Author: Liz Gannes

The flags, the speeds, the gates, the snow, the ice, the blades, the luge, the twirling adolescents — get psyched! The Vancouver edition of the Winter Olympics are starting today. Want to follow along online? Here are a few key resources.

Watch live web video: In the U.S. at least, this is WAY less appealing than it should be. Despite the fact that live video technology is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was a few years ago (meaning people would watch for longer and be more satisfied, so you could actually monetize their viewing), NBC is killing off the opportunity to make this a huge video event. You need to prove that you’re a cable, satellite or IPTV subscriber to watch any live video, and the selection of streams lacks all the big events: figure skating, alpine skiing, freestyle skiing, speed skating, snowboarding and short track. Happen to live in another country, say the host nation of Canada? Awesome. They’re planning to offer nine live feeds plus simulcasts of five TV stations, with the goal of showing “every single moment” of the Games online.

See the schedule of events: That’s an easy one. Vancouver Olympics schedule.

Hear from the Olympians themselves: Probably the best place to get the inside scoop or at least a flavor of it is Twitter, which has collected a list of verified Olympian accounts. Facebook is also aggregating updates from Olympians on an official Olympics fan page. There has been a bit of confusion over exactly what athletes are allowed to post, given the IOC released an obnoxious list of blogging guidelines (PDF), preventing athletes from doing things like using the image of the Olympic rings on their blog or publishing images or video from competitions. However a spokesperson for the United States Olympic Committee told Wired.com’s Epicenter that Olympians are free to tweet and blog, saying he expected that “These are going to be the Twitter Olympics…There’s no telling where the updates will come from. It could be the bench during a hockey game, or even on the medal stand.”

See what it’s like to attend: Flickr has created an approved photo group for pictures from in and around the Games. “Although as an attendee of an event you do not have commercial rights (in other words, you can’t sell your photos) you are encouraged to take photos and share them online,” says an announcement blog post.

Meanwhile, other web resources and accounts will surely emerge. One notable omission? From what I can tell there’s very little Olympics presence on YouTube, at least as of yet.

Online video has largely succeeded at many of its goals: It is democratizing media and encouraging a culture of sharing and participation. It’s pushing the television industry to modernize and become more interactive. It’s freeing content from time schedules and repressive windows. It’s driving cable companies to at least consider the true value of the loyalty of their subscribers.

But let’s be honest, it’s done more displacing and destabilizing than it has created wealth. And with a few possible exceptions — say, Blip.tv and Brightcove — no company but YouTube has really been able to grow a ton of value. (YouTube, Google promises, will be profitable any day now!)

Today, on the eve of Veoh declaring bankruptcy (first reported by MediaMemo), we can look back and see an awful lot of venture dollars invested — many of them that have since gone down the drain.

Veoh was actually the first online video company I ever covered, back in the summer of 2005, and if you know anything about me it kicked off a long fascination with the topic, aka our spinoff site NewTeeVee, which I founded three years ago and edited until very recently. Let’s just say I had higher hopes that the startups we covered would go on to become the new giants. Not so much.

Here’s a chart I made a couple years ago (back when many of these companies had already been walking dead, at least in terms of innovation, for a long while). Not a ton has changed since then.

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Google has acquired the social search startup Aardvark for $50 million, according to TechCrunch. We’ve asked both companies for comment, as well as our friends and friends of friends on Aardvark (that’s what it does), but haven’t gotten official confirmation. Update 10:40 a.m. PT: Aardvark co-founder Damon Horowitz confirms the company has been acquired.

The Aardvark founders had formerly worked at Google, so this will be a lucrative return to the fold. On the other hand, it’s an embarrassment for Google that it couldn’t foster the same kind of innovation from them internally.

Aardvark raised $6 million from August Capital and Baseline Ventures in September 2008. Interestingly, it launched on instant messenger and the iPhone before making its way to the web.

As of October 2009, Aardvark said it had 90,000 users, with more than half of them having asked or answered a question. Eighty-eight percent of questions had been answered, and 60 percent within 10 minutes.

Update: Here’s a video interview with Aardvark co-founder Max Ventilla from our What’s Next for the Web? Bunker event back in October. Here he talks about the future of his service, what it’s like being a startup in the real-time space, and springboarding innnovation from existing platforms.

Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive who was picked to revive MySpace last April, is stepping down, News Corp just announced. He’ll be replaced by two of his hires lieutenants, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who now each share the title of co-president, reporting to News Corp digital CEO Jon Miller.

Circumstances around the shake-up aren’t clear yet. Miller was quoted in a press release as basically saying that Van Natta’s personal and professional priorities weren’t in alignment with MySpace. One thing is clear: Running MySpace, and trying to bring it back to relevance, is a tough job.

I’m not sure Shashi Seth knew what he was getting into, but he must have had an inkling. Yahoo’s new SVP of search products (as of three weeks ago) invited the press down to Sunnyvale today to try to “reset” perceptions and misconceptions about Yahoo’s place in search. It didn’t really work, with a string of feature demos unaided by presentation glitches and a power outage leaving everyone asking about comparisons to Google and Bing. The majority of the search features demoed today had already been launched in the last six months — “Search Assist,” integration of Twitter and other sources into Yahoo News, a redesigned main search page. Today’s fresh new launch was a special shortcut for the Winter Olympics (Whoo!).

But Seth — whom I first met when he was deployed from Google to Yahoo almost exactly three years ago, and has since moved to startup Cooliris and then AOL and now Yahoo — managed to win the room over to some extent by acknowledging his underdog status. (Though with that kind of job history, it’s hard to convey you’re in it for the long haul!) By the end, I don’t think anybody really believed that Yahoo would beat Google, but at least they wanted Yahoo to get its act together and try.

Here were the purple-shirt-clad Seth and his team’s core points:

• Seth: “With with Microsoft-Yahoo deal, there is a misconception that Yahoo may not be in the game of search. Yahoo has been in search, is in search, and will continue to be in search in the future.”

• “We have 600 million users who love our content and properties, and we are focusing efforts in search to provide a differentiated experience where people spend a lot of time.” First up is better integration of search within Yahoo’s own properties — for instance, a potential product that would show related content to keywords in the text of an email right within the email (creepy!).

• Seth added, “As for competing with Bing, I’m actually not worried about them, because I think that there is much innovation left to be done in this space, and the core experiences we have around content and communication is going to set us apart and create the next generation of search.”

• Seth called recent search improvements by the competition “incremental change.” He said “We can take bigger risks because we’re not the market leader.”

• This from Larry Cornett, vice president of the Yahoo Search consumer products division, on competitors’ ability to quickly mimic any Yahoo improvements: “Yes they can copy the surface layer, but it sucks. We rock. We think about the science layer, we’re not just adding surface-level candy on top of it.” (Yeah, OK, so it wasn’t total humility!) Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo Labs, emphasized his team’s excellence in the academic community, writing textbooks and winning prizes for their search research.

Google Buzz and the services it supports at launch

I was totally on board with Google Buzz, the company’s late entry into the modern-day social web launching today, until it became dramatically evident how freaked out Google is by Facebook. Despite multiple questions from journalists at today’s press briefing at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, Calif., today about the elephant in the room, the Buzz product team and executives couldn’t manage a single utterance of the word “Facebook.”

Such silence has two implications: One, it speaks to defensive and reactive product design; and two, it shows that Google’s aim is not a fully open and integrated approach. That’s self-defeating, considering the stated aim of Google Buzz is to bring relevance to the world of sharing information online. If Google Buzz is yet another place that privileges its own information creation and recommendations, we users get stuck in another silo. Of course, siloing information can be good for users’ personal privacy as well as any company’s hope to own a market — and we all know Facebook is just as guilty as Google of that.

Still, Google co-founder Sergey Brin limply tried to defend the also-ran social network Orkut’s dominance in its markets and spoke in vague terms about how “at any given time there are definitely successful companies.” Meanwhile both Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz reminded the crowd gathered in person and by webcast that Google was not the first search engine, but won by being better than those it followed.

Buzz product manager Todd Jackson did say, without mentioning Facebook by name but responding to a question about integrating Facebook Connect, “We don’t have anything to announce on that at this time but it’s something that we’ll think about.”

To be fair, Google Buzz looks quite useful. It borrows the best elements of sites like Twitter (status updates, following), Flickr (a nice photo viewer), Friendfeed (condensed real-time information), Tumblr (encouraging commenting on followed friends), Foursquare and Gowalla (location-aware check-ins via mobile), and Yammer and Socialcast (Horowitz said enterprise support is on the way). Oh, and Facebook (private and public sharing controls, in-line media, etc., etc.).

But Google Buzz also adds some extremely useful tweaks:

• Auto-following the 40 people you email and chat with the most from the time you open the product (which is rolling out to Gmail users over the next 24 hours)

• Really nice email integration — this tops Facebook by far, though it could easily get out of control. Buzz items show up directly in your inbox, as well as in a tab within Gmail. You can open an item to comment directly because it’s a “live object with an open connection to the server that gets updates in all time,” as Jackson described it. @replies a la Twitter can lasso someone directly into a thread.

• Recommendations: Buzz learns over time what you like, and highlights items that friends like and share, while collapsing boring messages at the bottom of the screen.

• Good mobile integration — on Android you can use voice to update, and now Buzz comments show up on locations within Google Maps Mobile and on the map itself via little conversation bubbles on the spot they were made from.
  
  Please see the disclosure in my bio about Facebook.

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It’s clear that location is an opportunity ready for its time, but making technology smarter by knowing where we are needs to happen as part of a platform, not be an end unto itself. That’s why I found — and I think many entrepreneurs, developers and investors will find — Phil Hendrix’s new report for GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d) particularly useful. There’s a lot going on here and it’s helpful to get all the pieces in one place.

“Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation in 2010” is immr founder Hendrix’ 56-page primer on the space.

And here are some of his takeaways I found most interesting (all direct quotes from the report):

• Tectonic shifts are (i) making geodata “free”; (ii) improving the level of detail and accuracy of geodata; and (iii) enhancing the variety, richness and usefulness of maps and geodata. Efforts by Google, OpenStreetMap and other new players are expanding access to low-cost, even free, geodata while crowd sourcing and other efforts are simultaneously increasing accuracy, detail and fidelity.

• Given its ease of use and intuitiveness, one application in particular — Visual Search — will soon come to dominate search on mobile devices.

• Although bar codes are commonly associated with buying products, the potential applications of bar codes and QR codes are wide ranging…The open-source model is likely to win out over the closed, publisher-managed model.

• Automatic geotagging will (i) rapidly increase the frequency with which users add “location” to their social data; (ii) dramatically expand the volume of location-specific information produced; and (iii) intensify the need and create significant new opportunities for solutions that help individuals filter, find, access and leverage timely, location-specific content.

• Policies and standards for handling disclosure and location information, interoperable solution and even “privacy setting aggregators” are an urgent need.

• Recognizing the significant window of opportunity, Google, Twitter, Facebook and Apple are competing to be the dominant provider of location-based assets. With its ability to offer location-based services — including location-determination, visual and proximity search and others — “for free,” offsetting the cost through advertising and other revenue sources, Google is uniquely positioned to capitalize on emerging opportunities.

Google plans to add a stream of recent status messages and media from users’ contacts to Gmail as soon as this week, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The feature, which could be announced at a press event tomorrow, would be very much in line with what Google told us it wanted to do to catch up on the social front in 2010: as I wrote last month, “to expose and elicit more of the social network built into the tools that many of us already use.” It also makes a lot of sense, given how central email is to our daily existence and our connections to people.

According to the WSJ’s unnamed sources, the new feature would be a “module” in Gmail where users can click through to see a stream of friends’ updates, YouTube video sharing and Picasa photos. It would be an extension of Gmail’s instant-messenger style status messages, which are displayed along with presence information and currently aren’t archived for search or perusal.

The problem with lightweight incorporation of status updates, though, is that the tools around social streams have already gotten quite complex. Gmail will have to do a good job of understanding who we want to hear from, letting us group and block contacts, and integrating with other updates like Facebook and Twitter. If Google really wants to do this right, it should open everything up to outside developers.

Meanwhile, Yahoo already shows an aggregated stream of status messages and online activity within its web mail product; it calls the feature Yahoo Updates.

Thumbnail photo by Flickr user christyxcore.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” said Arthur C. Clarke. And that’s what Siri, a new virtual personal assistant that’s finally going live in the App Store after some sneak peeks last year, is going for. At the least it will be an excellent party trick.

The Siri app (only recommended for the iPhone 3GS, as it’s rather intensive) connects your natural speech queries to web services APIs to complete complex planning tasks. It understands things like where you are, what accounts you have on various services and the context of the last question you asked. So you can do things like make a restaurant reservation (using OpenTable) then buy tickets and pick available seats for a nearby performance (using StubHub). All you have to do is tell the app what you want and it will process your speech (using Nuance).

This is just the first public release of Siri, and you’re bound to encounter more stalls, crashes and unanswered queries than you’d hope from true Clarke-style tech magic. “This is the earliest possible time we thought it would be useful — not perfect, but useful,” said Co-Founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus in a recent interview.

Siri comes out of SRI’S $150 CALO Project on artificial intelligence, and has raised $24 million in funding from Morgenthaler Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Horizons Ventures. It currently has affiliate and referral relationships with about 20 services. Siri caches what it can through data dumps, but makes real-time web service calls. It’s not as fast as a search, and it won’t help you with the long tail, but it can do quite a few tasks that would take way too much time and hassle in a mobile browser.

“Mobile is chapter one,” said Kittlaus. “If you think about how we interact, you could make a web site, check in through email, send mail to [email protected], IM your buddy Siri…”

Check out the video demo below, which features the somewhat awkward query “I’d like a romantic place for Italian food near my office.”