Live Streaming Bill Gates Keynote At Advance08
Michael Arrington
27 comments »
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is now giving the closing keynote at the Advance08 Conference in Redmond, Washington. The big news is Live Search Cashback, announced earlier. The live stream began at about 10:30 am PST.
A big part of the keynote is about applying logic to searches to help determine intent. The main types of search: entertainment, commerce and reference (and navigation). Microsoft’s strategy is to try to simplify key tasks and innovate in the business model. The focus right now is on commercial search.
Commerce represents about a third or all searches, but the “dominant” share of revenue from search advertising. It’s a “very big part of the $20 billion search market.” Microsoft cites eMarketer: U.S. online retail is projected to grow to $335 billion by 2012, and today 68 percent of all those retail transactions begin at a search engine. This translates to 3.7 billion commerce-related queries a month.
Live Search Cashback is today’s announcement around commerce search. Gates says to expect big announcements around search every six months going forward. 2008 is the year, he says, that people will look back and say that search got competitive.
Gates concluded at 11 am, and Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group, took the stage to talk about Live Search Cashback from a product perspective.
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CrunchBase Information
Bill Gates

Companies:
Microsoft
William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft had revenues of US$51.12 billion for the fiscal year… Learn More
Satya Nadella

Companies:
Microsoft, Sun Microsystems
Satya Nadella is a senior vice president and leads Microsoft’s engineering efforts across the Search (Live Search), Portal (MSN) and Advertising Platforms.
Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992, and most recently led Microsoft Business Solutions… Learn More
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Steven Spielberg’s Ghost/UFO Social Network To Be Called The Rising
Michael Arrington
19 comments »
More details on Steven Spielberg’s upcoming ghost and UFO based social network, which we first wrote about in early March and followed up with additional details a week later. The site will reportedly be called “Rising” or “The Rising” (our understanding is that they have acquired both .com domain names), and the logo above and animated logo below are at least preliminary versions of the final.
We originally heard that The Rising is being created in partnership with Windsor Media, Terry Semel’s investment firm, but we still haven’t gotten confirmation of their involvement. Windsor was created by Semel before he went to Yahoo, was put on hold during his tenure there, and fired up again after his departure last year.
The Rising will have original video content with a permanent host in addition to the social network where users can share stories and experiences, tapping into serious demand for this kind of thing. There are thousands of forums dedicated to paranormal and UFO topics today - among them is, yes, a Meetup site for ghost trackers.
Rumored launch date is this summer.
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CrunchBase Information
The Rising

Website:
therising.com
Location:
United States
The Rising (which might end up being called just “Rising”) is Steven Spielberg’s upcoming (as of 5/08) ghost and UFO based social network. It may or may not be being created in partnership with… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
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SmallWorlds Brings a Third Dimension to Web 2.0
Jason Kincaid
20 comments »

Meet SmallWorlds, a free browser-based 3D virtual world that integrates YouTube, Flickr, and a number of other Web 2.0 services. The site is aimed at the teen and adult markets, and is designed to be more casual than Second Life. SmallWorlds will be entering a public beta on June 2, but the first 1000 users to register herewill be able to start using the site on May 26.Update: The first 1000 TechCrunch readers to send a request to techcrunch@smallworlds.com will get an invite within the next 12 hours.
SmallWorlds revolves around a characters’s room, which resembles a house one might find in The Sims. Users can furnish their rooms with TV sets that feature YouTube videos, posters of Flickr photos, Twitter messageboards, and stereos blasting tunes from Last.fm and SeeqPod. Then they can invite their friends over to their rooms, where they can view videos, photos, and songs together - a feature that will likely have mass appeal. The site facilitates meeting up with friends by assigning each room with a unique URL that will immediately transport avatars to their destination.
The site has a lot of potential. The virtual world looks impressive, featuring a 3D isometric perspective and highly customizable avatars. SmallWorlds is also releasing an API that will allow developers to create widgets that can be shared with friends (like games or other media offerings). The site was designed with Flex, and the company says it should work in any browser that supports Flash 9.
Users have been clamoring for a service that lets them view and comment on web media simultaneously, and SmallWorlds’ approach may be ideal for their target audience. We’ve seen a recent wave of similar services from the likes of Userplane and Videophlow, but these are basically just chat windows that sit next to a media viewer - there isn’t any of the interaction you get from a virtual environment.
On the other hand, there are already a number of well-established virtual worlds, including IMVU and Habbo Hotel, which may make it hard for SmallWorlds to gain traction.
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CrunchBase Information
SmallWorlds

Website:
smallworlds.com
Location:
Auckland, New Zealand
SmallWorlds, started by a New Zealand web development company, is a virtual world that runs inside your web browser. There’s no need to download or install any other software. It combines media, web… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
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Live: Facebook Discusses New Profile Design
Mark Hendrickson
20 comments »

Facebook has invited a group of bloggers and journalists to its offices on Hamilton Street in Palo Alto today to discuss the details of its upcoming profile redesign, which we’re told will launch in a few weeks.
Keep checking in here as I share my notes from the event.
Elliot Schrage has kicked things off by saying today will be more focused on Q&A than the last event, which was about Facebook Chat.
Chamath Palihapitiya, VP of Product Marketing, is discussing the vision behind the profile redesign, and the mini-feed/news feed in particular.
Goals for new design:
For users: Make profiles cleaner and simpler, give users more control over their profiles, and emphasize recent and relevant information
For developers: Create more meaningful engagement with users, offer new integration points in profiles, and provide distribution for engaging applications
Going to give developers a beta period to step into sandbox and play with new design, so they’re ready when profile gets rolled out in coming weeks.
New design takes advantage of tabs; goal to split up different types of information, make it simpler to navigate.
The basics: feed, info, photos, boxes, and custom application tabs.







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OLPC 2.0: A Striking eBook and a Step In the Right Direction
John Biggs
48 comments »
Here is the the next-generation OLPC. It will consist of dual touchscreens on a single spine and include keyboard, face-to-face, and ebook functionality. The touchscreens will be built by a start-up by former OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen. These screens will be readable in direct sunlight, just like the OLPC.
I’m glad that the second generation OLPC is more of an ebook than a laptop. While the “laptop,” as a designed object, is an excellent tool, books are what define our early education and creating an electronic book that works and is actively useful seems far more intelligent than the original OLPC, which is a stab at a “less is more” mentality that eventually hobbles the very people it is designed to help.
I remember a very interesting statistic from Freakonomics: the single, traceable correlation between a child’s ability in school and his home life are the number of books a family has in their home. I’m paraphrasing, but I’ve taken it to heart and I believe it to be true. A laptop is an interactive tool. An ebook, even if it’s just a glorified, dual screen laptop, is a reading tool. That is why tablet PCs never took off in the mainstream: people don’t know what to do with a form factor that is clearly not a laptop yet is also clearly a powerful computer. There is no way to connect the act of “scratching out words on a tablet” to processing worksheets in a spreadsheet. Why doesn’t the iPhone have handwriting recognition? Because it’s a horrible way to talk to a computer, even now. But that’s a different rant entirely.
That said, I worry about the project as a whole.
Read more plus video…
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CrunchBase Information
PixelQi

Website:
www.pixelqi.com
Location:
United States
Spinning off from the One Laptop Per Child project, PixelQi is focused on licensing and selling the technologies powering the OLPC’s XO laptop to mainstream laptop, cell… Learn More
One Laptop Per Child

Website:
www.laptop.org
Location:
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Founded:
January 1, 2005
With the tagline, “It’s not a laptop project. It’s an education project,” the One Laptop per Child initiative aims to revolutionize how we educate the world’s children. In January 2005, the MIT Media Lab launched the research initiative to develop a… Learn More
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FlipTrack Changes Name, Takes Flash Objects Mobile
Jason Kincaid
6 comments »

When we last wrote about FlipTrack in March 2007, it had created a niche for itself by making slideshows that were synced to background music. Since then, the company has reinvented itself: It is now Moblyng, a site dedicated to bringing the embedded flash widgets on social networks to mobile devices. Today, the company has launched a beta of its product, and has announced the closure of a $5.7 million funding round.
Moblyng’s main function is to take the Flash slideshow widgets seen on MySpace and other social networks, and convert them into a format that is viewable on most mobile phones. The system scrapes profiles for autoplaying flash movies and strips away layers in the .swf (Flash) file to expose the individual photos. These photos are formatted for display on any compatible mobile device, or, for phones that support video, they can be reassembled into mobile-friendly movies, along with the music and effects that were in the original flash widget. The newly-formatted files can be sent between users using SMS or through Moblyng’s built-in send function.

The new technology seems to work well, and at this point it seems like it has a large number of potential users - many phones don’t support Flash yet. That said, the phones that are capable of video playback are also more likely to feature Flash support in the near future (like the iPhone, for example), so Moblyng could see this userbase shrink quickly.
Moblyng’s $5.7 million funding round was led by Mohr Davidow Ventures and Deep Fork Capital. The company launched as FlipTrack in 2006, and is based in Menlo Park.