Category: Internet

Gregory T. Huang wrote:

The Seattle area’s hippest celebration for local software and technology startups is gearing up for its big night. After receiving nearly 7,000 nominations for 11 “best of” categories in Seattle tech, media company Seattle 2.0 is announcing today the finalists for its annual awards show. (Disclosure: I am one of the 36 judges who helped select the finalists.)

Now you, the public, are invited to vote on the finalists starting today, to determine the winners. Community voting will be open until midnight on May 11; anyone can vote on the awards website.

The winners will be announced at the second annual Seattle 2.0 Awards event on May 19th at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center in Seattle. Last year’s event was a smash hit and featured an inspirational talk by Glenn Kelman from Redfin. This year, the keynote speaker will be Jonathan Sposato, the former CEO of Seattle-based Picnik. Picnik, the popular Web-based photo editing startup, was acquired by Google last month in one of the biggest deals of the year. (You can read my interview with Sposato right after the acquisition here.)

Here is the complete list of categories and finalists (there are a lot of them). Good luck to all:

Best Startup: Apptio, BlueKai, BuddyTV, Cheezburger Network, Redfin.

Best Bootstrapped Startup: BigOven, Biznik, Bonanzle, HasOffers, Survey Analytics.

Best Nonprofit Startup: Jolkona, One Bus Away, Startup Weekend, TisBest, Vittana.

Best Startup CEO: Rich Barton (Zillow), Sunny Gupta (Apptio), Glenn Kelman (Redfin), Andy Liu (BuddyTV), Dave Schappell (TeachStreet).

Best Startup Technologist: Damon Cortesi (Untitled Startup), Joe Heitzeberg (WhitePages), Darrin Massena (Picnik/Google), Daryn Nakhuda (TeachStreet), Scott Porad (Cheezburger Network).

Best Startup Designer: Alex Berg (ex-Wetpaint), Greg Bowers (TeachStreet), Aviel Ginzburg (Untitled Startup), Jenny Lam (Jackson Fish Market), Matt Lerner (Front Seat).

Best Venture Capitalist: Geoff Entress (Voyager Capital), Michelle Goldberg (Ignition Partners), Greg Gottesman (Madrona Venture Group), Nick Hanauer (Second Avenue Partners), Andy Sack (Founder’s Co-Op).

Best Angel Investor: Bill Bryant, Clark Kokich, Andy Liu, Dan Rosen, Kelly Smith.

Best Service Provider to Startups: Pearl Chan (CFO Selections), Geir Hansen (Silicon Valley Bank), Eric Koester (Cooley Godward Kronish), Craig Sherman (Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati), Joe Wallin (Davis Wright Tremaine).

Best Entrepreneur Blog: Inspired Startup by Andy Liu, Quick Sprout by Neil Patel, Redfin Blog by Glenn Kelman, Startup Front End by Tony Wright, Untitled Startup Blog by Damon Cortesi & Aviel Ginzburg.

Best Event for Startups: Hops & Chops by Dave Schappell & Daryn Nakhuda, STS Meetings by Chuck Groom & Gaurav Oberoi, TechFlash Live by John Cook, Todd Bishop & Eric Engleman, Ignite Seattle by Brady Forrest et al., Seattle Open Coffee by Andy Sack.

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Gregory T. Huang wrote:

Stop me if this sounds familiar. You work in a tight-knit team that has one or two colleagues who are located in a different office—across the street, across the state, or across the country. You’d like to communicate with them more regularly, but phone calls, e-mails, and video conferences have to do. Inevitably, you feel like you (and they) miss out on some day-to-day interactions that help all of you stay fully connected to the company’s goals and culture.

Microsoft feels your pain—and its researchers are trying to do something about it. That’s why a group from Microsoft Research, based in Redmond, WA, is presenting a paper tomorrow at CHI 2010, the big international conference on human-computer interaction in Atlanta. The team, led by senior researchers Gina Venolia and John Tang, has developed a prototype system that gives a satellite colleague a “telepresence” not just in meetings but in the daily workflow of the hub office. They pull this trick with basically a laptop, speakerphone, and webcams on a cart, plus software to coordinate it all. Their project is called “Embodied Social Proxy,” or ESP.

OK, it’s a pretty jargony name, but it addresses a real and growing need in companies that have satellite workers or that expand to new geographies. The researchers have tested the prototype in four different product groups at Microsoft in addition to their own research group. They’re reporting that it increased the “attention and affinity” of the hub towards the satellite, and that it improved the interpersonal social connections between team members. (Of course, this might be difficult to quantify—more on that below.)

In this globalized era in which teams are being spread over long distances and “virtual” businesses, a number of tech giants are trying to help companies stay culturally tight-knit as they grow larger. The list includes Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Cisco, and Skype, who have led the way in developing technologies for Web conferencing and remote communications. A whole slew of startups are working in related sectors such as social business software (like Jive in Portland, OR) and online project management (like Smartsheet and LiquidPlanner in the Seattle area).They all share the goal of boosting productivity in the face of complexity. Recently, notable technology and business leaders Kelly Jo MacArthur and Stephen Wolfram have emphasized the importance of remote communications in running an organization.

The Microsoft project builds on years of social science and communications research. It also seems decidedly old-school and low-tech. That is part of what makes it interesting, as a complement to social-media efforts to improve business collaboration (including Microsoft’s relatively new FUSE Labs led by Lili Cheng). Microsoft’s ESP effort began in 2008 when Venolia and Tang’s colleague, principal researcher George Robertson, a co-author on the study, moved to Maine to work from home. The team decided to test out a system that was “as simple as possible, to fix what was most broken,” Venolia says.

That meant daily interactions and face-to-face contact. So the team assembled a PC, monitor, some decent wide-view cameras, and a speakerphone, and mounted them on a cart that could be wheeled into meeting rooms (see photo above), or left in a dedicated office space that has become Robertson’s de facto “office” in Redmond. In meetings, the Redmond team can see Robertson’s face at the table and hear his voice, and he can interact with people in the room by controlling different cameras that allow him to focus on a particular person, or a whiteboard, or slides. The most interesting thing is …Next Page »

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Wade Roush wrote:

If you glanced at the software engineering job listings page for Google Boston, you might think that the company’s Kendall Square office has only two positions open. That would be wrong. Site director Steven Vinter says the office has been hiring aggressively since December.

The growth would have started sooner if it hadn’t been for the recession, which didn’t slow Google’s expansion much, but did seem to engender a kind of constipation in the local software community, with people unwilling to risk leaving their current positions, Vinter says. But conditions have eased and the company is now getting more resumes. In any case, the two positions described on the job page—software engineer and software tester—are just roles, Vinter says. The company is hiring many people to fill each one.

In fact, with more than 100 engineers and 100 business development staff spread across four floors at Five Cambridge Center—space the company occupied in early 2008 after outgrowing its cramped quarters at One Broadway—Google Boston has evolved from a mere outpost of Google’s Bay Area headquarters into a major engineering and sales center. I stopped by a couple of weeks ago to hear the latest about the office’s progress from Vinter, whom I last interviewed in depth way back in November 2007. (At that time, the office had half as many people.)

The main point Vinter made, as you’ll read below, is that Google Boston is now big enough to have what he calls “end-to-end” responsibility for major parts of the Google product lineup, including the Chrome browser and operating system, the YouTube server and client infrastructure, Google Book Search, and the Google Friend Connect social Web service. As Xconomy founder Bob Buderi has argued in his book Engines of Tomorrow and elsewhere, it’s crucial for corporate outposts to have this kind of responsibility and autonomy if they want to avoid becoming marginalized within their own companies. My impression is that Vinter has been working hard to make sure that Google Boston isn’t simply a vehicle for hiring talented New England engineers who don’t want to move to Mountain View, but that it builds teams that have a direct impact on Google’s bottom line and on the problems the company is trying to solve.

With major news about Chrome, Chrome OS, Friend Connect, and other products expected later this year, it’s likely that Google Boston’s profile within the company will keep rising. That may be true within the Kendall Square neighborhood as well: Vinter told me he admires Microsoft’s efforts to open up its New England Research and Development Center for tech-community events, and says he’d like Google to be more active in this area. Here’s a writeup of our conversation.

Xconomy: Other than your big move into the Cambridge Center space, what have been the biggest changes since we had that long talk back in 2007?

Steven Vinter: There are two big things. All throughout 2009 we were looking for more candidates to hire, and the thing we didn’t really understand was why there seemed to be so few people making it into Google. We didn’t understand why we wouldn’t have seen a continuous flow. Looking back, I think there were just a lot of people [who were] really uncomfortable with moving. The economic problems, in the same way that they affected consumer confidence, affected people’s concerns about wanting to go out and try something new. But that just disappeared around the December time frame, and we haven’t seen such an influx of talented people since I arrived here. So the challenge for us now is basically to make sure that the projects we have keep step with the level of the incoming folks.

X: During that lull, were you actually getting fewer resumes, or was it that the quality of the applicants was below what you wanted?

SV: More the former. There were just fewer people in the pipeline. One thing that’s helping is that we are aggressively seeking new college grads here. Obviously there is a huge wealth of talent in Boston, but in previous years I was more concerned about …Next Page »

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Un tal “jacekowski” ha logrado ejecutar el navegador web Chromium en su Nokia N900 con Maemo.

El resultado fue bastante bueno, el flash aparece casi correctamente, pero sigue siendo un poco lento, igualmente es un buen comienzo.

Para instalar chromium en el Nokia N900 seguimos los siguientes pasos:

– Descargar chromium-5.0.369.2.deb, libxss-1.1.3.deb y colocarlos en la carpeta Nokia N900 para instalar los archivos.
– Lanzar la terminal como root
– cd /home/user/MyDocs/
– dpkg -i libxss-1.1.3.deb (de esta manera se instalan las librerías necesarias para ejecutar e instalar chromium)
– dpkg -i chromium-5.0.369.2.deb (de esta manera lo instalamos.. y luego ya podemos ejecutarlo como cualquier aplicacion)

Video y explicación cortesía de Test-mobile.fr

Gregory T. Huang wrote:

Redmond, WA-based Concur Technologies (NASDAQ:CNQR) announced this week it has raised $287.5 million in convertible note debt financing, payable at an annual interest rate of 2.5 percent. The notes will mature on April 15, 2015, and will convert into equity if the stock price is above $52.35 per share, which represents a 25 percent increase over $41.88, the closing price of Concur’s common stock on March 30, 2010. Proceeds from the financing will be used for “general corporate purposes, including potential acquisitions and strategic transactions,” according to the release. Concur, which is led by CEO Steve Singh, makes online software for managing employee expenses and corporate travel. Last month, the company announced its product was among the initial set of offerings available in the new Google Apps Marketplace for businesses.

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We’re all aware of AT&T’s recent Android releases with certain Google apps removed or replaced. These are the most restricted Android devices on the market today. Orange may be following suit with their upcoming Android devices. Google Maps, Youtube, Gmail, Gtalk and possibly Search too will all be removed in their devices.

These core Android apps will be replaced by Orange bloatware. Most people buy Android devices to have access to Google’s apps on the mobile. There is a few things to look forward too from Orange’s Androids. Unlike AT&T, you will be able to install apps from places other than the Android market and the upcoming HTC Desire will include all of Google’s apps.

Statement from Orange:

“We customize the software to phones colors of Orange and we add our own applications, without depleting product features”

– If the mail application (eg Gmail) was actually installed by default, subscribers could exchange e-mails without supplementing their package including a simple formula “Unlimited Internet”. But this is not the case with the Orange software alternative that uses protocols not included in the package Internet access! All calls made from that application are billed out of bundle. Unless you opt for the package “Internet, e-mail and unlimited Wi-Fi, charged 11 euros more … Even in this case, we must make a cross to Gmail. This is exactly the same thing with MSN Messenger which replaces Gtalk …

This seems to be a way for them to sell unlimited internet packages to potential customers. moves like these will sway potential users to go elsewhere for their devices.

[via frandroid]