Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

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We Interrupt This Demo Coverage…

February 13, 2006 / / 0 Comments

…for a developing story that broke a few days ago, I learned, just as I was getting back from the Demo 2006 conference. This blog does technology, not politics, but this article from the Christian Science Monitor talks about a new government program called “ADVISE” that uses data mining to troll news, blogs, even e-mails, so I thought it worthy of inclusion here.

Basically, this is all about a different kind of open source from the one us tech folks usually write about. This is “open source intelligence” — which government types, in their classic acronym-speak, also term “OSINT.” See this Wikipedia page for background. It turns out, however, that it really is related to the open-source software movement, in a way, as pointed out in this article from 2002.

For more reading on OSINT, here’s a CIA news release and a CIA secure log-in screen.

This is just a quick item of interest I wanted to pass along. It caught my eye especially because I’m currently working on a paper about how email mining is actually a coming new business application as well. So many of our technologies get their start in government.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blog program…

[Written on my lunch hour in St. Paul, MN.]

Vizrea Makes Photo-Sharing Automatic

February 13, 2006 / / 7 Comments

To me, the biggest underlying theme at the recent Demo 2006 conference was the sharing of user-generated content — especially photos, and especially cell phone photos. Why? Because camera phones outsell digital still cameras at least four to one, with about 300 million of them to be sold this year. All told, one billion camera phones are now estimated to be in circulation. That’s a lot of freaking fotos, friends. And the market continues to grow impressively.

The stat I heard at Demo that really made me sit up straight, however, was the estimated percentage of those one billion people that now share their photos: less than one-third. That’s why several companies at Demo see the sharing of photos as one big market opportunity (though that’s not the only type of content they can help you share).

Demovizreaceo_1 One company at Demo, Vizrea, was founded specifically to address the difficulty of sharing cell phone photos. Mike Toutonghi, CEO and founder, told me at breakfast on Wednesday that, after taking some time off from Microsoft, he decided there had to be a better way, and then set out with some colleagues to develop a solution. Mike was GM for Microsoft’s .NET platform, and was VP of the Windows e-Home Division, which developed Windows XP Media Center Edition. The thing that’s really cool about Mike, though, is that he was skateboarder in his earlier life, and even tried a bit of surfing, too — so I like him despite his being a Microsoftie. 🙂

The company says its Vizrea Snap™ service is a complete photo service for camera phone users. Steve Toutonghi, VP product development, put it this way: “It takes the work out of shooting and sharing, the whole end-to-end process.” It’s actually three apps: one for your PC, one for your cell phone, and one for the web. What’s very cool is that, when you shoot a phone photo, it’s automatically moved to your PC (wherever it is) or the web, or both. And soon file types will include movies, audio notes, blog posts, even podcasts you do from your phone — all getting shared via the web and/or organized on your PC, all automatically. How cool is that? [I’ve told my friend Steve Borsch, who does really great, professional podcasts on technology, that I just couldn’t see my self doing podcasts — too much trouble. This may change my mind, beause it’ll be as easy as leaving somebody a voice mail. Are you kidding me?]

Vizrea got a huge boost when Walt Mossberg ran a column on them in the WSJ the day after Demo wrapped up, causing online signups to surge. The company had announced a free trial at the conference. And Mike told me later in an email from Europe that “we’re already learning a lot from the trial, which was exactly our intent.” He promised more good stuff is on the way: “In the next month or two, when we release our full service, it will be much better as a result.”

Biggest drawback to me so far? It doesn’t work on the Mac, or with my Moto RAZR. The initial release only supports phones that use the Nokia Series 60 operating system (which aren’t very many here in the U.S.) But Mike also told me Vizrea had “a lot of business development related interest” at Demo, so one could only wonder if, for example, Steve Jobs will come calling. This appears to be one area where Apple lags, even though its iPhoto software was certainly an early innovation (and I love it). Mossberg, who’s always quick to point out when any Windows software products are not as good as good or easy to use as things Steve Jobs has brought us, strangely didn’t even mention the word Apple in his column.

Watch for more on the other cool stuff from photo-sharing and content-sharing companies that presented at Demo: GarageBand.com, SharpCast, SmileBox, TagWorld, Tiny Pictures, and peer-to-peer company Zingee.

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[Written from Minneapolis, MN.]

What’s So Kewl About Krugle

February 10, 2006 / / 0 Comments

It should be no surprise to you by now that Krugle Inc. launched its source-code search engine on Tuesday at the Demo 2006 conference. The company’s gotten much fanfare, including being named one of the “Demo God” winners at Wednesday evening’s closing press panel dinner, which you’ll see more about here.

I spoke with Chief Architect John Mitchell and CEO Steve Larsen earlier that day to find out more about this new tool, which they say will change the way developers work. Steve said their job in today’s open-source world is “more about finding and assembling code than it is about writing it.” Krugle’s research has found developers spend upwards of a quarter of their time searching. That’s a ton of lost productivity. With the Krugle service, you can find content about the code you’re looking for, or find the code itself. In the search results, the Krugle interface has a Project View at the right, which shows you where a specific piece of code fits in, with “lots of meta info.” And it also has a World View, which shows the relationship of that code to all the source code in the world. What’s also cool is you can email colleagues to show them right where you are in your search.

Chief architect John Mitchell explained to me how their engine goes well beyond a Google search. “They just do text. This goes in and understands the code, using semantic analysis,” the latter referring to proprietary technology of the company’s. Search results also include all necessary licensing info. John told me Krugle is currently bringing ten new servers online, and has a private, 800-user test coming. He said the company’s search data base is being built as it crawls all the code repositories, currently including “Java, C, Python, etc, and more coming — Linux, Eclipse, and so forth.” What about scaling? How big does their infrastructure need to be? “The scale is nowhere near Google’s, as far as numbers of users,” Mitchell explained. “Our focus makes it work. There are only so many source code repositories, and only 20 million or so developers out there.” That means, he said, the number of concurrent users might be only hundreds of thousands at any given time. The key in comparing to Google is “we have to go deeper.”

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Full Disclosure: My Blog Coverage

February 10, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Did you see this article yesterday in the Wall Steet Journal’s Marketplace section: “How Tech Start-Ups Tap Blogs as Cheerleaders”? It’s worth a read. [I’d give you the link, but it requires a paid subscription.] After reading this, and in the spirit of good, common-sense ethical practice, I’m declaring here and now that I am not paid by any of the companies mentioned in my “Demo 2006” conference coverage. Nor am I for any of the other companies I have mentioned to date in my blog. [And, if I ever do mention a company with which I have a consultant/client relationship or advisory board relationship, I will disclose that within the blog post.]

I know bloggers Dan Gillmor and David Weinberger (mentioned in the article), and they are both highly ethical individuals who enjoy a great level of deserved trust. So, it only makes sense they would disclose their respective relationships with Spanish Internet startup FON Technology early on in their postings about them, as the WSJ article states. It’s good to have them taking a leadership position on this very important issue.

I’m afraid the topic of how bloggers can “monetize” what they do (if you’ll excuse my use of that awful word) is one that won’t be going away anytime soon. Traditional journalism pays awfully, except for an elite few; but blogging is a whole lot worse. So, it will be interesting to see what kind of a compensation model emerges for this growing medium, beyond Google AdSense Ads, Amazon commissions, and other nickel-and-dime stuff (see the “Tip Jar” feature I added at the bottom of my sidebar to the right!). Again, these only make a difference for an elite few that get monthly traffic in the hundreds of thousand or millions. The vast majority of independent bloggers rely on consulting or freelance project work to survive, and in most cases are going to be doing that in whatever industry, sector, or topic area they blog about. (Unless maybe it’s a totally personal/hobbie/avocational kind of a blog.) No question, then, that disclosure by bloggers is an issue that cannot be ignored.

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‘Demo God’ Winners: Is There a God?

February 9, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Just saw the story pop up on CNet about last night’s DEMO 2006 recap dinner, at which the show’s producer, Chris Shipley, gave out the event’s legendary “Demo God” awards. [I was on a plane home at the time, writing another blog post.] Demograemesview No surprise that Krugle was one winner, for their game-changing open-source code search engine. They were definitely a pick of mine (see previous post from early this morning), as was the “Pleo” robotic toy (how could that miss?). But, wow, the fact that enterprise software and services companies dominated the list so much — that shocks me! I liked some of these winners, but the buzz just wasn’t there, IMHO. The fact that none of the consumer-services companies — zip! — made the list leaves me wondering: huh? That category was the dominant one. So much for Web 2.0/social networking at Demo, I guess (well, for their CEOs being top-notch presenters, anyway). I thought some did great pitches, and I blogged about several of these consumer services companies in previous posts from the event (scroll down to see): Vizrea, SmileBox, Tiny Pictures, Kaboodle, LocaModa, TagWorld, Blurb, GarageBand.com, EQO Communications. Hey, we wuz robbed… 🙂

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