Archive for the ‘Silicon Valley’ Category

Tomorrow night Silicon Valley’s Girls In Tech group will head over to Kosmix HQ for an evening of networking and career advice from some of the area’s coolest companies.

If you are looking for a job, or want tips on how to sharpen up your resume, this is the place to be.  Here are all the details from the Girls In Tech crew:

Have you ever wondered what it is, exactly, about your resume that will turn a recruiter on/off to your potential as a candidate for employment? Find out with Girls in Tech Silicon Valley, on November 19, as we invite a variety of  managers / recruiters to share resume best practices and knowledge around how to make yourself an attractive professional in today’s competitive market.

During the evening, participants will be breaking out into intimate groups to do peer resume reviews while Hiring Professionals provide valuable insight and feedback.

Professionals from the following industries and others will be joining us:

–Lizelle Baylon, Principal Recruiter at Boston Scientific (Medical Devices)

–Debbie Donovan, Sr. Manager, Practice & Hospital Market Development at Intuitive Surgical (Medical Devices)

–Kiran Prasad, CTO at Sliced Simple, Inc. Former Senior Director WebOS Emerging Technologies at Palm (Mobile)

–Cindy Wang, Product Manager at Tiny Prints Inc. (Online Retailer)

–Stephanie Lonn, Technical Recruiter at Zynga (Social Media / Games)

–Isabelle Mitura, Recruiter at Zynga (Social Media / Games)

Spots are first come, first serve. Refreshments and snacks will be provided!

Doors open at 6:45, breakout sessions begin at 7:00pm
$10 in advance (register at Eventbrite)
$15 at the door

Kosmix
444 Castro St
(Entrance on Mercy St)
Mountain View, CA 94041

OK, I admit it:  When first I saw the title of Sean Parker’s session at Web 2.0 today, I immediately thought HARDWARE.  After all,  “The Rise of the Network Company” initially seemed to suggest IT infrastructure, switches and routers,  and all the geekiness that lurks inside those stuffy data centers.

But this is Web 2.0–and Parker is the guy who co-founded Napster and Facebook before his 28th birthday.

Parker’s definition of a network company isn’t Cisco.  It’s Twitter, Apple, eBay, Facebook, and other organizations that understand the value of networking people.

Parker began his 10 minute talk with the assertion that Google won’t determine the future of the world, because collecting data is less important than connecting people.  He cited Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the numbers of connected users in the system.   By this measure, a network company is only as good as the number of connections it facilitates.  Sound familiar, Facebook addicts?

While the first phase of the Internet was all about data–compiling it, searching it, organizing it, and analyzing it–Parker argues that the next phase is about building connections between people and things.

In the course of his discussion, Parker called out eBay, AOL and Craigslist as examples of his belief that groundswell makes big network companies even bigger, until they dominate the market completely.  And the best products don’t always win.  As the larger players drive out competition, organizations get too comfortable and stop taking risks.  Though Parker didn’t explicitly say what this dynamic means for innovation, his message was clear that a lack of competition doesn’t exactly foster excellence.

Parker’s real point today was that the new economic value on the Web isn’t Search–it’s establishing connections.  Here at Kosmix, we take a similar view that connecting ideas and putting things in context is inherently valuable.  We give people an easier, more visual way to explore topical information on the Web, and we also help you understand how different people, places and things relate to each other.  Our acquisition of Cruxlux this week gives some indication about the role connectedness will play in our overall Kosmix roadmap.

As Parker concluded his comments today, I suddenly found the words of British novelist E.M. Forster ringing in my ears.  “Only connect!,” he wrote in Howard’s End nearly 100 years ago.  “Live in fragments no longer.”

We had a GREAT time at SF New Tech last night–thanks to Myles and the crew for hosting such an awesome evening.

The club was packed with more than 200 movers and shakers in the local startup community, as well as a few VCs and journalists–including the New York Times’ Brad Stone, who had some hard-hitting questions for us about the future of media and the role sites like MeeHive play in a well-informed society.

If you haven’t had the chance to check out some of the other startups who presented last night, several of them are definately worth a look.   One of our favorites was Famililink, which has created a site that makes it easier for elderly people and those who aren’t technically inclined to keep in touch with family email messages, videos, pictures and calendars.  One person in the audience suggested that they should also integrate MeeHive into their offering, to add personal news to the mix.  (And, no, we didn’t plant someone to say that.)

We finished the night with a Kosmix Lucky Twit giveaway.  In the true spirit of “Wheel of Fortune,” some folks in the audience even chanted, “No whammy! No Whammy! No Whammy!”  when we’d spin the tweets to pick a winner.  Congrats to the lucky tweeter who went home with the FlipCam–enjoy!

Jennifer Simpson took some terrific photos of the event–check them out here.    Here’s a sample of some of her cool pics:

Every time I want to look up facts, read about a topic, or am curious I go to Wikipedia. So does everyone else. Wikipedia is a brilliant idea for the greatest compendium of knowledge ever created. Unfortunately, for a machine it is a blob of data with very little meaning… all that information is too hard to understand.

Semantic Web is an idea that has been alive for a while. The Internet has revolutionized our access to information. If computers could access that information and process it, imagine how much more we could do with it. But computers are not as smart as humans and we need to talk to them in a different language. We need Web pages and blogs and news and email to be written in this language that computers can understand, a language far simpler and more structured than English. The Semantic Web’s goal is to create this language and make it possible for people who create content to use it everyday.

When did you last learn a new language? Can your neighborhood blogger read French? Or Chinese? New languages are hard to learn and content creators need a BIG incentive to master and use them. Google, Bing, or Kosmix could, for example, provide that incentive by ranking Semantic Web Pages higher, as they can understand them better.

All right, so we know why this language is needed and we have some idea of the incentives that will push people to learn it. But where is this language? Who defines it? The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been defining standards like “RDF” and “OWL” that they hope will lead to this global language. But these standards are really an “Alphabet” that tell us how to write this language. What they don’t give us is a dictionary, a vocabulary called a “Schema” that will help computers understand this language.

What is needed and what the proponents of the Semantic Web have failed to create is this global “Schema” of types of things and their relationships. A vocabulary that works for all the content on the Web. Something that tells a program that an iPhone is a “Mobile Phone” which is a “Phone” which is a “Communication Device” and also a “Personal Electronics Gadget”. A “Schema” is easily extendable and the extensions are easily standardized. There were no “eBook Readers” a few years ago. Kindle is an “eBook Reader.” Both my computer and yours should call it an “eBook Reader.”

Who can create such a language? They would need the largest compendium of information ever created. They would need an easy way for the world to edit and change this compendium over time. They would need a process by which every piece of information in the compendium can be “defined” by a common schema. You see where I’m going here: They would need to be Wikipedia.

Frankly, this is an opportunity that Wikipedia has missed. Don’t get me wrong, Wikipedia has a lot of structure for humans, and lots of companies and researchers are writing sophisticated programs to understand this structure. But this structure isn’t yet complete or visible enough to be used by other content creators. If Wikipedia can evolve into a compendium of information that can also create and maintain this vocabulary, we can have another revolution with Wikipedia at the center. The amazing thing is, this is only a small step from where Wikipedia is today.

At Kosmix, we write sophisticated programs that understand pages on the Web, including Wikipedia. We want our programs to understand what people are writing so we can connect that information to those looking for it. But it would take decades for computing power and technology to grow enough to truly understand the English language. Another revolution in Wikipedia can skip the world ahead by a few decades.

Finally, those of us in the South Bay now have a Girls in Tech chapter to call our very own.

This evening several of my Kosmix colleagues and I attended the first meeting of the new Silicon Valley chapter of Girls in Tech. A packed crowd—with nearly as many men as women!—came to the event to learn how to take their iPhone apps from concept to launch. Here are some of the highlights:

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One of the new chapter’s organizers, Dhana Pawar, a leading mobile application development expert, opened the session by outlining the basic steps for successfully launching an iPhone app:

1) Get a developer account from Apple
2) Choose a great design and development partner
3) Use the ad-hoc deployment process. Keep it simple. Start small, gauge the reaction of a focus group, and iterate from there.
4) Submit to Apple for approval. It takes anywhere from two to three weeks, so build the extra time into your launch plan.
5) Invest in marketing and PR. Social media can be very powerful here.

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Next, Suzanne Ginsburg of Ginsburg Design shared her advice for user-centered iPhone app design. She’s working on a book about this topic, which should be coming out in June 2010. Here are the five most common pitfalls that she sees iPhone developers make:

1) iPhone apps that are too complicated and unfriendly to set up

2) Tasks that require too many steps or too much typing

3) The inability to synch the iPhone app with a desktop or Web version

4) The app doesn’t remember where the user left off

5) No content for a given location, even though the app bills itself as “national”

Suzanne then offered three simple tips for creating a successful iPhone app:

1) Conduct upfront user research to understand usability and discover new opportunities. Methods include shadowing, field interviews and diary studies.

2) Brainstorm and sketch like mad. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines are a good place to start, but try to see beyond the basic frameworks.

3) Refine and Test Promising Directions. Usability testing your concepts will help uncover issues related to setup, flows, terminology and more.

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The final presentation was by AdMob’s Mike Fyall, an expert in promoting and monetizing mobile applications through advertising. His company recently conducted research about iPhone user behavior, and came up with some interesting findings:

1) The average user downloads 10 apps per month, and the average iPod Touch user downloads nearly three times that amount.

2) More than twice as many iPhone and iPod Touch users have adopted paid apps as Android users.

3) Fifty percent of iPhone users buy paid apps, with an average of 1-2 paid apps each.

4) Users most often discover apps by browsing the AppStore and searching directly.

5) Over 90% of people download apps on their phone, rather than from their computers.

At Kosmix, we have two iPhone apps: MeeHive and Samachar News. Check them out at the App Store and let us know how well we followed the experts’ advice!

The internet is abuzz today with Google’s announcement on a next generation search project that the internet has fondly dubbed “Google Caffeine”. I read the news along with my own morning shot of caffeine, and it immediately increased my sense that exciting things are happening again in the search space.

Take the last few months. The launch of Bing, the MicroHoo deal, a search box taking prominent place on the twitter.com homepage, Google launching the “Wonder Wheel”, Facebook turning on Real-Time search, and today’s news on Google Caffeine. Clearly, the search industry itself seems to be on a heavy dose of caffeine recently.

Google Caffeine is probably a major backend release for the Google search engine,and, like any other release, it will be faster and better. After all, search engines need to constantly innovate and update to keep up with the competition, and Google has always done that better than anyone else.  You can try it here.I definitely see an incremental improvement in quality.

Things get more interesting when you consider that Google clearly must have several big releases for their search product every year. However, lately Google not only has to improve its product, it must also communicate these improvements and be “seen” to improve its product. After several years of stability, search is heating up, and the market leader must maintain its brand or lose it forever.

This is a typical cycle in any industry reliant on innovation.A short period of rapid innovation, followed by a longer period of consolidation and stability again… followed by a rapid period of innovation. After years of the traditional search model, search seems to be entering its next period of rapid innovation, and all the big players, as well as the smaller ones, must innovate or be left behind.

So to me, in my moments of caffeine-induced clarity, I see “Google Caffeine” as another indication that we are about to see a revolution in search. My hope is that this will deliver on search’s many possibilities!

Yesterday, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that they had finally reached an agreement on a long-sought search partnership. Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft’s Bing will power Yahoo! Search, while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Yahoo! will continue to own the user experience of its search site, but the technology will be powered by Bing. Yahoo’s stock has been on a free-fall since the deal was announced, shedding 12% of its market cap yesterday, and another 4% today. Microsoft’s stock is up 1-2% while Google is up 2-3%. Clearly, investors feel this is not a good deal for Yahoo, but it’s great news for Google. It is the exact opposite of what you would expect when #3 and #2 team up to take on #1!

The Good

1) Consumers will benefit from having a strong alternative to Google in Bing. Many analysts and industry experts who recently reviewed Bing feel it is on par, if not better, than Google on relevance and user interface.

2) Search advertisers will now have a viable alternative to Google. They will no longer have to rely solely on a single traffic source (Google AdWords) that currently accounts for over 75% of all paid search clicks.

3) Publishers who earn revenue from search ads will have someone else besides Google to turn to. They will no longer have to negotiate with the dominant player, which should result in better bargaining power for them, thereby strengthening their financials.

4) Yahoo will go back to its roots of being a media company, ending its seven year foray into search algorithms and technology. Prior to acquiring Inktomi in 2003 and Overture in 2004, Yahoo had outsourced search to various players (including, at one point, to Google), and was focused on building great properties like its frontpage, Mail, News, Sports, Finance, and so on.

5) Search engine startups will have one less competitor to worry about. This should, hopefully, foster more innovation and venture capital investment in this lucrative sector.

Disclosure: I owned shares of YHOO at the time of writing this article. I was also previously employed at this company.