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The Man Corporations Love and Xenophobes Hate

2010-03-20T01:11:57+00:00

During my recent trip to India, I flew down to Bangalore for one reason: To meet N.R. Narayana Murthy. Murthy is the co-founder, executive chairman and former CEO for 21 years of Infosys, the first Indian company to go public on Nasdaq and effectively the company that began the $30 billion Indian IT outsourcing market.

Murthy’s idea was so successful that it quickly became controversial—not only within the United States where some Americans feel Indians are “stealing jobs,” but also in India where many are concerned about a tech economy that doesn’t make anything. I wanted to meet with Murthy, because in many ways he’s the best person to address what Indians at home and abroad are facing and where Indian entrepreneurship goes from here.

Here are a few highlights from our meeting:

His Day Job. Murthy thought he was stepping down from Infosys back in 2002, but he couldn’t fully let go. As such, he still works pretty much full time for the company, traveling to meet with customers and running a lot of the company’s mentoring and training programs. The more surprising aspect of his job: He personally signs off on the architecture of every building on each one of Infosys’ campuses that employ some 17,000 people around the world. The one we were sitting in was spread of eight acres and had some remarkable buildings, including one that looked like the Luxor casino in Las Vegas.

I asked why this was a top priority—after all, many Valley campuses are plush but from an architecture standpoint look about the same. He said when GE and other American multinationals were starting to come into his business everyone thought Infosys would lose the local talent war. So Murthy studied why people want to work at a particular place. One of the results was the comfort and design of the facilities. That was in 1994 when Infosys was designing the very building we were sitting in as we had this conversation. “I’ve been in charge of every building since– all over the world,” he says.

Hurting or Helping Local Entrepreneurship? Given exactly how plush Murthy and his colleagues have worked to make Infosys, has he indirectly hurt Bangalore’s entrepreneurship scene by making the risk of leaving so daunting? He smiled when I asked this and said, “We may have unwittingly. But I do feel like the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and kicking in Bangalore.”

Further, I asked about Bangalore’s Zippo-flipping, free-spending generation of young techies who’ve graduated to a huge wave of multinational jobs that pay them far more than their parents ever made, in many cases more than the rest of their families combined. Murthy didn’t deny that that instant-gratification, “gimmie” contingent was strong in the city he helped build, economically speaking. But he blames the Internet and the mass-cross-pollination of Western pop culture, not the bigger paycheck from companies like his.

“We are moving towards a uniform, global culture with an intense competitive spirit and an intense desire for instant gratification,” he says. “But I have a firm belief that each generation is better than the previous one. The Indian entrepreneurs today are more daring than we were.” (This from a man who became a capitalist after after hitchhiking across communist Eastern Europe and getting thrown in jail for chatting up someone’s girlfriend on a train. “More daring” is a tall order, young Indian techies.)

Is India’s Tech Community Too Addicted to Services? Clearly, services has been a great business for Infosys and the hundreds of dollar-millionaires and even more rupee-millionaires that the company’s generous stock program has created. But a lot of Indian CEOs and investors complain that in most cases services-based tech businesses are a great way to get revenues quick, but not a way to build a huge, high-growth business. There’s a big question of whether India’s tech sector has a worrying lack of product-building know-how.

Murthy says it’s a progression. “India missed the industrial revolution, but Indians had intelligence,” he says. “We had to make do with pen and paper. We were always forced to look at the abstract. What is happening in India today is the creation of jobs. Let’s create jobs as long as they are legal and ethical, it doesn’t matter, as long as we make money. The time will come for creating products. I wouldn’t lose sleep over this. If we create enough jobs we’ll raise the confidence of the youngsters and they’ll create products.”

India’s Infrastructure. Here’s something it’s hard for even Murthy to be upbeat about: India’s shoddy physical infrastructure. Murthy has traveled the world and it’s frustrating that so much money has poured into the country he loves, and yet, the infrastructure is still so shockingly bad.

There is progress—Infosys for instance has benefited from a new overpass that cuts down on the drive to the campus by more than thirty minutes. (See!) But it’s not moving nearly fast enough, he says. “I don’t know if we will reach the level of the United States or China,” he adds.

Murthy gave a more nuanced explanation than the usual “it’s corruption” answer you get in India. He explained that 65% of India’s population lives in rural areas and 35% live in cities. And there’s such polarity between the quality of life that politicians have to appear to be doing more for the villages than the cities if they want to get re-elected. That leaves prosperous economic cities blighted by poor sewage systems, pollution spewing generators and beggars weaving through traffic tapping on car windows. “Different emerging nations take different paths,” he says. “In China, they chose to emphasize giving people economic freedom first and political freedom second. In India we chose the opposite path.”

Hurting or Helping US-based Indians? All you have to do is read the comments on one of Vivek Wadhwa’s posts to see the ugly, anti-immigrant, anti-Indian fervor that’s been whipped up in America, post-recession. A lot of it has to do with outsourcing. I asked Murthy if he felt his company and industry’s huge success has indirectly made life harder for Indian-Americans. He turned the blame on xenophobes like Lou Dobbs and grandstanding politicians who use the wedge issue to get viewers and votes.

But it’s an issue he has to address a lot. He answers it by saying every morning he gets up and gets a Pepsi out of his GE Fridge and drives his American car to work where he sits down at his Dell computer. India used to have companies that made soft drinks, refrigerators, cars and computers. But the American ones were better. Allowing them in hurt Indian workers in the short term, but provided a far better quality of life for a much bigger swath of Indians long term. He argues outsourcing has done the same thing for US companies. Greater efficiencies and cost-savings enables these companies to stay competitive and there’s no reason they can’t—in theory—plow those savings into better local jobs or job training.

This argument isn’t going to pacify hate-mongers, because nothing will. Murthy knows that too and while he regrets it, he seems to accept it as reality.

Advice for Entrepreneurs. Murthy has started a $170 million venture fund, so although he spends most of his time still at Infosys, he clearly cares about encouraging the next generation of entrepreneurs. He had two big pieces of advice for them. One, be able to articulate what you do in one sentence. If you can’t, you don’t have a good idea. And two, make sure the market is ready. Businesses are killed, not congratulated, for being ahead of their time.

Opera, Safari Beat Chrome On Google’s Own JavaScript Conformance Test

2010-03-20T01:11:56+00:00

Back in June, Google launched Sputnik, a suite of tools that runs over 5,000 tests to check a web browser’s JavaScript conformance. Last week, they made the tool a lot easier for anyone to use, with a version that works in the web browser. The results are interesting.

Notably, both the Opera and Safari web browsers beat Google’s own Chrome browser in the test. As you can see in the picture above, Opera is the clear leader, with only 78 failures (the closer to the center, the less errors). Safari came in second with 159 errors, with Chrome in third with 218 errors. Firefox is close behind with 259 errors, while Internet Explorer is the outlier with 463 errors.

These tests were run on Windows machines, with the latest released version of each browser. Using the web tool on my Mac, though, shows similar results (at least for Opera, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox — there is no IE for Mac anymore).

While much of the focus on JavaScript is about speed (that’s what the SunSpider test measures, for example), Sputnik is interesting because it focuses on conformity, making it more like the Acid3 test, which tests web standards compliance. Chrome, Safari, and Opera have all passed Acid3, with Firefox getting very close (94/100 for Firefox 3.6). IE, meanwhile, again lags behind with just 20/100 for IE8. And even the new IE9 preview only scores 55/100.

Speaking of IE9, I tried to run the Sputnik tool in the preview build of the new browser on Windows 7. Unfortunately, it completely shut down several times after getting up to about 50 failures after only a few hundred of the 5,000+ tests — not a good sign. But again, it’s just a very early preview release of the browser, and early SunSpider results for the browser have been good.

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Review: Aperture 3

2010-03-20T01:11:56+00:00

If you’re a photographer and use a Mac, chances are you’re using Lightroom or Aperture. Probably Lightroom, since Aperture is less popular among pros — and the latest version seems to be an acknowledgment of that. The features added in version 3 are clearly intended to draw casual shooters using iPhoto to the paid image editing honey pot.

Since so many of these amazing new features are direct side-loads from iPhoto, it smooths the process and makes the program as a whole more approachable, though whether existing Aperture users will find them helpful is questionable. Brushes, on the other hand, are a welcome addition to any photographer’s toolset, and depending on how dedicated you are, may be worth the price of admission.

Stat Rant: Does Facebook Trumps Google For News & Can’t We Measure Twitter Correctly?

2010-03-20T01:21:32+00:00

Earlier this week, Hitwise put out stats suggesting that Facebook is beating Google and Twitter when it comes to driving traffic to news sites. I dug a little deeper, and I beg to differ. Along the way, some pokes at the need to more digging into stats in general. The Hitwise blog post reported that Twitter [...]

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Crocodoc Sets Its Sights On Adobe Acrobat With New Update

2010-03-20T01:11:56+00:00

Last month we wrote about Crocodoc, a new Y Combinator-funded company that makes it very easy to upload a text document or PowerPoint deck and mark it up online to share with your colleagues. Unfortunately, it was also pretty bare boned — you couldn’t even save your edited document to your hard drive. Today, that’s changing: Crocodoc has rolled out some key new features (including the ability to save) that make the service significantly more flexible, and also pits it more directly against Adobe’s Acrobat Pro.

Aside from the ability to save to PDF, the new version includes a freehand pen tool, a tool to convert any website to PDF (which you can then add notes to), and a new API. In a few days, the company will be releasing its application on Google’s recently-launched App Marketplace. The service will also be rolling out a Flash-based embeddable document viewer (similar to what you’ll find on DocStoc and Scribd) that lets you both view and mark up embedded documents.

CEO Ryan Damico says that these features make Crocodoc more competitive with Adobe’s $400 Acrobat Pro software because the free Acrobat Reader most people have doesn’t allow them to mark up and save their documents (personally, I’ve been avoiding any software with the word ‘Acrobat’ in its title for years). Damico does acknowledge that there are still plenty of premium features that Crocodoc doesn’t have that Adobe’s paid software does, but says that this basic editing/saving functionality is what most people are after, anyway. Damico says that in the long term, Crocodoc is hoping to “do to Acrobat what Gmail did to Outlook” by taking a widely used desktop application and bringing it online.

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Google enhances the "Places of Interest" layer

2010-03-19T22:23:28+00:00

Google has just made some changes to the organization of the Layers in Google Earth, as seen below:

The biggest change involves the "Places of Interest". Not only did it move from the bottom of the list to nearly the top, but it's undergone some major changes. In the previous version, it had a huge list of subitems you could select. Those are gone, in favor of a single checkbox.

Google has also redone the icons in Google Earth, as well as the way they appear. When you're high in the air viewing an area, you'll only see icons for major attractions (stadiums, museums, airports, etc). As you zoom in closer, you'll see smaller items, such as restaurants and and hotels. There are still a lot of items that show up in the middle of the street, but hopefully people will continue to reposition the markers to make things more precise.

Other changes in the list include:

• Panoramio getting top-level treatment instead of being buried in "Geographic web".
• Traffic moved from the top-level into the "More" category.
• Quite a bit of reordering (see the screenshot above).

This is the first major change to the Layers list in quite a while, and it seems like it was very well-planned. What do you think of the changes?

Google Hands Of Its First 1337 Cash Prize For A Chrome Bug

2010-03-19T21:44:53+00:00

Back in January, Google announced that it would follow Mozilla’s lead and start offering cash bounties for bugs found in the code of Chromium (the open-source browser behind Chrome), or Chrome by the community. Google both matches Mozilla’s $500 and ups the bounty all the way up to $1,337 (yes, 1337) for “particularly severe or particularly clever” bugs. This week, they rewarded the first of those.

As noted on the Chrome Release blog, Google made four cash payments on Wednesday. There were two $500 prizes (both for memory errors), one $1,000 prize (for a cross-orgin bypass), and the first-ever $1,337 prize. The lucky receipient of that was a man named Sergey Glazunov, who located a bug that Google is calling, “High Integer overflows in WebKit JavaScript objects.”

This crowd-sourced bug hunting seems like a great idea, especially for a browser moving through development as quickly as Chrome. Chrome has only existed for a year and a half and already they’re testing version 5.0. Stable builds of both the Mac and Linux version of the browser are likely to launch at some point over the next few months.

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Green E-Biller Transactis Raises $2.5 Million

2010-03-19T21:44:53+00:00

Banks, cable companies, and utilities all want to get rid of their paper bills and get customers on their electronic billing systems. Just as there were back-office billing providers for the paper era, there are now back-office electronic billers. A company in Charlotte, North Carolina called Transactis is one of them, and it just raised a $2.5 million round led by New York City-based Metamorphic Ventures. CEO Joe Proto and other existing shareholders also participated in the round.

The round is an extension of a $3 million series C the company raised last year, and brings the total capital raised to $10.5 million.

Transactis works primarily with banks and payment processors to take over the whole e-billing process for them, from presenting the bills via email to collecting the cash. More and more consumers are opting to go paperless (it’s the green thing to do), and companies save on the paper, printing, and postage costs.

Email billing is a growth business, and Transactis is carving out a nice little niche for itself.

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One on One: Christopher Poole, Founder of 4chan

2010-03-19T20:50:53+00:00

An interview with Christopher "Moot" Poole, founder of 4Chan, the racy message board.

Location Isn’t A War Between Two Sides, It’s A Gold Rush For Everyone

2010-03-19T21:44:52+00:00

Editor’s note: This post was written by Joe Stump, the co-founder of SimpleGeo, a geolocation infrastructure company. While much of the focus in location these days is on the front-end side of things, SimpleGeo focuses on the backend, allowing startups to very easily get started with geolocation.

There’s been a lot of coverage lately about the location “war” between Gowalla and Foursquare. Nobody is arguing that Gowalla and Foursquare aren’t, on some levels, competing, but I do think a lot of people are missing the big picture here. Which is the impending location gold rush.

My cofounder, Matt Galligan, and I firmly believe that location is in a similar position as social was in 2001 or so. By that I mean that, at the time, social was very nascent, but exciting as it gave us a whole new view of the data we consume every day. Over the course of almost 10 years we’ve seen social get baked into everything from photo sharing to financial tools. I think that location, similarly, gives us an interesting new view of our data.

This momentum has been slowly gaining steam since, essentially, the iPhone was released. We, the developers and general nerd populous, finally had an open platform that had location (in the form of latitude and longitude of our users) baked into it. The first wave of location services made location the core feature. Much like social, this isn’t sustainable long-term. You can’t be “Some Company plus location” and expect to sustain users. Especially after Some Company enables location themselves.

Which bring us to the second wave of location, which I think was started by our friends at Foursquare. They were, in my opinion, the first product to gain traction by moving past simple location and building an experience on top of it. It’s as if co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai said, “Okay, we have location, but that’s boring. Let’s make a game out of going out with our friends!” In other words, they worked under the assumption of having location and built a compelling experience from there.

I think people who are building location-based applications need to keep two things in mind:

1. If there’s any war brewing, it’s over presence. That is the very basic question of where you and your friends are and who may know those details. Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, et al, if they wish to own presence, will be duking it out with Twitter and Facebook. For anyone who’s not already in this game it’s going to be very hard to break into it at this point.

2. You need to move past the mindset that location is the feature. Build products under the assumption that you have a user’s location and that you can use the social plumbing we’ve been building for the last nine years. What kind of interesting experiences can you build on top of the potent mixture of friends, location, and the real world?

So who’s going to win? More than just one company. The users are going to get more interesting and compelling experiences, some familiar names will revolutionize their products with location, and some kid in a garage we haven’t heard of is about to make us all look like fools.

I can’t wait.

[photo: flickr/bogenfreund]

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Apple Starts Accepting iPad Applications; Launch Apps Must Be Submitted By March 27

2010-03-19T21:44:52+00:00

There are only two weeks left until the iPad’s April 3 launch date, and Apple has just started reaching out to developers to say that they’re accepting applications that were developed specifically for the device. We’ve included the Email below. The key takeaway: If you’re looking to have your app available at launch, you need to submit it by March 27, at which point Apple’s team will let you know if your application is ready for the grand opening.

The first few weeks after the iPad is released will be a huge gold rush opportunity, as users look to try out the device’s large screen for the first time. In short, if you can make it to one of the App Store’s ‘top apps’ lists, you’ll likely do very well for yourself. The only problem is that the vast majority of developers have never had access to an actual iPad — they’re all working off of emulators, save for a handful of extremely lucky developers who literally have their iPads chained to a desk. Developers can tweak their applications all they want on their computer monitors, but until they’ve actually gotten to try it out for themselves, they’ll have a hard time figuring out if their apps feel right.

I expect most developers will scramble to submit what they have by March 27, and that we’ll then see numerous updates immediately afterward as developers tweak button placement and other interface elements. Some developers may choose to simply wait until they have a device in their hands so that they can try out their apps before submitting, but the App Store’s discoverability issues make this a risky move (of course, given the hundreds or thousands of applications that will launch alongside the iPad, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get noticed on launch day, either).

Keep in mind that users will also be able to use scaled-up versions of iPhone applications on their iPads. Given the choice, though, there’s little doubt they’ll choose a native iPad app over an iPhone app every time.

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Friday Fun - Part Two

2010-03-20T01:12:32+00:00

Google Earth Guys - The Job is Never DoneCollegeHumor's Google Street View guys are back:If you missed the Google Earth guy's first outing then check out CollegeHumours Google Street View Guys video._____________

Yahoo Chief Technologist Sam Pullara Leaves To Become An EIR At Benchmark

2010-03-19T21:44:52+00:00

One of Yahoo’s key chief technologists, Sam Pullara, is leaving the company to become an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital. Pullara was the technologist how headed up the development of the the Yahoo! Open Application Platform, the Yahoo! Query Language and Yahoo! Pipes. His departure follows that of veteran Yahoo senior executive Ash Patel earlier this week.

Back in 2008, Yahoo was making a big push to open itself up to developers, and Pullara was one of the champions of that strategy. He was also Yahoo’s representative on the OpenSocial Foundation, which sought to create a counterweight to Facebook.

Pullara has been an EIR before. In 2004, he held that position at Accel Partners and created a startup called Gauntlet Systems, which he sold to Borland in 2006. At Benchmark, he will be looking for new startup opportunities. He will also be working again with Benchmark partner Peter Fenton, who was at Accel when Pullara was there. Pullara’s last day at Yahoo will be on April 1. Yahoo has no plans to hire a replacement.

Today, another Benchmark EIR, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, was named CEO of Eucalyptus Systems.

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Bootstrapped Social Network For Families Genoom Hits 1 Million Users

2010-03-19T21:44:52+00:00

Who says you can’t attract a substantial number of users on a shoestring budget?

Spain-based social networking platform provider Genoom, which lets family members communicate amongst each other on private online community sites, is about to sign up its millionth user.

This isn’t exactly a huge milestone, but I think it is noteworthy since the startup is operating on a mere $80,000 in seed funding, which it raised from Midatel roughly 3 years ago.

Genoom was launched in July 2007 and will cross the 1 million registered users mark by this weekend. According to company spokesperson Bob Samii, the site is now available in 17 languages and counts more than over 10 million profiles from families all over the world.

On the Genoom website, users can add family trees, personal information, photos, videos, and related documents about ancestors and living relatives alike, limiting access to uploaded information through invitations and custom group privacy settings. This makes the service effectively a marriage between genealogy and social networking.

Genoom offers a handy Facebook application, allowing users to access their family tree and communicate with family, all while logged into their Facebook account.

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WorkSnug Augmented Reality iPhone App Hits SF And NYC For Mobile CoWorkers

2010-03-19T21:44:52+00:00

WorkSnug, an augmented reality iPhone app that is setting out to connect "mobile workers" (that's everybody now, right?) to the nearest places to work in major cities, is now live in New York and San Francisco. This follows launches in London and Barcelona. To kick-start a process to reach scale they've used volunteers and app users to visit and review hundreds of workspaces where the coffee is good and the screaming kids are less prevelant - rating WiFi, noise levels, power provision, "community feel", with the idea that we all hang out in a mobile kind of way these days. They have an Augmented Reality iphone app [iTunes Store link] which pulls in data from the site.

Twitter Working On ‘Most Popular Tweets’ Search Project

2010-03-19T18:00:38+00:00

Twitter’s search team is working on a project to uncover the most popular tweets for any search query, but it’s unclear when or where the project might be implemented. Taylor Singletary, a Developer Advocate at Twitter, announced and described the project today in a post on the Twitter API Announcements group. The Search team is working [...]

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Apple iPad? The Germans Have Other Ideas

2010-03-19T17:49:26+00:00

While every man and his dog is waiting for their preordered iPad to arrive, some Germans went their own way and yesterday presented a Slate that appears to have, well, better features. The Neofonie WePad has similar form and function as the wet dreams of our Crunchgear editors, but facts are that the German Android device has a bigger multitouch screen and a faster CPU than the iPad. Also it runs Flash, has USB ports, an inbuilt card reader and expandable memory. Additionally it allows complete multitasking and has a webcam. Beat that baby.

Former MySQL Chief Lands at Eucalyptus

2010-03-19T20:50:53+00:00

Marten Mickos has opted to run another high-flier in the open-source software world.

OneRiot Rolls Out Realtime Ad Unit That Refreshes To Match Trending Topics

2010-03-19T17:49:26+00:00

Last year, OneRiot ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. The search engine also launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, that has since been integrated into the search engine’s API. Today, the realtime search startup is improving upon its advertising product by offering Trending Ad unit that automatically updates in realtime corresponding to the the most popular trending topics at the time.

The ability to update in realtime allows OneRiot to show advertiser content that is relevant to trending topics as they emerge on networks like Twitter, Facebook and the web. The ads are available via standard-size IAB Ad Units and is enabled by OneRiot’s realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm. And previously, OneRiot’s “Trending Ads” were available only via OneRiot’s API. This meant that developers had to integrate the raw feed into their applications, and create their own UI. The new ad unit allows any website currently monetizing with standard static ad units to display RiotWise Trending Ads.

In order to implement he new ad unit, publishers need to integrate Trending Ad Units in the same way they would call standard ad units. The ads will then link to realtime and relevant content from OneRiot’s network of media partners. One Riot claims that the realtime relevance of the ads leads to click through rates at four times the average rates.

Currently OneRiot’s trending ads have been used on Twitter apps (ÜberTwitter) and desktop clients (Digsby). OneRiot shares revenue with the application developer. As we’ve written in the past, OneRiot runs the risk of surfacing irrelevant or spammy content with realtime ads, especially is the ads are refreshing constantly to match trending topics. But as a realtime search engine, OneRiot has invested heavily in spam prevention and is constantly sorting through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. Regardless, it seems like a viable monetization tool for developers.

The startup, which just raised $7 million in funding, has been steadily innovating its product and is gathering up partners quickly. The realtime stream ramped up this year with all the big players adding functionality to their search offerings and OneRiot was smart to get in the game early.

Google’s Need For Speed Is About Making You Search More

2010-03-19T17:49:26+00:00

Google’s obsession with speed is well-documented. One of the primary design principles behind its search engine is to return results as fast as possible and strip away anything extra. But its need for speed goes well beyond search. All of Google’s apps are optimized for speed (well, except Gmail lately, but they promise to fix that). The Chrome browser is extremely fast, and the upcoming Chrome OS is also expected to make Web browsing and other computing tasks zippier.

It almost doesn’t matter if Google’s Chrome browser and OS gain significant market share or not, as long as they push other browsers and operating systems to keep up in the speed race. Google’s need for speed boils down to one very simple thing: money. It realized long ago that every millisecond improvement in pageload times on its search engine resulted in more searches, and thus more search ads served and clicked on. The opposite is also true. Google once did a study showing that delays of 100 to 400 millisecond in showing search results translated into up to 0.6 percent searches. Multiply that across the billions of searches done on Google and it starts to add up to real money, perhaps tens of millions of dollars per quarter.

Google can keep trying to make search faster because that is under its control. But what about the rest of the Web? The faster pages load, the more Web pages people will visit overall (this is why broadband adoption is the single biggest driver of Internet traffic and e-commerce). And it stands to reason that the more Web pages you visit, the more searches you will perform in any given day. Because searches are driven by the other things you do on the Web. You go look for information, surf around, and then go back to search when you want to find something new (at least Google hopes you do). By helping to speed up the Web, Google can speed up that information loop so that instead of waiting for Web pages to load you can get what you need and start another search instead.

No wonder Google tries to do everything it can to make the Web faster. For instance, it is supporting emerging standards such as HTML5 and SPDY, and sharing its best practices and speed-monitoring tools with developers. It is also baking the PuSH protocol into Google Reader and other apps. In doing so, Google is helping to deliver news feeds faster (PuSH, aka Pubsubhubbub, was created by two Google engineers, of course, and released as an open-source project). The list goes on and on.

It is all about trying to get people to achieve a “flow state” where they are just clicking from one link to the next and it all happens instantaneously. In order for humans not to notice electronic delays, new information needs to appear in a matter of milliseconds. Get the whole Web humming like that and we may never leave our monitors.

Photo credit: Flickr/ Ana Patricia Almelda

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Skype Legend Morten Lund Will Rock GeeknRolla, April 20, London

2010-03-19T17:49:26+00:00

We've just confirmed that Morten Lund, possibly the quintessential European tech entrepreneur/investor - will be keynoting at this year's GeeknRolla in London on April 20. An entrepreneur from Copenhagen, Denmark, Lund is a talismanic figure on the European scene. While many tech players in Europe are accused of being too timid, this is a guy who - like many Silicon Valley players - bets a lot of chips at once. Indeed, his story reads like a roller-coaster ride in European entrepreneurship. Wikipedia describes Lund as a startup 'ideologist' and 'visionary' who has founded or co-invested in more than 40 high-tech start ups in the last decade, most famously Skype. In May 2008 he exited Danish social networking and mobile backup site ZYB to operator Vodafone Europe for around $49m.

March Madness in Google Earth

2010-03-19T14:46:09+00:00

Google has just created a few files to help show off the venues for this year's NCAA Basketball Tournament. All of the venues in this tournament are in 3D in Google Earth and are quite impressive to view.

You can view them all by downloading this KMZ file, or you can view them all in a special MyMap that they've created. In addition, you can view the 14 venues by downloading this KML tour or browsing them all in EarthSwoop.

New Media Infrastructure Company Ankeena Networks Raises $16 Million (Update)

2010-03-19T17:49:26+00:00

Ankeena Networks, a Santa Clara, CA-based provider of new media infrastructure solutions, has raised approximately $16 million in ~~new~~ VC funding, according to a regulatory filing (via peHUB).

Update: small oversight from the good people at peHUB – which we didn’t catch either – but this isn’t actually a new round but an amendment filing:

The company had reported back in 2008 that it had secured $8.5 million of a $9.4 million Series A round, and this new filing is actually an amendment. The company later announced a $6.5m extension in the summer of 2009, although did not submit an SEC filing.

The new report says that the securities were first sold in 2008, and we should have caught it. Our error was due to the fact that the filing was not labeled as an amendment (that’s just an explanation for our original post, not an excuse).

The company’s total funding stands at roughly $16 million. Apologies for any confusion.

No word about who backed the company with this ~~third round of financing~~, but Ankeena Networks was listed by one of its main business partners, Juniper Networks as one of their investments when they announced their $50 million fund recently, so that’s one name at least. Ankeena has also secured funding from VC firms Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures.

Ankeena Networks’ flagship product is a content delivery platform dubbed Media Flow Director, which enables mobile operators and other service providers to take advantage of rising consumer demand for mobile content and other rich media content across mobile devices, PCs and televisions.

MFD aims to ensure users receive a smooth viewing experience without buffering or stuttering despite of varying network conditions, regardless of the viewing device, over mobile as well as wire-line broadband networks. Ankeena does this by dynamically detecting the available bandwidth and varying the delivery bit-rate.

Ankeena Networks was born under another name, Nokeena, back in 2008. The company was co-founded by CEO Rajan Raghavan, chief strategy and technology officer Prabakar Sundarrajan, chief strategy and technology officer, VP of Engineering Kumar Narayanan and Jaspal Kohli, chief architect, along with Deepak Srinivasan, VP of Business Development.

Collectively, this team brings leadership expertise from companies like Akamai/Speedera, Cisco, Citrix/NetScaler, Exodus Communications, HP, IBM, InSilicon/Virtual Chips, Intel, Level 3 Communications, Mirapoint and Yahoo.

One to watch closely.

CrunchBase Information

Ankeena Networks

Information provided by CrunchBase

GEB app now available on Android

2010-03-19T14:46:09+00:00

Earlier this year, we showed you the iPhone app that we had created. We're pleased to announce that our Android app is now available too!

The app is very similar to the iPhone app -- it shows you our recent entries, videos and Tweets. Once again, we thank MotherApp for making it possible.

If you have an Android-powered phone (Droid, Nexus One, etc), you can find the app from the Android Market on your phone. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!

Interview: Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie on Silverlight and Windows Phone

2010-03-19T17:49:26+00:00

This year's MIX 2010 was led by Scott Guthrie, who has emerged from Microsoft's rank and file to own just about everything developer-related. Where last year's MIX and PDC conferences were spearheaded by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, Guthrie's keynote appearances focused on the progress Silverlight has made in driving the company's 3 Screens and the Cloud approach to the disruptions going on in mobile, television, and the Web OS desktop. I spoke with Scott after his opening day keynote in Las Vegas: