The chief executive of Oracle last week at the Churchill Club sat down with former Motorola CEO Ed Zander for a fireside chat about the future of the company he co-founded, the pending acquisition of Sun and the implications thereof, and the state of the economy in general.
Most amusing however, was his ranting on cloud computing, captured on video by TechPulse360. Of course, we’ve heard his refreshingly critical take of the buzzword du jour before, but he continues to make it a valid point:
With Buzzd, which is launching its free iPhone app today, you simply load the program and it will bring up a list of venues close to you that are currently popular based on people talking about them on Twitter and Buzzd. It also uses some location data pulled from Twitter. Right now, that data is pulled from users’s Twitter profiles, so it is imprecise, but with the Geolocation API (which may be sort of live already) that will soon change.
If you click on a place, you can learn more about it, including how far away it is, its phone number, and a description of it. You can also see “buzzes” about it, meaning the things people are saying about a place on Twitter and in the Buzzd community. And you can “Buzz It,” meaning you can tell the community you are at a place and give a short description of what it is or why it’s good. And you can send that info to Twitter.
To do all of that, you have to create an account on Buzzd and sign-in, but one nice thing about the service is that you can see all of this data without ever creating an account. If you really don’t care about buzzing data yourself, you can simply use it passively.
There is certainly an upside to using data that is purely location-based, as it is with SocialGreat, but until location-based services truly take off, services with a lower barrier to entry, like Twitter, are going to have much more data to offer up. And you can clearly see that with Buzzd.
Buzzd has actually been around for a little while, but it has mainly existed on the mobile web and as an app on the BlackBerry. There’s a good reason for this: It was one of the original BlackBerry Partners Fund receipients. But the lure of the iPhone proved too strong, and after one meek attempt at an app, this new version of Buzzd looks like the real deal. It’s not a complex app, but it’s good for what it does.
Last month, the service had 500,000 active user over the web and its BlackBerry app, we’re told. Those numbers should undoubtedly jump with this new iPhone app. As it gains users, you can imagine them doing slightly more interesting things such as allowing users to say if a venue is good or bad, rather than just if they are there or not.
The business model will revolve around advertising, but the company is doing some interesting things in terms of striking deals with some locations to get their places featured.
You can find Buzzd here in the App Store
Update: We originally had said that SocialGreat only pulls in Foursquare data, but it now pulls in more, including data from Brightkite and GraffitiGeo. Still no Twitter data yet (the big source), but you can imagine that when Geolocation is ready, they may just do that.
It also recently launched an iPhone app that only subscribers can use.
But perhaps the hint of their strategy lay in the fact that on that app you could save playlists and tracks for offline playing (if, say, you were on a plane), though you can not access any kind of MP3 file for sharing of course.
All that changes today because later today Spotify will extend the ‘Offline mode’ that is available on Spotify Mobile and bringing it to the desktop version of Spotify.
In addition to offline mode, Spotify has also added Paypal to the list of available payment methods this week for users in the UK. Spotify does not sell MP3s (you can download them via 7Digital, iTunes Store and Amazon MP3).
This move must surely now have completely new implications with its relationship to Apple iTunes. We’re not saying that Spotify is poised to kill off iTunes – far from it. iTunes is deeply ingrained in the mainstream consumer mind and Spotify is some wet behind the ears startup that, although popular, has done no mainstream marketing to date. In addition, users will be limited to how much music they can download to offline mode.
But this ability to play offline must surely change things. Streaming music services have not had much impact on Apple, if at all. Being able to play offline is a different ball-game altogether. Why buy and download masses of songs when you can shift your listening patterns to your tastes without bill shock, especially for that offline holiday.
The service is targetting a Q4 US launch.
This is an interesting move for a number of reasons. Let’s tackle TypePad Platform first and take a look at Six Apart’s forray into the community microblogging space afterwards.
TypePad Platform and Developer Program
The TypePad Platform will essentially enable developers to use structured social objects (think blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups and tags) to more easily build social applications on top of a cloud network. While this is obviously mostly a developer-oriented product, Six Apart CEO Chris Alden
For larger publishers and online businesses, Alden writes, the TypePad Platform could be another alternative for them to incorporate blogs and social networking into their websites, thus offering an alternative to local software solutions or hosted SaaS solutions. Personal bloggers will ultimately benefit from more applications that enhance TypePad’s core functionality, he expects.
Starting today, interested programmers can head to the fresh TypePad Developer Program
TypePad Motion
Six Apart recently added some Posterous-style microblogging flavor and real-time blogging capabilities
The service is already live here
Six Apart says the TypePad Motion app evolved from the Pownce codebase & community. It’s written in Python
A leader playing a good hand by broadening and diversifying its product line, or too little, too late? What’s your take?
Maybe it has something to do with competition from Bing, but all of a sudden Google is really interested in guided search. Last May, it launched search options in the left-hand column of the results page which let you filter results by type, time, and other criteria. Today, Google is adding a new set of options
The new options include the ability to see results from only the past hour (that’s so near-realtime) or for a specific date range. You can also filter for results only from news, blog, or book search. (Basically, these options bring some of Google’s standalone search verticals into the main search experience).
Then there’s the spam filter. You can “fewer shopping sites” or “more shopping sites.” When you choose more shopping sites, product prices appear up top. And if you are trying to go back to something you’ve already seen but can’t remember exactly where it was, you can personalize results by seeing only sites you’ve already visited. Or you can choose to only see new sites, and make the search more of a discovery tool. (You need to be signed in and have Web History enabled for these last two options to work).
Most searches on Bing also bring up a set of guided options on the left. But whereas Google is choosing to apply a set of search options consistently across all queries, Bing takes more of customized approach based on what you are searching for. For instance, it usually shows related searches to your query and lets you filter by type of search as well (shopping, local, image, video). The search options change on the fly depending on the search.
Which approach do you like better—consistent categories (Google) or customized categories (Bing)?
Apple struck back with a statement
In its letter to the FCC Apple says that “contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it”. It then goes on to describe its issues with Google Voice, which include fears of confusing users and replacing the iPhone’s core functionality (for a moment let’s ignore the fact that Apple’s description is totally disingenuous). Apple closes out this description with “The following applications also fall into this category”, and then lists the three third party Google Voice apps that were yanked from the App Store.
Presumably the applications in “this category” are all being pondered over too, and have not been rejected, right? But that’s simply not the case. Riverturn Inc
Of course, this is all semantic hairsplitting
Today, Aneesh Chopra, US Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director for Technology for the White House, spoke at a forum held by TiE,
Chopra outlined the Federal government’s technology agenda, calling attention to the challenges the government faces. He says that in terms of innovation, the U.S. has a lot of room for improvement. The government recently did a survey of where countries rank as innovators over the past decade. The U.S. ranked dead last in the rate at which innovation sped up over the past ten years, according to Chopra’s data. In the area of e-government options, the U.S. ranked last as well.
The role of the US CTO is to invest in innovation, including smart and secure infrastructure (i.e. cybersecurity, broadband access), and increase R&D collaboration by focusing on university and entrepreneurship for new product developments. The Federal government spends $150 billion on research dollars in universities—Chopra wants to make sure these investments are efficient. Chopra says that post-doctoral fellows are particularly useful to helping with innovation and suggests that businesses begin fellowship opportunities for innovation. He is also promoting innovation around other priorities in the government’s agenda, such as health care, education and the smart grid.
Heath care IT is an issue that’ particularly high on the agenda, with Chopra working to implement regulatory framework, open data standards, and an ecosystem for continued product innovation in the space. The smart grid is also a concern for the US CTO, and is helping accelerate energy efficiency initiatives and ensure that cybersecurity is at a high level.
And one of Chopra’s primary roles is to develop an open government initiative, which will implement government platforms that will be transparent and collaborative (i.e. Data.gov). For example, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service launched a new customer service that lets applicants get updates on the status of applications online and via e-mail and text messages.
Steve Wozniak thinks that its important to harvest intelligence; he suggests that the government should do this via games. The Woz also highlighted the importance of cyber security and technology in education, concluding that “education is being shafted.”
