Traveling Geeks Are Going to London!
Written on 3rd July 2009
0 COMMENTS 
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Although I just recently returned from Internet Week New York, I’m about to set foot on another exciting, new adventure. From July 5 to July 10, I’ll be traveling around London together with my Geeky friends. aka The Traveling Geeks. The TG’s are a small informal group of technology bloggers and influencers who like to travel to various regions around the world, collaborate with technology innovators and leaders on interesting projects and then share everything with the rest of the world via blogs, videos, podcasts and social networks.
On this trip, we’ll be on the hunt for innovative uses of new technologies in Great Britain, especially by lesser-known companies, and spotlight how those innovations may improve people’s lives. We’ll also compare the thought (more…)
Blonde 2.0, blonde20, craig newmark, Howard Rheingold, jd lasica, jeff saperstein, london, meghan asha, renee blodgett, robert scoble, sarah austin, sarah lacy, sky schuyler, susan bratton, techcrunch europa awards, tom foremski, traveling geeks, traveling geeks tweetupDoNanza: The Freelance Job Search Tool Launches
Written on 29th June 2009
4 COMMENTS
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
In a time of extreme economic downturn and rocketing unemployment rates, it’s nice to see a clever startup launching just in time to fill the needs of those hungry job searchers. DoNanza.com is a search tool specifically designed for freelancers and enthusiasts looking to find online jobs or projects that they can do from anywhere, in exchange for money and professional exposure in their field. With the combination of a simple interface and user-friendly filters, (more…)
WorldMate, the mobile travel service, comes to the iPhone
Written on 4th June 2009
2 COMMENTS
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
WorldMate
is huge in the mobile world -it first started as a Palm OS app back in 2000. Then, as today, they realized that “travel = mobile” and so it made sense to build a mobile application for travelers. WorldMate had an innovative approach and built what was the industry’s first on-device portal with a myriad of travel content for online/offline use. WorldMate was so successful that many PDA/Smartphone makers including Nokia, Palm, HP, and Sony Ericsson pre-installed it on their devices. More than 3 million people use WorldMate across the Symbian, BlackBerry, Palm OS and Windows Mobile platforms.
But that was then when making mobile apps meant being pre-installed on a pre-sale phone. The world has moved on since the launch of the iPhone to a new world of online application stores. Now with after the SDK 3.0 and right before the expected launch of iPhone 3.0, WorldMate has come to the iPhone app store.
In many ways this is a huge validation of the iPhone platform, it’s one of the first dedicated for business applications of the kind that are huge in the BlackBerry world to make the platform jump to an appstore full of shall we say “less serious” applications (you can see more of this attitude in the latest WorldMate Max video embedded below).
It’s easy to see why they are coming to iPhone, the potential market is huge; there about 40 million business travelers in the US that take over 200 million trips totaling $200 billion in sales. According to WorldMate these “road warriors” are continually jostled around with 30%+ of flights are delayed or cancelled, with meeting schedules change all the time, and because there’s a lot of stress trying to make split second decisions in unfamiliar environments with a lack of relevant information. What’s more, these travelers spend on average $1000 per trip. WorldMate is the only service to that can help by effectively aggregating this disparate information. But that is only half the battle. WorldMate further distinguishes itself in that it can take this information and turn it into solutions. For example, if your flight is delayed, WorldMate will let you know and then suggest all the alternative flights you can take instead to make it to your destination on time.
WorldMate in both its free and Gold versions have both shot to the top 20 apps in the travel category and it seems that not only is WorldMate ready for iPhone, iPhone is ready for WorldMate.
Friends Go Head to Head on XPO Games
Written on 25th May 2009
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Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Social gaming has become huge in the last year, reason being that playing games is naturally a social activity. Social gaming basically combines the best of the gaming portals with the social network platform. What’s so great about this idea, is that the social tools offered, enable casual gamers to play in a much more fun, interesting and competitive environment. It not only allows friends to share their scores with one another, it creates a fun way for people to interact, create and receive feedback.
While more and more gaming sites are hopping on this trend, XPO Games is one trend hopper who’s doing it right.
XPOGames
describe themselves as a fully-featured social network for both casual gamers and game developers. Gamers can join the fun; play original casual games and use the featured socializing tools to meet new people and share their experiences, while developers can submit and expose their originally created games and monetize them. XPO Games launched in 2007 by Daniel Yaron and Hagay Nave when they realized the void and solitude one can experience on other casual gaming websites. “The games were there, but the community and social tools weren’t!” says Daniel Yaron. They decided to go beyond the portal functionality by including features such as the ability to like games, create profiles, friend other users, send them messages, post on walls, utilize the live scoring system and news feed, and win trophies. In addition to all this, the XPO Games platform allows developers to ask users for feedback on which games to create.
Gaming just makes more sense when you play against your buddies. Daniel and Hagay have realized this and have taken it to the next level.
XPO Games is still in private Beta and we’ve got 1000 invites specially for The Next Web readers! Get yours here.
Friends Go Head to Head on XPO Games
Written on 21st May 2009
0 COMMENTS
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Social gaming has become huge in the last year, reason being that playing games is naturally a social activity. Social gaming basically combines the best of the gaming portals with the social network platform. What’s so great about this idea, is that the social tools offered, enable casual gamers to play in a much more fun, interesting and competitive environment. It not only allows friends to share their scores with one another, it creates a fun way for people to interact, create and receive feedback.
While more and more gaming sites are hopping on this trend, XPO Games is one trend hopper who’s doing it right.
XPOGames describe themselves as a fully-featured social network for both casual gamers and game developers. Gamers can join the fun; play original casual games and use the featured socializing tools to meet new people and share their experiences, while developers can submit and expose their originally created games and monetize them. XPO Games launched in 2007 by Daniel Yaron and Hagay Nave when they realized the void and solitude one can experience on other casual gaming websites. “The games were there, but the community and social tools weren’t!” says Daniel Yaron. They decided to go beyond the portal functionality by including features such as the ability to like games, create profiles, friend other users, send them messages, post on walls, utilize the live scoring system and news feed, and win trophies. In addition to all this, the XPO Games platform allows developers to ask users for feedback on which games to create.
Gaming just makes more sense when you play against your buddies. Daniel and Hagay have realized this and have taken it to the next level.
XPO Games is still in private Beta and we’ve got invites for all Blonde 2.0 readers! Get yours here.
A Conversation with Ziv Navoth
Written on 8th April 2009
0 COMMENTS
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
AOL
sure is in an interesting place these days, they have a brand new CEO (ex Google VP Tim Armstrong), a legacy dial-up access business that more than twenty years after it was launched still makes billions of dollars a year and the rest of AOL split up into three different groups; Platform A which is one of largest advertising networks, Media Glow which includes AOL.com and mega blogs like TMZ and Engadget and the group which most interests me; People Networks which includes AIM, ICQ, Bebo, Yedda, Goowy and the newly acquired SocialThing.
People Networks are now planning an extensive synergy of all these properties (and also 3rd party outside content) under the banner of “life streaming” where users will be able to syndicate all their online activity into one stream.
I was lucky enough yesterday to have a conversation with Ziv Navoth SVP Marketing at People Networks, Ziv is a very interesting guy; at Bebo where he ran marketing, he grew the user base from 22 million to 45 million users and pioneered numerous innovations including a new business model for media companies to distribute and monetize their content and a new form of online entertainment, combining original productions with brand sponsorship. Since the Bebo acquisition his task at AOL is to expand a network already 90+ million strong. See my full conversation with him below.
Photo-Finder Will Find You Wherever You Are
Written on 24th March 2009
9 COMMENTS
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
The Facebook
photos application has been by far Facebook’s biggest success, the easy to use interface for uploading pics from your computer and then brilliant point-and-click tagging of friends has proved intensely viral; there are now more than fifteen billion photos on Facebook, making it the largest collection of pictures in human history. More than 850 million new photos are uploaded a month with no signs of slowing down, and Facebook’s servers display twenty billion photos every month.
The question is; how many of those pictures are of you? Well you know how many of them you’ve been tagged in but how many photos are out there that you have no idea about? A new application launched today aims to answer that question.
Photo-Finder will go through all the albums in Facebook that your account has access to, and using their fast, powerful and accurate facial recognition technology, scan Facebook to find untagged photos and let you browse through the results. There’s no need to train Photo Finder, it does that for you. Photo Finder shows you all of the results sorted by accuracy or date, letting you review its findings so that future searches become more accurate. With Photo Finder you also get notified whenever a photo of you gets posted, even if no one tagged it. Photo-finder lets you know first and gives you the chance to hide potentially embarrassing photos from other Photo Finder users.
Photo-Finder also has the ability to push information on newly discovered photos to your FB news feed, giving this app a real chance to go viral as more and more people discover pics they never knew about.
The Technology behind this app was developed by the app’s creatorsFace.com. This patent-pending technology is based on Face.com ’s own proprietary algorithms that allow them to achieve high accuracy for recognizing faces in the real-life photos of the web on a massive scale. In an experimental real-life faces dataset (“Labeled Faces in the Wild”) organized by the University of Massachusetts, an Hybrid descriptor-based algorithm published together with the face.com team outperformed significantly best-known algorithms to date; comparison at http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html .
It seems that Photo-Finder has a very real chance of changing the way we interact with the Facebook photos platform and perhaps give us a real taste of a future where computers can actually recognize very complex visual data like faces and correctly tag them. The founders behind Face are close friends of mine and knowing their combined set of skills and technological abilities, I am certain that this application will be more technologically advanced than any other we’ve seen so far.
Downtown Defender Bridges the Gap Between Casual and Serious Gaming
Written on 10th March 2009
1 COMMENT
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
The gamer’s dilemma has always been between the quality of dedicated gaming vs. the convenience of casual flash based games. You can play Gears of War if you have the game (80$) the console (300$) and a TV (500$ for a good one) or you can play limitless flash games on limitless sites -for free- if you happen to have a computer. But whichever way you go there will be a tradeoff: quality vs. ease of access.
Downtown Defender is a new game, just publicly launched, that bridges that divide; it is browsr based, but features true 3D graphics and it tackles one of the most popular online genres; Tower Defense. On its Website Downtown Defender is described as the following:
“The objective of Downtown Defender is to fight off a flood of giant monsters as they storm downtown San Francisco before they eat all the people fleeing to the Ferry Terminal Building. To accomplish this, you will command a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter with a payload of heavily armed gun turrets. You must drop these turrets at strategic locations throughout downtown to inflict maximum damage on the monsters. Every monster you kill will give you more soldiers so that you can build larger and more deadly turrets. To win the game, you must detain the monsters long enough so that the civilians can board the ferry and escape.”
Downtown Defender is the first game launched by plaYce a TechCrunch50 start-up and takes advantage of the plaYce player, a proprietary browser plugin that allows a full 3D gaming experience all within the Web browser. Later in the year they will be launching more games set in Hong-Kong and Manhattan and other cities around the world. The platform will soon be open to developers to construct their own games in whichever cities they like, imagine pod-racing in Hong Kong or team combat in Sydney.The possibilities of full 3D gaming online are endless.
Here is a look at Downtown Defender:
[Image Credit: XKCD]
The Social Side of Skittles
Written on 4th March 2009
6 COMMENTS
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
The average site for a popular consumer product is:
A. Slick with a high level of ‘production values’.
B. Made in flash.
C. About as socially engaging as a log.
Skittles changes all that in one go by essentially giving up on having a site of its own. If you go to skittles.com you see a realtime Twitter search for “skittles.” All that is left from the old corporate branded experience is a small widget-like navigator in the right hand corner.
If you click “videos” it goes to Skittles’ Youtube page, if you click “images” it directs you to a Flickr search, “products” is the Skittles Wikipedia article and clicking “friends” will take you to the skittles fan page on Facebook. This breaks with the tradition of consumer products with boring mass sites that feel like generic dance clubs -I’m looking at you Pepsi. Skittles have decided that the best online experience is one created by its own customers.
Predictably the Twitterati went wild after discovering that any tweet mentioning “skittles” would make it the new Skittles front page and it was inundated with tweets like:
mobob: #skittles is doing a very nifty thing, but i’m still not going to eat them, they always tasted way too much like rocks.
shehulk123: All the skittles talk on twitter today makes me want to go out and taste the rainbow.
brianboyko: @poneal - so… skittles gets people to talk about skittles on twitter by showing people talking about skittles on twitter. I don’t get it.
mpk: @obra you are way out of date on today’s fast-moving Internet. That Skittlesthing is *so* six hours ago.
Many have said that Skittles is making a mistake opening itself up to the worst impulses of the Web. They should ask themselves if any other consumer product has managed to get this level of attention online, ever.
Kudos to Skittles for leading the way!
Update:
So Skittles now defaults to the Wikipedia page for Skittles (yesterday it was their Facebook fan page). It seems to me that they are rotating through their different profiles, either as part of a strategy or just trying to see what achieves better customer interaction. To see the Twitter live search now click “chatter”. But the question remains; when will we see some Digg love?
TheCrane.tv – The First Ever Online Video Magazine
Written on 2nd March 2009
4 COMMENTS
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Last month at the DLD conference
I had the opportunity to speak to Constantin Bjerke, founder of TheCrane.tv. TheCrane.tv is a new online video magazine all about contemporary culture that is set to launch in March and plans to feature high caliber content on the topics of Culture, Art & Design, Fashion, Lifestyle, Travel, Ideas and “Green”/Ecology around the globe.
TheCrane.tv hopes to raise the bar for superior video content on the Web with what they are referring to as ”Talent Generated Content.” Constantin describes Talent Generated Content by saying that all of the site’s content ”is produced by people that actually know what they’re doing, both in terms of quality of the film and in terms of the content.” Creatives from around the world are invited to share their films, videos and animations on any of the forementioned topics. TheCrane.tv is a unique magazine because it is completely video based. You don’t have to read articles but can simply “sit back and enjoy the ride” as Constantin puts it. (more…)
animations, collaborate, collaborative art, competition, Constantin Bjerke, contemporary culture, dld, DLD conference, Fernando Sulichin, film competition, filmmakers, films, Flavio Albanese, Karl Lagerfeld, Kirill Razlogov, Laurent Claquin, mobile video, online video magazine, ora ito, revenue share, talent generated content, TheCrane.tv, video content, video magazine, videos |
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