Posted four years ago but likely made in the 1990s, this video, created by Apple, shows how the technology giant has been thinking about combining a touch screen interface with artificial intelligence, content sharing and voice recognition for absolutely years. Given it’s acqusition of Siri, the voice recognition iPhone app, it’s clear this is entirely the direction Apple is heading in. I think this is fascinating.
Video: “Apple Computer Knowledge Navigator”
Business secretary Vince Cable has created a new forum of high profile entrepreneurs to advise the government on business and enterprise policy.
They were unveiled at the launch of Global Entrepreneurship Week in the UK today.
The Entrepreneurs’ Forum will provide “informal and personal advice” and meet four times a year, starting in early 2011.
The government said the group will have up to 26 members but only 16 have been appointed so far. They are:
iGlue, which wants to “wikify the web“, has officially launched its semantic content organizer and search application.
Three years in the making before being unveiled at TechCrunch Europe’s GeeknRolla event in London last April, iGlue creates an additional information layer over web pages by using natural language technology to understand its content. The browser plug-in or bookmarklet recognises names of relevant entities in text, such as people, geographical locations, institutions etc. and then when a user rolls their mouse over those entities, displays related information, images and videos.
However, where iGlue perhaps comes into its own is that users can contribute to this structured data via the plug-in’s annotation tool by entering their own entries and data, potentially turning any website into a Wikipedia-like resource, hence the “wikify the web” description used by the company.
This is a guest post by Evan Rudowski co-founder of SubHub.
We were two co-founders with one big problem.
We had a great team and loyal customers. We had big ideas and an ambitious vision we believed in. But translating our vision into code hadn’t proven to be easy. We were stuck with a platform that had too many limitations to take our startup where we needed it to go.
SubHub’s vision is to build a powerful website publishing platform that’s simple and intuitive to use and enables content creators to make money. Our underlying belief is that eventually all content will be digitized and distributed over the Internet. Much of this content must generate revenue for its creators as it is the only value they have. Our mission is to provide content creators with everything they need to prosper online.
Although simplicity is what we strive for, in truth it hadn’t been simple for us to get our technology to deliver. Yet, somehow, we managed to turn it all around, culminating in our launch this month of SubHub Lite. How did we do it?
Apple’s iAd advertising platform is, reportedly, due to launch in Europe with its first partners, at any moment. Last week the network launched in Japan, in with Japanese agency Dentsu, representing its first steps internationally.
The FT reports that Apple has so far “twice delayed” the European iAd launch recently but that two or three campaigns could run in early December, though most will go live in January. Though the ad network has had a mixed reception in the US in April, the enthusiasm has slowed, with high prices for ads, a slow production process and client withdrawals, reports the FT.
Back in June Apple had $60m pledged from advertisers like Nissan and Unilever. But of the 17 partners Apple announced at least two have left, including Chanel and Adidas.
Unsurprisingly, big brands and agencies are finding their interaction with Apple less that easy – welcome to the world of the app developer guys!
In recent days Britain has started to resemble an earlier era of intolerance. People are using social networks like Twitter and Facebook to be themselves, but the Police, the judiciary and the Establishment are showing worrying signs of not understanding this shift in society. Two recent cases, the “Twitter Joke Trial” and the “#welovebaskers” case currently exploding on Twitter serve to highlight this. And there is a direct comparison to an earlier era.
In 1968 William Rees-Mogg, as editor of The Times newspaper, quoted Poet Alexander Pope, for an editorial about the “Redlands” court case brought against the Rolling Stones. The Stones had been partying at a house, whereupon they’d been busted by the Police for possessing a small amount of drugs. The case resulted in prison sentences for Rolling Stones members Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.
But Rees-Mogg’s Times editorial came to the Stones defence, concluding “If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr. Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse. There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man.”
Swap out “new hedonism” for “the new social networking” and you find that the public nature of social networks is causing a disconnect in British society which has implications for our freedom of speech.
Today Google has a pirate-themed logo, but no, it’s not International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Instead it’s Robert Louis Stevenson’s 160th birthday, and Google is honouring the Scottish author of pirate-filled classics such as Treasure Island and Kidnapped. (He also wrote The Strange Case of Mr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – we’ll let you think up some ‘don’t be evil’ jokes).
Born on November 13, 1850 in Edinburgh, Louis Stevenson had an early death at the age of forty-four, by which time he had travelled the world.
So it seems to me that since TechCrunch has declared that [tech] entrepreneurs are, in effect, Pirates, we should now adopt Robert Louis Stevenson as patron saint.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrr!!!!!
At Monaco Media Forum I ran into Tine Thygesen, CEO of 23 Video, the business video site which is taking on giants like Brightcove. She said there’s been a lot of interest in the site since we broke news of their launch, largely from big brands that want to control their video content and presentation.
At Monaco Media Forum I caught up with Gilles Barbier, CEO and founder of TellMeWhere, the mobile recommendation startup which is a kind of blend of Foursquare and Yelp. Interestingly he said their new strategy is not to launch in the US for a while, but to concentrate on building in European markets first.
Here’s some weekend stimulus for you. The Ignite London, the super-fast-paced series of talks which is something of an antidote to the TEDx crowd, has re-animated itself and – for some reason – only just uploaded some of the talks from their most recent event way back in March. But this one is definitely worth sharing now.
An excellent talk by Tom Scott (@tomscott) about a “Flash Mob Gone Wrong” during IgniteLDN 2 has now gone live on the main Ignite YouTube channel, and describes how social networks, bulletin boards, video, smartphones and CCTV cameras conspired to produce a bizarre sequence of events. Maybe.
IgniteLDN4 will be in February as part of Global Ignite Week.
Less than a week after its global launch, MiniTycoon Casino, is now the number one mobile social game on the iPhone ahead of the real social games including Empire City, TapZoo, Restaurant Story and Farmville. This is SGN’s first pure social game on the iPhone and iPod Touch. No doubt as a result of its social features, it’s also now the number one casino game, although you don’t bet real money but instead purchase virtual goods to pimp out your place, Soprano like.
I caught up with CEO and founder Shervin Pishevar at the Monaco Media Forum to discuss the news, video below.
Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in September, it’s available free in the App Store here.
As we reported earlier today, Cloud OS startup Jolicloud has confirmed the “Jolibook” Netbook is coming this month, although we don’t know the price. Well, we may not know the price, but strolling round the Monaco Media Forum today I button-holed founder Tariq Krim, and got him to reveal where the Jolibook will appear first: the UK.
Although my colleague Robin Wauters was showed the device in Dublin at F.ounders two weeks ago, he didn’t get any video. Well, Robin the next round of drinks is on you, because I got some video of the packaging in a 9 minute interview with Krim. Sorry Robin! I also saw the netbook in action but couldn’t take a photo or shoot video. But boy. Wow. This thing is fast, that’s all I can say.
Krim also says a number of new things on the video. Including that they will be launch an Android version of Jolicloud.
Yuri Milner, CEO of Russian venture investors Digital Sky Technologies, gave a fascinating interview today at the Monaco Media Forum. Given that DST powered the IPO of Mail.ru recently – the bigest IPO of a European internet company ever – he’s become an even more important and powerful figure, even not counting DST’s early investment in Facebook and Zynga.
In fascinating interview on stage with Journalist and entrepreneur Michael Wolff, he dropped a number of choice words to the assembled invite-only audience. Wolff called him the “the Oligarch of Geeks.”
Here are a few highlights.
• ”Our business model at DST is not joining boards. You see less of us.”
• He thinks that technologies like Facebook’s will eventually be better at choosing your friends than yourself.
• ”There is huge demand for artificial intelligence technologies” and this has far-reaching implications.
• ”This is the era of mathematicians” … It’s not about social networking – its about math.”
On December 13, TechCrunch Europe is coming to Moscow, Russia, for our first ever “TechCrunch Moscow”. The event will be held at the first Russian private tech incubator, the Digital October Center, located in a historical manufacturing building Krasny Oktyabr (or “Red October” / Красный Октябрь in Russian). Our event will be part of the official launch of the building, which hopes to become Moscow’s leading digital / media / technology hub.
You can now buy tickets here.
Since Paper.li quietly launched in May this year, it’s been building momentum. At first it seemed like a very simple Twitter app which just turned the feed from the people you follow into a rather neat newspaper-style site where you could peruse what was being shared. But coupled with an automatic virality, in that it would make your account tweet the user names name of the people featured in your ‘Paper’, the application has been taking off. Subsequently I have been hearing rumours that it’s traffic was exploding, thus attracting a lot interest from potential investors, although the company denies it is raising financing right now.
Today those rumours surface to some extent in the form of news, exlusive to us, that well known investor Guy Kawasaki has joined its advisory board.
Similar to Twittertim.es, part of Paper.li’s appeal is that it presents the links shared in your feed in a highly digestible form, thus giving it quite a lot of mainstream appeal. It’s also been optimized for use on the iPad.
I caught up with CEO and founder Edouard Lambelet at the Monaco Media Forum for the interview below:
Back in August, rumors started surfacing about a potential French Y Combinator. Since then, the tweets of several well-known French entrepreneurs and investors have made it clear that they have ambitions of being the French Paul Graham, including Deezer co-founder Jonathan Benassaya and Kima Ventures co-founder Jérémie Berrebi. And there are definitely more out there.
So I got in touch with Mr. Graham so see what he thought…
Sandbox, a London-based international network of entrepreneurs under the age of 30, announced this week that it would be launching in France. Funny coincidence, this announcement comes just 1 week before the first edition of TechCrunch France Remix, which will focus primarily on the young generation of entrepreneurs coming out of France.
Sandbox’s global network currently counts 500 members in over 40 countries, including the likes of Rajeeb Dey (CEO of Enternships and O2′s Entrepreneur of the Year), Soraya Darabi (Co-founder of FoodSpooting, former Product Lead for Drop.io and one of FastCompany’s 100 most creative people) and Suhas Gopinath, who created CoolHindustan.com at the age of 14.
Likiwi is pretty much Skype - but on Facebook. This morning, the Paris-based startup announced that they are launching a new texting service, enabling Facebook’s 500 million users to send texts directly from Mark Zuckerberg’s platform.
Launched back in October 2009 by 20-something-year-olds Aurélie Perruche and Yvan Morales, Likiwi’s Facebook application lets users call their Facebook friends for free. Using a business model that is similar to the one used by French startup Beezik for downloading music, Likiwi requires that users watch a 10-15 second ad before each call made via Facebook.
Gruupy, the Ireland-based group buying site for gadget fans, has officially launched in the UK. The format is a familiar one: offer one deal a day that only becomes active is enough users commit to purchasing the item in a single 24 hour period. So far Gruupy has offered headline items such as discounted iPads, netbooks, and Xbox 360s.
But the young startup, which is part bootstrapped and part angel-funded by its chairman and serial Internet entrepreneur Dylan Collins, is also building in what it describes as “community and social mechanics” by rewarding activity on the site, not just purchasing but also things like comments. For now, that appears to translate into Foursquare-style badges for, say, hitting the 20 comment mark (“Chatterbox”) or being the first to put down on a deal (“Fire Starter”). It’s slightly gimmicky but fits in with the overall light-hearted tone of the site and isn’t exactly hard to build.
DriveGain, the UK startup that helps motorists learn to drive more efficiently, has added much needed support for automatic cars to its iPhone app of the same name. This opens up the app to new markets “given the vast majority of cars in the US and Asia are automatics”, says Simon East, CEO of DriveGain.
The app works by giving users visual and audio feedback on what changes they can make to their driving style to help them save more fuel.
