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

Tag: Tech-Surf-Blog (Page 5 of 14)

Split Rock Coughs Up Big Bucks for Local Firm (Do Tell)

But don’t get too excited — it’s just another late-stage deal. Why are we not surprised? Gearworks, as reported by the Pioneer Press, just closed on yet another $21 million in VC, of which our local Split Rock Partners contributed $7.5 million. Pilesofcash The partner on the deal is, of course, Michael Gorman. Yes, that’s a lot of money in a single round for a MN tech firm. And it now means that Gearworks has raised — are you ready? — a total of $59 million since its founding back in 1999. Of course, they blew threw a lot of that cash in a model since adandoned, but they seem to be onto a real market now for location-based services. Gearworkslogo It must be a good market, because for this much money to be invested, and now the conservative late-stage guys coming in, there has to be a big payback seen just over the horizon. [IPO?] Well, less so of a payback for the late-stage money, I guess…

But all this big-bucks stuff has little meaning to people in the early-stage investment world, where I know most of us live. For a strange juxtaposition to the above news, check out this video of the latest panel that Guy Kawasaki moderated. It’s amazing how companies today can get launched with so little capital — at least when the Internet is central to what they do. Many of ’em all but thumb their noses at VCs — I hear it all the time. One guy I heard it from recently was Gabe Rivera, founder of Techmeme, chatting with him last month at CES/Bloghaus. What some of these guys are able to do, with such minimal startup funding, is amazing. More power to ’em!

Shut Down by Google, They’re Baack – with ‘iReader’

A Minneapolis-based tech firm, almost put out of business by Google last year with for scraping its site with its ePrecis technology, is back today as Syntactica. [As Syntactica president Henry Neils said to me last week, “Like they don’t scrape everything out there.” Hah!] Under this new company name, they’re introducing the iReader Web Previewer tool. Ireaderlogo So, take that Google! It previews the content of a web link without clicking on it — by studying the language, the linguistics, behind it. Pretty heavy stuff, but this team of developers has been working on perfecting this technology for years, so this is certainly no upstart. Perhaps they’re onto an application of it now that will stick, and that the powers-that-be will allow to happen. User acceptance will tell the story, of course, and that’s why reaction in the blogosphere will be big for these guys. Smartly, they’re opening the technology up via open source XML web services, I learned last week.

Ireadernytimes

Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web has already done a great post called iReader Previews The Content Behind Links. It tells the story well, so I won’t repeat it. It’s also worth taking a look back to see what he blogged about ePrecis in October 2005 on ZDnet, calling it “next generation search.” [By the way, the old ePrecis site, which, interestingly, still shows up in a Google search(!), won’t seem to come up today. Must be getting hit too hard.]

The beta they just launched is an easy plug-in install for IE or Firefox (Mac or PC), and it’s sure to create a lot of conversation out there. Try it out on some of your favorite news sites, like the NY Times, CNN, MSN, etc. Seems to work great on the story links down near the bottom of the NY Times page, for example, where stories are grouped into categories. Let me know what you think. Or better yet, tell the company: they’re about to launch their blog, too, where you can do that.

Note one VERY KEY thing: you can turn the iReader plug-in on or off! So, if it’s bothersome to have these little “preview windows” showing up for you on some sites, just right-click your mouse to toggle it on and off. Not sure how you do it on a Mac yet, though, in Firefox. I think they’re adding some notes on the downloading page…

[Disclaimer: I have a consulting relationship with Syntactica.]

Subscribe to My ‘Blidget’

Actually, I’d rather you subscribe to my RSS feed. But, what the heck, subscribe to this, too! Just click on the blue bar near the top of my sidebar to the right. It lets you add a widget of my blog headlines to your own blog or web site, courtesy of Widgetbox. Blidgetgraphic I saw this company debut at DEMO last year. They thought widgets were gonna be big….and they were right! The company’s been going great guns since then, becoming an amazing source of every kind of widget imaginable. They partnered with Typepad to introduce this “blidget” (blog+widget) concept. Mine looks like this:


Get

For some reason, my photo was showing up in it fine at first, but then it wasn’t. Are you seeing it on my blidget? The one I chose, naturally, is the infamous hat & lei photo of me above in my header, shot while partyin’ on Maui about 10 years ago…

Blogs as ‘New Media’: The Evolution Continues

Wow, some real interesting things are happening out there in Blogland lately! Specifically, new developments that keep raising questions about disclosure and the independence of bloggers. Marshall Kirkpatrick did a TechCrunch post yesterday about Microsoft hiring two respected industry guys (one an analyst, the other a tech journalist), to start blogging for the company. And it drew a hailstorm of comments — accusations of selling out to The Man, etc. But the question about ethics and disclosure isn’t just about big-company bloggers these days. Robert Scoble, who started the whole employee-evangelist blogging phenomenon at Microsoft, has been under attack at the small startup company he now blogs and “vlogs” for, PodTech. A post on his Scobleizer blog a while back drew a very heavy, sometimes downright nasty discussion about disclosure, specifically relating to Robert’s coverage of clients of PodTech’s. [Some of PodTech’s clients it calls “sponsors” and are identified as such on its web site. Robert also has one sponsor for his personal blog, which he says is Seagate.] His post on this topic was in response to Valleywag calling him out on being a shill. Scoble straightens out Valleywag on the details, but admits he doesn’t always give enough disclosure. He resolves to be more careful in the future. Dan Farber at ZDnet also weighed in on the flap.

But the arguments about what consitutes sufficient disclosure will surely continue. Who decides? The evolution to new media is not without its bumps. Traditional journalism has a code of ethics that takes up a whole book at some media outlets such as the NY Times (which hasn’t prevented some notable lapses by certain reporters and editors there in recent times). But bloggers now, more and more, seem to be getting held to higher standards — especially those of the so-called independents that are widely read. Those who have accepted high-profile positions at big-name companies don’t have disclosure issues, however. We all know who’s paying them, and simply apply that filter.

One great blog to read that covers this issue like no other — blogs versus mainstream media — is Mark Glaser’s MediaShift, which is hosted by PBS.org. I’ve written about it previosuly. You’ll find his coverage of the recent “WeMedia” conference interesting as well.

The battle for influence goes on. In the minds of most web users today, that influence now exists collectively in blogs, or at least in certain blogs that are respected and deemed to have influence over others. No question that blogs as a medium are gaining fast on traditional media. And don’t doubt for a second that corporate communicators and their bosses aren’t getting this, bigtime.

What makes a blog influential? How does one measure that? How much of it is quantitative vs. qualitative?

Yahoo! Kisses Krugle

This just in…news on Valentine’s Day about a company I follow named Krugle, of code-search fame. Seems they’ve chosen this hallowed day to announce they’ve been tapped to supply search functionality for the Yahoo! Developer Network. This is a centralized resource that offers open APIs and Web Services to make it easy for developers to extend and build on Yahoo!’s products and services.

Redlipsanim

The Yahoo! Developer Network hosts the publicly-available code and documentation for Yahoo!-owned properties, and provides tutorials, code samples, and other resources for developers. With this partnership, developers can now take advantage of Krugle’s code search engine and interface when they’re working with Yahoo! APIs and data — specifically, to find, save, and share code written in six languages: ActionScript, JavaScript, .NET, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

A kewl thing about Krugle is it also provides users with contextual information as they browse the code, such as associated documentation and dependencies, bug reports, commentary, and user-tagged code and search results, which they can then easily share with their colleagues.

“One of the reasons for Yahoo!’s success has been the company’s strong belief in opening up its products for third-party developers,” according to my old buddy Steve Larsen, who’s the CEO of Krugle, based in Menlo Park, CA. Stevelarsen_1 “By publishing open APIs and helpful documentation, they create an active and engaged community and encourage developers to create applications which utilize Yahoo!’s technology in new and innovative ways. With this partnership, Krugle will make it easier than ever to leverage the true potential of Yahoo!’s open APIs and Web Services.”

Krugleallyoucaneat

To check out Krugle code search on the Yahoo! Developer Network, just go to http://developer.yahoo.com.

One other thing I like about Krugle: not only the management, but the investors and advisors behind this outfit are pretty darn awesome, too.

« Older posts Newer posts »