Author: Dana Oshiro

A month ago, Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough were diligently preparing for the acquisition of their Tulsa Oklahoma-based company Ping.fm. ReadWriteWeb covered the Seesmic deal in early January and since then the duo has moved to San Francisco to help get their product inline with the twitter client. ReadWriteWeb caught up with McCullough to find out what’s changed since the acquisition and what early-stage entrepreneurs can learn.

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Tell us about yourself and how you decided to start Ping.
I started Ping on a lunch break 2 years ago. I really wanted a way to update my few social networks from one spot instead of wasting time posting the same message over and over. I didn’t ever plan to make it available to the public.  It wasn’t until a colleague at my job suggested it.

Was your company built to flip or does Ping have a longer roadmap?
I didn’t start it with the intention of flipping as soon as an offer came across the table.  I wanted to see where it could go.  The early model of the business had a lot of unknowns, but once user interest and integrations started to expand, a real business model had been established.  I planned on staying open as long as we could, providing a unique service to people who needed exactly what we were doing.

In negotiating your company’s acquisition what points did you have to consider?
One of the biggest internal decision to even consider an acquisition was who was making the offer.  I didn’t want to merge with a company who wouldn’t care about the product we’ve created. I’ve always liked Loic and Seesmic, so the decision was pretty easy once it was on the table.  We’ve had other offers, but the companies didn’t seem as into what we had going as Seesmic did.  Ultimately, you have to think about your users too.  How will this affect your users and what will they think about the whole deal?  Our users are what has kept us going since day one.  We’ve had a substantial number of requests to be integrated into Seesmic clients, and now that we are part of Seesmic, the future of integration is a no-brainer.

What are some tips you can offer entrepreneurs to make the company merger/transition smoother?
Get to know your new team.  Whether it’s by meeting them in person, or Skype chatting or just simply sending an e-mail.  You’re going to be working with these people on a pretty frequent basis.  I was fortunate enough to have spent a lot of time with the Seesmic team prior to our merge, so I was prepared on how it might be to work with them.

How do you plan on monetizing Ping’s reach? (Obviously there’s a good opportunity for a social media-based advertising network similar to Sponsored Tweets)
A few things have been up for discussion, and advertising has come up. Before, we had our own plans for monetization.  Premiums, partnerships etc. Since becoming part of Seesmic, we had to switch up our ideas to accomodate some potential models brought forth by the new team.  I guess time will tell on this one, there’s really nothing set in stone.

How can Ping help startups?
You could use our service to help build a community around your startup or idea. Target audiences that might be outside of the Twitter/Facebook land. There are tons of users that are just dying to try out what you have created.

If you were to push out a message via Ping to help entrepreneurs like you, what would you say?
When in doubt, don’t forfeit confidence…and it always helps to grow a beard and wear a hoodie. (Two pieces of advice that McCullough continues to observe religiously)

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When asked what shapes Portland’s startup culture, Silicon Florist blogger Rick Turoczy named 3 defining aspects of the industry – hardware roots, open source projects and iPhone development. Turoczy has been in Oregon for the past 15-years and started Silicon Florist as a way to cover the region’s early stage startup scene alongside other Portland tech sites like Mike Rogoway’s Silicon Forest blog and Strange Love Live.
Since then he’s watched his town grow into a bustling tech hub and enjoyed every minute of it. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Turoczy and a few other Portland influencers to get a feel for the scene.

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Turoczy explained, when Tektronix and Intel hung their hats in Oregon, scores of great developers and technologists found themselves settling the once sleepy blue collar region. As employees broke off to start new ventures, a startup community was born out of it. Concurrently, the open source communities and iPhone communities sprung up.

Entrepreneur and Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton manages to keep a foot in both the open source community and the iPhone community. While Urban Airship focuses on building out iPhone infrastructure for developers, Kveton is also well known for working with Oregon State University to start the Open Source Lab – the first state-wide open source development curriculum. Coupled with the fact that O’Reilly’s OSCON and the Linux creator Linus Torvalds call the region home, Oregon’s developers understand the value of shared knowledge and community. When asked how the open source movement has shaped Oregon’s entrepreneurs, Kveton replies, “Portland has a live free or die attitude. We engage in community and unlike other groups we really share our knowledge.”

The majority of ReadWriteWeb’s team calls Portland home. Agrees Marshall Kirkpatrick, “There’s a very supportive community, lots of very creative people and a great history of geekery.  People interested in open source, wikis, RSS and mobile apps will find some of the most influential developers and companies in the world available to connect with in Portland.”

Raven Zachary is one such developer. Zachary helped start BarCamp Portland, Ignite Portland, iPhoneDevCamp and still serves on the board of Legion of Tech – a group that organizes Oregon-based tech events. Through his work as the President of Small Society he’s built iPhone apps for a number of influential campaigns including the Obama ’08 iPhone app. When asked what he thinks of Portland he explains, “Portland attracts people – people who want to stay here and ideally work for local businesses. We have a huge population of telecommuters in this city working for out of state employers, many in California. The talent is here, the greater challenge is the receptivity of investors to bet on Portland-based tech companies.”

Portland Entrepreneur Josh Friedman knows as well as anyone how hard it is to raise funding. Friedman took the skills he’d learned from Intel and applied them to start Eleven Wireless and startup co-working facility Nedspace. Says Friedman, “It was hard as hell to raise money and at the time I was pretty well connected.There’s a gap in funding resources for Portland entrepreneurs looking to raise between $25,000-250,000 dollars and it needs to be addressed…While our Angel investors are great, they simply aren’t doing the volume to take chances on early-stage companies.” Friedman is looking to expand Nedspace to ten additional cities in 2010 and is rumored to be raising a seed fund for Portland-based startups. Says Friedman, “If it wasn’t exciting here I don’t think I’d live here. I really believe in my heart and soul that Portland can be the best city in the world to start a business. The fact that it’s a cheap to live, in addition to being a clean and cool place makes it a good place for entrepreneurs. If we combine that with the right investors, people will move here in droves.”

Says Rick Turoczy, “In some ways this whole town is an incubator. People here view technology as an artistic pursuit and they like to muck about in coffee shops and co-working facilities. In the 15 years I’ve lived here it’s the most cohesive and collegial community yet. This sort of creative spirit doesn’t always come with a business plan, but as more companies like Jive and JanRain get funding, we’re starting to see the developers and VCs get on the same page.”

Additional Resources

Oregon Entrepreneurs Network: OEN helps Oregon and SW Washington-based entrepreneurs manage their early-stage companies. The group’s programs include the Portland Angel Network, Women’s Investment Network and Oregon Angel Fund. The group also hosts conferences including Angel Oregon and Venture Northwest as well as a series of business-related PubTalks on the second Wednesday of every month.

Portland Ten: Portland Ten is an incubator program where companies buy into their own development and make a goal to reach to $1M in revenue by Oct, 2010.

Coworking Portland Wiki: This wiki keeps a list of local co-working spaces and requests for shared spaces.

Beer and Blog:On Fridays between 4-6pm Portland residents meet up at the Green Dragon to share in their mutual love of beer, blogs and all things Portland.

If you’ve got more resources for the Portland area let us know in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Stu Seeger

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One of the fantastic things about being an entrepreneur is that you can define your own working conditions. From Craigslist’s modest Sunset District apartment headquarters to Twitter’s stylish new digs, startups are getting creative with their work spaces. Below are a few options to consider in choosing your space.

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Virtual: As covered in an earlier post, ReadWriteWeb runs a totally virtual office. Using a combination of Basecamp, Google Docs and Skype, the team manages to coordinate articles and interviews from more than five locations across the globe.

Traveling Space: We recently came across iStopOver – a service that allows you to rent space for your team while on the go. If you’re together at a conference, or you’d just like a change of pace, this service allows you to rent furnished office space on a daily basis.

Co-working: Rather than having your staff work in isolation, you can rent them desk space at one or a number of distributed co-working facilities. Sites like San Francisco’s Citizen Space and The Hat Factory allow nomadic tech workers to share ideas and solutions in a friendly environment. Many co-working spaces offer a daily drop in rate as well as the option for monthly membership. To find a space in your community, check out the co-working map on the Co-working community blog.

Lease and Rent: Sites like LoopNet and Rofo specialize in finding commercial space. A number of sites will allow you to take on space for a short-term lease with the idea that you may need to scale up your team in a short period of time.

If you’ve got a unique work environment, let us know in the comments below.

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When we wrote our year end posts for 2009, we should’ve added patent trolling to our list of trends. In the past year we’ve covered a number of patent disputes including the Word-blocking patent against Microsoft and VoloMedia’s patent on podcasting. Union Square Ventures’ Brad Burnham wrote an excellent piece today on independent invention and how patent reform can minimize trolls.

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Said Burnham, “Almost a third of our portfolio is under attack by patent trolls. Is it possible that one third of the engineering teams in our portfolio unethically misappropriated technology from someone else and then made that the basis of their web services? No! That’s not what is happening…Our companies are being attacked by companies that were not even in the same market, very often by companies they did not even know existed.”

What’s this? How can you be accused of stealing another’s intellectual property when you didn’t even know the company or patent existed? Independent invention is the idea that a group of software engineers can build a technology similar to one that has already been patented with no prior knowledge of the patent. For example, take the lingering case of the iPhone fart app disputes. Burnham argues that with an independent invention defense, patent holders would have to prove that startups had some prior knowledge of their technology before pursuing action. He argues that this would decrease patent abuse and place the burden of proof on those that are more likely to abuse IP law. In your opinion do you think Burnham’s vision of patent reform is a sound one? Why or why not?

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In 2007, Wired Magazine published an article entitled the See-Through CEO where Redfin founder Glenn Kelman gained the public’s sympathy and a slew of new members by blogging his corporate woes. Lately we’ve been looking inward at how companies can improve their employee recruitment strategy through social media. Great candidates research you before accepting an offer, and here is what your social media profile reveals to them.

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LEARNING: A few months ago Bessemer Associate Sarah Tavel wrote an article entitled Venture Capital’s Freemium Model. Tavel explains that her firm gives away free advice via blogs, tweets and white papers. The point of all this is to display their knowledge to potential portfolio companies and make startups understand the value of Bessemer’s advice. By this same reasoning we can assume that CEOs who blog establish themselves as thought leaders and attract better employees.

TRANSPARENCY: Flybridge Capital Partners’ Jeff Bussgang gives transparency and accessibility as reasons for his blogging. Says Bussgang, “The VC business can be an intimidating business to many.  I am an iconoclast at heart.  As a former entrepreneur, I particularly enjoy breaking down barriers and making the VC business more accessible and transparent for others.” Make your business accessible to both employees and potential hires. Rather than waiting for scheduled meetings to celebrate your successes or public partnerships, give others the option of reading about developments as they happen. You might even get some useful feedback in the comments.

HAPPINESS: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh once wrote that Twitter made him “a better and happier person.” He asks, “What would you do differently if there were a permanent public record of what you do or say?” Hsieh argues that Twitter adds a public broadcast element that reminds him to be more positive, thankful and empathetic. He writes that those same values trickle down to the corporate culture of Zappos. As a company voted one of Fortune Magazine’s Top 100 Companies to Work for in 2009, Hsieh makes a great case for using social media as a recruitment tool.

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Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn’t the first place you’d think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like Demand Media and Docstoc call Southern California home, it’s not surprising that the community is emerging as one of the country’s hottest startup hubs. ReadWriteWeb caught up with some defining characters of the LA Tech scene to find out why they’ve made their homes away from the traditional tech haunts of Silicon Valley.

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FUNDING
Says Sean Percival, developer and founder of LA tech blog Lalawag, “The tech space in the Valley feels over saturated at every level, at least to me. Here in LA there are still so many untapped resources and opportunities.” Similarly Twiistup producer Francisco Dao remarks, “There’s certainly a smaller funding infrastructure in LA but it is MUCH more accessible. SoCal VC’s can be easily found at events looking to meet entrepreneurs. In Northern California, it’s harder to get into the loop and get to know some of the VCs and players.”

In some cases, competition to pitch angels in the Bay is so fierce that entrepreneurs have paid to present their companies. Upset by the exploitative practice of pay-to-play angel pitch sessions, serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis recently launched the Open Angel Forum. Based out of LA, the Forum allows companies to submit an application free of charge with the best applicants invited to dinner alongside some top-tier angels. Other LA-based funding sources include firms like Rustic Canyon Partners and GRP VC. Dealmaker Media also hosts regular LA-based events where founder Debbie Landa invites some of the country’s top VCs to coach LA startups through industry trends and tactics.

MENTORSHIP
As for mentorship opportunities, in 2009 GRP VC‘s Mark Suster created Launchpad LA to offer help to early-stage LA-based entrepreneurs. The group meets virtually 2 times per month and seasoned veterans pass their knowledge on to startup newcomers. Some of these newbies include companies like band app-maker Mobile Roadie and parenting social network Totspot.

Says Suster, “We historically didn’t have a ton of successful tech companies. But things have changed and now companies like PriceGrabber, MySpace and Shopzilla are well established. LA is seeing a resurgence in second time entrepreneurs and it’s this generation of people that are helping breed success for others.”

Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar also works with Dealmaker to host a monthly Startups:Uncensored meet up series. Meanwhile, Francisco Dao’s Twiistup is the event to attend for SoCal tech networking.

Says Dao, “I think the smaller more familial environment in LA may act as almost a natural incubator. Everyone talks to everyone else here.”

There’s an old saying that “a cloudy day is no match for a sunny disposition.” Lucky for them, the LA tech scene gets to experience warmth in more ways than one.

Photo Credit: Lisa Newton

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Social media is likely to be factored into your ad budget for the new year, but the problem is deciding which format best suits you. Highly controversial, tech influencers like Chris Pirillo and Robert Scoble are being paid to tweet periodic product endorsements. The question is: Are sponsored tweets worth it? ReadWriteWeb caught up with Likes.com co-founders Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan as they made the case for conversational advertising and the sponsored tweets landscape.

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Similar to Ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets, MyLikes is a service that pays influencers to Tweet about specific products. In what resembles an AdWords-style dashboard, advertisers create a budget for their campaign and set the parameters and URL for where they’d like endorsers to redirect their friends.

This month, Moo created a campaign in the hopes of selling business card packages to U.S.-based users. Rather than being forced to endorse Moo, MyLikes members could chose to endorse them from a long list of companies. From there the endorser creates a short line of text about why they like a particular company, with a link to pre-populated images, video and the campaign URL from their blogs and Twitter accounts. Bindu believes that because the network gives users options in who to endorse, the sponsored tweets become more authentic and are better targeted to the user base. On a cost-per-click basis, campaigns range between $0.20 and $0.60 cents per click based on the influence of the endorser. If you compare this against some of the higher-priced AdWords keyword campaigns, Twitter sponsorship is quite reasonable.

While a budget analysis is an obvious indicator of whether or not you should sponsor tweets, another factor to consider is your company culture. When Izea’s sponsored tweets program launched in late June, many questioned the process of disclosure and the role of a social media influencer. While the FTC Act revisions make the space more regulated, they don’t change the fact that your stakeholders may simply be put off by the practice.

I’m going to answer your question about sponsored tweets with another question, “Are sponsored tweets more cost effective than your current click-thru campaigns and will your audience embrace it?”

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While maybe not the most visually compelling product, Healthful Apps represents an interesting new trend for 2010. Created by Apps for All, the product recommends customer-reviewed iPhone health applications in a variety of categories including autism, relaxation and memory. Although the company’s first effort is focused on health, the larger industry-wide question remains – will this year’s branded iPhone app be a recommendation app?

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Last year ReadWriteWeb covered Appsfire as one service that allows users to bookmark and share their favorite iPhone apps. While it’s certainly a useful tool, recommendations are made by individuals rather than influential groups. As seen with Healthful Apps, there’s opportunity to extend these recommendation-based applications to special-interest and location-based communities.

Imagine investment communities trading and reviewing stock and news apps, or Oprah Winfrey’s community recommending shopping and reading apps, or New Yorkers sharing transportation and amenity apps.

The personalization of applications by politics, lifestyle, locale and community may prove more useful in making app recommendations than any automated Genius system that Apple could hope to cook up. Additionally, because providers can monetize recommendations through paid app referral fees, it’s entirely possible that influential communities can earn money simply by weighing in with their app preferences. It’s honestly so meta that it hurts, but if social media has taught us anything, it’s that community influencers are tastemakers.

If this is in fact the future, then my question to you is this – Which communities would you take recommendations from, and would you pay for the app?

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In an ironic twist of fate for 2009, Fox’s IGN Entertainment, a company known for its game reviews of products like Zombie Apocalypse acquired What They Play. The newest member of Fox Interactive is touted as the “family guide to video games” and offers reviews, warnings and suggested products. Under the umbrella company of What They Like, What They Play uses the “Entertainment Software Rating Board” (ESRB) to warn parents of games containing explicit lyrics, cartoon violence and drug references.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

In an age when gross-out sites like goatse are just a click away, a number of services offer parents the information they need to find quality online entertainment. While past generations were raised on unfiltered television and video games, today’s parent take a more active role in the process of media consumption.

AOL’s PlaySavvy: PlaySavvy is another site that offers parents a chance to check out age-appropriate kids games. Similar to What They Play, this site lists the ESRB ratings next to games and information is categorized by topic and gaming system. Products for console favorites like Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii are often featured on the site. AOL also offers parents daily articles and a section to view the most popular games.

Parents’ Choice: Established in 1978, this site is run by the Parents’ Choice Foundation – a nonprofit organization that offers awards to the top children’s media and toys. Some of the award categories include websites, video games, DVDs, software, television programming and toys. This site definitely skews towards narrative-based educational materials. If your kid has a shorter attention span, you might want to visit PBS Kids instead.

Common Sense Media: Common Sense media is a nonprofit organizations dedicated to offering parents reviews and suggestions on appropriate content. The group produces movie, website, TV, game, book and music ratings as well as a number of educational tools for classroom use. The site can be personalized for kids between the ages of 2-17 years old and it’s available in English and Spanish. This site tends to weigh the benefits of mainstream media sites.

PBS KIDS Island: This site offers parents reading resources, videos and games in English and Spanish. While the majority of the content is best queued up by a parent or teacher, the videos are of particularly high quality and completely commercial free.

National Geographic for Kids: This site offers kid-friendly games, videos, stories and activities for nature lovers. The same photography that has made National Geographic a hit with grownups is likely to please kids. Not surprisingly, the video content is equally compelling. Discovery Kids offers a similar experience and is a great site for visual learners.

Totlol: Totlol is a parent-moderated version of YouTube. The site offers video options specifically designed for children and even offers “age optimized interfaces” to ensure that kids of different ages get the most appropriate content. In 2008, ReadWriteWeb covered Totlol’s beta launch. As of today the site charges a $3 per month subscription fee or $54 until your child grows up.

Photo Credit:Swaminathan

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If you ever thought startup life would be about champagne toasts and million dollar term sheets then you need to get back in your time machine and set the dial for the nineties. If there’s one thing we learned in the latter half of this decade, it’s discipline. To say that it was a tough year, would be an understatement. But those of us who stayed lean will be back for 2010. While the below concepts weren’t invented this year, they certainly hit their stride in 2009.

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1. Outsourced Labor: Rather than hiring onsite staff, more companies flocked to services like Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower to fulfill simple tasks. Companies listed their jobs and thankfully, a temporary workforce was there to get it done.

2. Cloud Scalability: Rather than paying for a slew of dedicated servers, startups took advantage of elastic workload tools like Amazon Web Services and Heroku. These services kept our site running during huge traffic spikes, but they ensured we weren’t burning cash in the downtime.

3. Web-Based Project Services: Google Apps made huge headway in 2009 as companies migrated from Microsoft to the cloud. Many startups began using real-time cloud collaboration tools to organize their projects, while others looked to customer service sites like Get Satisfaction and Zendesk to manage complaints.

4. Monetization: While consumers will settle for free products, premium services demand a certain level of competence. According to 37signals CEO Jason Fried, “the most intimate transaction between people is money”. In other words, if you put a price on your product and users paid it, you got your feedback. From paid iPhone apps to subscription music services, businesses in 2009 got the feedback they needed to find out if their products made the cut with consumers.

5. The New PR: From soft-spoken Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and his Twitter empire to fast talking Gary Vaynerchuk and his wine podcasts, startup leaders opened the kimono and engaged with stakeholders. Communities don’t get built on autopilot or by a ghostwriting marketing intern. To grow social capital, we learned that we need to put ourselves out there (flaws and all) and treat our audience members like the intelligent beings they are.

Thanks for reading ReadWriteStart in 2009. We look forward to a great 2010 with you and would like to wish you a Happy New Year.

Photo Credit: Windell H. Oskay, Optical Illusion

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Two years ago, ethnographer danah boyd had the blogosphere abuzz with her look at class-based divisions between teens on MySpace and Facebook. The esteemed Microsoft researcher found that Facebook’s collegiate origins encouraged a group of slightly more educated mainstream community members. Meanwhile, MySpace encouraged self-expression and the organizing of subcultures. boyd’s latest paper entitled, “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook” suggests that those same origins also propel race-based divisions. She likens the mass teen migration from MySpace to Facebook to “white flight”.

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“White flight” refers to the 20th century exodus of Caucasian Americans from urban centers to what were believed to be the “safer”, more racially homogenous and affluent suburbs. She describes how teen language about MySpace is similar to that used to describe city dwellers in the 1980’s. The city dweller narrative is that it’s for “dysfunctional families, perverts and deviants, freaks and outcasts, thieves, and the working class. Implied in this is that no decent person could possibly have a reason to dwell in the city or on MySpace.”

Considering the parallels between white flight and the move from MySpace to Facebook boyd writes, “The suburbs of Facebook signaled more mature living, complete with digital fences (privacy settings) to keep out strangers. While formal restrictions on who could move lifted in September 2006 (when the service moved from being a collegiate service to a public one), the more subtle network-based disincentives did not.”

After white flight, boyd describes the urban decay that followed including a reduction in investment, reduced property values, increasing unemployment (as jobs moved to the suburbs) and a rise in crime. She likens untended MySpace profiles to an abandoned and graffiti-covered city and spammers to street gangs.

boyd believes that while teens do not directly reference racial divisions in fleeing MySpace, the aesthetics of “bling” and “hip-hop culture” often criticized by new Facebook users do have racial overtones. Says boyd, “While Facebook’s minimalism is not inherently better, conscientious restraint has been one [cultural] marker of bourgeois fashion.”

In other words, the text, images and videos we choose to share amongst our friends through social networks are the cultural markers that reveal our racial identities. While boyd cites a number of reasons for racial divides online, one thing is certain. She writes, “Neither social media nor its users are colorblind simply because technology is present. The internet mirrors and magnifies everyday life, making visible many of the issues we hoped would disappear including race and class-based social divisions in American society.” To download her draft paper visit danah.org/papers/2009/.

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Just as many of us are getting used to augmented reality applications for cellphones and digital cameras, Babak Amir Parviz and his University of Washington students are taking it one step further. The group is working on a human machine interface where LEDs are embedded into contact lenses in order to display information to the wearer. You heard right, in a few years your cyborg eye will talk to you. In an article with the IEEE Spectrum, Parviz relays the challenges of custom-building semi-transparent circuitry into a polymer lens roughly 1.2 millimeters in diameter.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Says Parviz, “We’re starting with a simple product, a contact lens with a single light source, and we aim to work up to more sophisticated lenses that can superimpose computer-generated high-resolution color graphics on a user’s real field of vision.”

For now, Parviz mentions that single pixel visual cues for gamers and the hearing impaired are already quite possible with the lens prototypes. The group has also experimented with non-invasive biomonitoring including checking glucose levels for diabetics.

Some of the obvious challenges of building an augmented reality contact lens include:
1. The Need for Custom Parts: Regular circuitry and LEDs are incompatible with regular contact lenses. Every piece of this project must be fabricated from scratch.

2. Physical Constraints: The group must attempt to fit transistors, radio chips, antennas, diffusion resistors, LEDs and photodetectors onto a minuscule polymer disc. Additionally, the team is required to control lens position and light intensity relative to the pupil. And finally, because the lens is so close to the corneal surface, the group must project images away from the cornea using either micro-lenses or lasers.

3. User Safety: In addition to protecting the eye against chemicals, heat and toxins, the lens components must be semi-transparent in order for the wearer to view their surroundings.

“We already see a future in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today, with lots of developers contributing their ideas and inventions. As far as we’re concerned, the possibilities extend as far as the eye can see.” And you thought the iPhone SDK was a tough nut to crack.

For Parviz’s complete seven-page article, check out the IEEE Spectrum’s Biomedical page.

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Emanuele Vulcano is making waves with his latest Infinite Labs release. The grad student recently released SwapKit – a new iPhone OS exchange protocol that allows developers to share data between locally installed iPhone apps.

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SwapKit is a unique protocol in that it allows developers to transcend the walls of the iPhone OS and pluck information from across a local network. In his own Mover application, Vulcano allows iPhone app users to add photos, videos or contacts to Mover’s table. From here you can slide your various forms of media to nearby Mover app users. The result is a Bump-like application interface that allows for easy flow between devices. The Mover app will ship with SwapKit support in its next update. In this case, the application will use SwapKit’s built-in UI to identify the sending and receiving app using a grand total of two lines of code.

SwapKit is available as a binary package or you can view the source repository in GitHub. The API documentation is also available on Vulcano’s Infinite Labs site at infinite-labs.net/swapkit/docs/api.

Below is Erica Sadun’s TUAW demo video of the protocol.

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In 2006, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake coined the term “BizDev 2.0” when looking at the phenomenon of supplying commercial API keys to startup partners. Said Fake, traditional business development meant “trying to get hopelessly overbooked people to return your email. And then after the deal was done, squabbling over who dealt with the customer service. [It’s] much, much better this way!” Three years later, many are finding that while APIs are great biz dev tools for the larger provider, startups can often suffer under the thumb of their platform keepers.

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In November ReadWriteStart spoke to Lookery CEO Scott Rafer about his company’s shutdown. Rafer counts his dependency on a single platform as being one facet of his downfall. Said Rafer, “I’ve ranted for years about how bad an idea it is for startups to be mobile-carrier dependent. In retrospect, there is no difference between Verizon Wireless and Facebook in this context.”

This week, Totlol CEO Ron Ilan set the blogosphere abuzz in a blog post describing his latest issues with YouTube.

In July 2008, unbeknownst to Ilan, Google was about to change its YouTube terms of service. According to the startup entrepreneur and father of two, Ilan found himself in a predicament. He had originally planned to find sponsorship for his community of curated toddler-appropriate YouTube videos; however, the new YouTube ToS restricted commercial use and his ability to monetize. In one fell swoop from the API provider, his entire business model and livelihood changed. Unwilling to violate the new terms, Ilan began work on a subscription model.

Says Ilan, “When publishing a public API, a company forms a relationship with
developers. To quote from the movie Love Actually – I love that word ‘relationship’. Covers all manner of sin doesn’t it? The relationship is by definition asymmetrical, as in me (one person) with them (the world’s most powerful company). I think the API provider should be at least as honest and open as the startup. I don’t know how Facebook and Twitter are with their API users, but I guess they can’t be worse.”

Similar to Totlol, entertainment community Redux offers a community where users aggregate niche video content from third party sites. While much of the content comes from sites like YouTube and Vimeo, Redux CEO David McIntosh has a decidedly different view of the YouTube ecosystem.

Says McIntosh, “We’re committed to adhering to YouTube’s Terms of Service as it exists today, and as it may change in the future. We believe that there are many awesome opportunities for 3rd parties to monetize around YouTube content in ways that are consistent with the YouTube’s Terms of Service and great for users.”

McIntosh plans to monetize his service via video insertions in Redux’s television mode and promotional items displayed in the real-time Redux feed similar to Digg’s latest ad efforts. But the question is whether or not ToS can affect these revenue streams as well.

You never believe your home is going to be damaged by an earthquake, but for some it happens. If you build on a platform you don’t control, is this akin to laying your foundation on a fault line? If you’ve got suggestions on how to mitigate this type of risk, let us know in the comments below.

YouTube didn’t respond by press time to our request for comment but we’ll update this post if we get a response later.

Disclosure: RWW is sponsored by API management service Mashery.com.

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While 2009 has been the year of the API, it’s the codeless creative experiences that drive mainstream adoption. Every December, ReadWriteWeb’s writers collect up their thoughts from 2009 and make predictions for the year ahead. My first prediction was that augmented reality applications would gain popularity. Part of that prediction was informed by a recent interview with Metaio Marketing Director Lisa Murphy.

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ReadWriteWeb first covered Metaio in early November when the company was set to release its editable consumer application Junaio. While products like Layar and Wikitude offer users a chance to view location-based notes and text, Junaio is the only service that offers non-coders the opportunity to edit images and text on multiple layers.

While Junaio is certainly its most popular product, the 6-year-old Munich-based company earns revenue by working with commercial clients like Lego, Popular and GM. Often described as “augmented reality marketing”, Metaio specializes in markerless tracking for advertising clients where a printed codes prompt a 3D webcam experience.

In the same way that consumers can generate their own QR codes via sites like Kaywa, is it possible that markerless AR tracking will one day yield a codeless creative experience? Honestly, it’s fine to hold up an Ikea catalogue and see a 3D sofa, but what good is a so-called immersive environment if the user is held captive in a passive consumer experience?

Says Murphy, “We chose to focus on the social aspects of Junaio by offering image sharing, oAuth and Facebook integration.” Nevertheless, she acknowledges that the company may open up the interface for further exploration. In keeping with its commitment to the social, we’re hoping Metaio finds ways to incorporate user-generated SketchUp creations in Junaio as well as an all-purpose AR tracking generator. In other words, rather than just interacting in an immersive environment, we’re hoping non-coders can contribute more than their eyeballs.

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While 2009 was a year to keep our noses to the grindstone, many of us let our personal blogs languish in decay. Whether it’s offline or online, it’s never healthy to neglect yourself or those who care about you. One way to turn over a new leaf and keep your community engaged in 2010 is to install community toolbar Wibya.

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Similar to the Meebo Bar, Wibya encourages audience members to share content across networks. Depending on the widgets you choose, you can translate text into more than 11 languages, track your real-time visitors with Who’s.amung.us and share content via a number of social networks. The service also allows you to create a built-in Tinychat application with video functionality and full Twitter and Facebook integration. Tools are offered in an application storefront and are categorized to increase page views, encourage content sharing and enrich content.

As seen with Meebo and other cross-platform sharing tools, Wibya is expected to steward community engagement and interaction. To ensure that these applications are effectively reaching our audiences we can delve further into application click-through rates by pouring through the service’s customizable dashboard. Backed by legendary Israeli investor Yossi Vardi, it’ll be interesting to see whether Wibya or Meebo comes out on top.

To compare Wibya against Meebo, register for the new tool at wibiya.com. If you notice a significance difference in your stats, let us know in the comments below.

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Ever since Jeff Han demoed his Multi-Touch Workstation at the 2006 TED Conference, the world has been waiting for a high resolution sensory work experience. As a generation of hunched night creatures with intimate knowledge of our chiropractors, we’ve suffered and conformed to our traditional interfaces for too long. Touch was the future of workstations. But as articulated by ReadWriteWeb, the upcoming Apple tablet is not the workstation of the near future. It simply isn’t practical. For those of us who still want to gawk at the cool regardless of its practicality, here is an assortment of 2009’s most interesting interfaces.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Sixth Sense: Sixth Sense is an extremely inexpensive interface ($350 to build the prototype) and it consists of some colored finger markers, a projector, and a camera on a necklace. Demoed at the TED conference, this interface has amazing potential. We reviewed this product as part of our post The Wearable Internet Will Blow Mobile Phones Away.

Given Nikon’s release of yesterday’s first camera with a built-in pico projector and Mobileburn’s demo of the Samsung Anycall Show phone, these little projectors are about to start popping up everywhere. For Minority Report fans, we may actually see these projector based interfaces used up for everyday tasks; however, it’s more produce amazing entertainment for gamers.

Perceptive Pixel Multi-Touch Wall (Jeff Han’s new project) and Microsoft Surface: In the world of alternative interfaces, these two workstations are extremely well known. Certainly not the inexpensive, mainstream touch interfaces we’d hoped for, their size and price makes them unobtainable to the average user. However, for commercial uses, they’ve certainly got that wow factor. The products are used for story boarding, geo-spatial command, broadcast media, museum exhibits, hotels and Surface is even in Disneyland’s tomorrow land.

Scratch Input: Recently featured in Technology Review for his presentation at the SIGGRAPH Conference, Carnegie Mellon Ph.D student Chris Harrison created a gestural input interface using existing surfaces and an acoustic input technique. In other words, Harrison’s interface uses scratches to communicate with his machine. By taping a modified stethoscope to a wall, Harrison got users to perform six scratch input gestures at about 90% accuracy with less than 5 minutes of training. If Scratch Input were utilized by a mobile manufacturer, a phone owner could simply rest their device on a table top and use it to scribble out messages.

Pulp-Based Computing: While there’s little information on these projects just yet, one thing is clear. The folks in MIT’s Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group are exploring electrically active inks and fibers during the paper making process to create a new form of paper-based computing. Apparently the paper would react in the same way as regular paper; however, it would also carry digital information. While the project is only in its early stages and appears to be hooked up to a basic Arduino prototyping platform, theoretically this could be used to create a new type of Wacom tablet. Remember when Steven Levy wrote about losing his Macbook Air? A paper interface would take some serious getting used to.

Siftables: Created by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, Siftables is a series of blocks that contain built-in motion sensors, graphical displays and wireless communication. The blocks can be programmed to interact with digital information and media to form a collective interface. Siftables have been used to create art displays, painting tools, calculators, games and even a music sequencer. Bug Labs also offers a similar open source block system for modular device interfaces.

For more on alternative interfaces featured during 2009, check out our articles on the BiDi screen and the wearable Internet.

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It’s been almost a year since I last worked with DIY repair site FixYa but I still remember the traffic spike we’d see every Christmas. While families would be thrilled to unwrap smart phones, netbooks and flat screen monitors in the early morning, they'd find themselves lost in a sea of instructions by noon. There is nothing worse than having a new shiny toy and not being able to play with it. In addition to FixYa, below are a few resources you can use to help set up your new gadgets.

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1. How Stuff Works: If you're looking for a basic understanding of your computer or device, you can always check out this site for some helpful videos. The site offers tips on everything from adding RAM to your laptop to deconstructing your wireless mouse.

2. Videojug: This site offers videos on everything from cooking to cars. The site's technology and cars section offers a variety of how-to information including how to get videos onto your iPod to how to set up your PlayStation.

3. Aardvark: When in doubt, ask the mob. While not specifically a gadget site, Aardvark allows you query your network for answers via email, instant message, iPhone app and web interface. Named ReadWriteWeb's Best Little Co. of 2009, the beauty of this site is that only those with a self-proclaimed expertise will be asked to solve your gadget problems.

4. Gdgt: Gdgt is a social wiki site where users trade tips and tricks on their favorite gadgets. Launched by former Engadget editors Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, the site offers specs and reviews on some of the newest products on the market. If you can't solve your gadget-related issue on one of the video sites, it's probably because the product is too new to have how-to videos. Check Gdgt for the listing and look at the discussion page for details.

5. iFixit Teardowns: And finally, if you're feeling ambitious and you don't want to wait on the phone for a manufacturer's 1-800 number, iFixit offers user-generated teardown guides. The guides give a photo documentation of gadget disassembly as well as commentary on parts and hardware. Check your product documentation before venturing into this territory, you wouldn't want to void your warranty before getting the device working.

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If you’re like many of us, you’re home for the holidays. Rather than complaining about the springs in the pullout couch or watching endless television reruns, consider rediscovering your hometown. Featured on today’s Flickr blog, Noticings is a location-based game similar to Foursquare that forces you to discover new gems in your old haunts.

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Each day Flickr users upload three geotagged photographs with the tag “noticings”. From here they receive points for game-related activities including finding misspelled signs, being the first to tag a photo in a particular neighborhood, or for noticing something everyday for a week. Users upload photos via the $3 Noticings iPhone application or through Flickr’s regular desktop, web and iPhone tools.

Just imagine the possibilities of capturing your hometown. Document the visual parfait of the abandoned fish cannery, drink in the chaos of the strip mall parking lot, and of course, don’t forget to snap the fine public art displayed in your local pub latrine. This service is a great way to keep you sane in your hometown while literally putting it on the map for its unique features.

ReadWriteStart’s Chris Cameron recently profiled Stalqer – a service that maps your friends based on their geotagged Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare status updates. In a similar vein, Noticings leverages an existing service to create a completely new experience. Coupled with augmented reality mobile applications, location-based services like Noticings and Stalqer have done much to get geeks out of their homes into the real world. To join Noticings, check out the game rules at http://noticin.gs/rules.

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If you’ve ever believed that semantic search is meant exclusively for researchers, then Meaning Tool might prove you wrong. Through Popego, the semantic search engine allows you to add your online profile and interests such as “gadgets” or “current news”. From here, Meaning Tool serves you entertaining content from across your social graph. ReadWriteWeb took a look at how the tool works and how it just might bridge the gap between scholars and social media junkies.

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Meaningtool – Demo from Popego on Vimeo.

Meaning Tool is a semantic engine that offers users a chance to extract concepts from text using specific semantic trees. As mentioned, you define your categories of interest by creating search parameters and training them with related websites or RSS feeds. Similar to Open Calais, the service appears to use the linked data standard to retrieve data via dereferenceable URIs on the web. From there you can search text in any Romantic language to produce relevant words and categories. Categories such as “technology” and “security” are then shown in a pie chart to represent the percentage of relevancy the text has to these key categories. The system also offers a tag cloud of relevant keywords and key concepts. And finally, Meaning Tool extracts entities such as mentioned companies, people and places.

Unlike many other semantic search services, your satisfaction with results as a researcher, marketer or general consumer weigh heavily on how you train the system. To find out more about the semantic web, check out our article on semantic search’s myths and realities. To add some of your own interests to Meaining Tool visit meaningtool.com.

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