ in the U.S. That’s a pretty impressive feat for a startup that was virtually unknown six months ago. And the company is still in private alpha.
What makes Qwiki so compelling is its ability to generate media on the fly that combines text, audio, and animated photos. It presents information in a highly visual way, assembling photos and spoken text from Wikipedia and other sources to create visual guides to millions of topics. The startup’s technology is no doubt disruptive and could become a completely new way in which we consume information.
Qwiki is planning to launch an iPad app, which is in the works.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Google Search Algorithm Ruined... must read guys
Google's Search Algorithm Has Been Ruined, Time To Move Back To Curation
Paul Kedrosky
Paul Kedrosky Dr. Kedrosky is an investor, speaker, writer, media guy, and entrepreneur.
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That was the origins of the original lists and directories, from Yahoo on outward.
But then that got too hard. The web got bigger faster than anyone could keep track. Curation steadily gave way to algorithmic search, which at first was just spidering of the web, and then more intelligent spidering with keywords.
And then it became Google, with ranking algorithms that placed websites into a hierarchies of keyword-related relevance based on things like authoritativeness, as defined, in part, by links from other sites -- by those original hand-curated lists, ironically enough.
That model has now begun to give way too. Any algorithm can be gamed; it's only a matter of time. The Google algorithm is now well and thoroughly gamed, as I first wrote about late last year, and as now become an entire genre of web writing, and that has grown to include my friend Vivek Wadhwa's smart piece on TechCrunch not long ago. Google has, they argue, lost its mojo -- which is true, but it's more interesting and complicated than that.
What has happened is that Google's ranking algorithm, like any trading algorithm, has lost its alpha. It no longer has lists to draw and, on its own, it no longer generates the same outperformance -- in part because it is, for practical purposes, reverse-engineered, well-understood and operating in an adaptive content landscape. Search results in many categories are now honey pots embedded in ruined landscapes -- traps for the unwary. It has turned search back into something like it was in the dying days of first-generation algorithmic search, like Excite and Altavista: results so polluted by spam that you often started looking at results only on the second or third page -- the first page was a smoking hulk of algo-optimized awfulness.
There are two things that can happen now. (Okay, three. We could stop search, which won't happen.). We could get better algorithms, which is happening to some degree, with search engines like Blekko and others. Or, we could head back to curation, which is what I see happening, and watch new algos emerge on top of that next-gen curation again. Think of Twitter as a new stab at curation, but there are plenty of other examples.
Yes, that sounds mad. If we couldn't index 100,000 websites in 1996 by hand, how do we propose to do 234-million by hand today?
The answer, of course, is that we won't -- do them all by hand, that is. Instead, the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation -- not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) -- and partly about hand curation (JetSetter, etc.). We are going to increasingly see nichey services that sell curation as a primary feature, with the primary advantage of being mostly unsullied by content farms, SEO spam, and nonsensical Q&A sites intended to create low-rent versions of Borges' Library of Babylon. The result will be a subset of curated sites that will re-seed a new generation of algorithmic search sites, and the cycle will continue, over and over.
In short, curation is the new search. It's also the old search. And it's happening again, and again. [-]
[Update] A friend points out in IM that all of this makes Yahoo mothballing Delicious, a directory of curated lists, more than a little mistimed. And it's made pointed and ironic too when you look at what the #2 most bookmarked link is on Delicious right now: Google's weakening search results.
This post originally appeared on Infectious Greed.
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Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-search-algorithm-is-spinning-out-of-control-2011-1#ixzz1ApykrHf9
Friday, December 31, 2010
FACEBOOK IS LARGER THAN GOOGLE SEARCH.
Facebook Got More Visitors Than Google Search In 2010
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New statistics from Experian Hitwise show that Facebook.com was the most-visited Web page in the U.S. from January to November 2010, passing Google's search page for the first time.
Hitwise reported that Facebook passed Google in monthly visitors back in March, but this is the first time that year-end statistics have favored the social networking site.
In a bit of irony that must make Google crazy, Google is actually driving lots of users to its hottest competitor. The number-one search term for the second year running was "Facebook," and four out of the top ten search terms included the F-word.
The statistics aren't an airtight victory for Facebook, however. If you add all of Google's network sites together, it's still in the number one spot wit 9.85% of all visits versus 8.93% for Facebook. The big difference: Google has YouTube, the fifth-most popular Web site.
Yahoo Mail and Yahoo.com notched up the third and fourth place spots, bringing Yahoo properties to number three overall with 8.12% of all U.S. visits.
Almost as an afterthought, Hitwise notes that the top 10 Web sites accounted for 33% of all visits in the first 11 months of 2010--that's an increase of 12% from last year. It looks like the big are getting bigger.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-got-more-visitors-than-google-search-in-2010-2010-12#ixzz19hQAFFtc
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Woman rule purchasing on the internet.
Here's Why Women Will Drive The Future Of The Internet (And What The Internet Is Turning Into)
 Image: National Archief via Flickr |
And what is the one thing that these three startups, which are in quite different businesses, all have in common?
Their core audience is women.
Gilt is mostly a fashion site so that's obvious. Reportedly, Zynga's most devoted users are "bored housewives." And while Groupon has something for everyone, it's women who buy most of the deals.
This is important because most tech entrepreneurs, as we've been reminded lately, are male. Tech investors are even more male.
But this isn't just an amazing, multibillion dollar arbitrage opportunity for audacious entrepreneurs. It also tells us something about how far the internet has come, and where it's going.
Right now, the internet is a teenager. It's only been fifteen years since the web has become a mass medium. Fifteen year-olds grow very fast and start to show real signs of what they'll be like as adults.
As we head into 2011, it's worth taking a look at what is changing during those teenage years.
The best definition we heard of the nebulous concept "Web 2.0" was by Ross Mayfield and went something like this: Web 2.0 assumes the web is made of people, not just machines.
Who are the people who make up the internet? Well, they're everyone. That's the point.
The growing importance of women on the internet doesn't just reflect the importance of women, it shows that the internet is becoming a much more mass medium than before.
Zynga grew much faster than Google, which was an extremely fast-growing company. And now Groupon is growing faster than Zynga.
But more important is how they grow. Usually a web service would start with a niche of early adopters, and then seep into the mainstream. This is how all web 1.0 companies, and many web 2.0 companies, grew. Zynga and Groupon, to the contrary, started right in the middle of mainstream and haven't stopped, and when the tech set became aware of these companies they were already huge.
These companies, their trajectory and their audience, show that the internet is finally reaching critical mass. And this will create plenty of opportunities. You would think that a business model like Groupon's could have existed in 1995, aggregating buyers and sellers by email. But for Groupon to work you need social networks so that deals can spread virally and tip. Much more importantly, you need a critical mass in cities big and small of normal people who are familiar enough with buying online to buy a coupon for a local spa.
This shows that, in Nikita Khrushchev's words, "quantity has a quality all of its own." This new massification of the internet doesn't just mean that traditional internet businesses like Amazon will do very well, although it means that as well, it also means that it will allow new business models, like Groupon's, to come into being.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-women-will-drive-the-future-of-the-internet-2010-12#ixzz19UuEYz00
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