Earlier this week, we launched the Google Apps Marketplace, an online storefront for Google Apps that makes it easy for domain admins to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications. JIRA Studio, a hosted software development suite from Atlassian, was one of 50 apps available at launch and is now available for trial or purchase in the Marketplace.

But even before the launch, one team put the Google Apps and JIRA combination to the test: theStartupBus.com.

Like many great ideas, the Startup Bus sounds a little crazy at first. From the website: "25 strangers board a bus in San Francisco – and at 60 miles an hour and over 48 hours – they are to conceive, build and launch 6 tech startups in time for a SxSW party in Austin."

The time on the road provided the perfect opportunity for these developers to try out the combination of Google Apps and JIRA Studio, a hosted software development suite that supports every role of a high-performing development team through each stage in the development process.

This team wouldn't have time to worry about choosing, installing and managing a bunch of separate tools – they'd be too busy fidgeting with seatbelts. Because JIRA Studio could be installed to Google Apps and deployed to the entire team with just a few clicks, and because data and workflow move seamlessly between the two products, everything they needed was in one place.

Though the bulk of their creative output would occur on the Startup Bus itself, one important project had the globally sourced team collaborating even before climbing aboard: the thestartupbus.com website. Working online, the team designed mockups within JIRA Studio using the integrated version of Balsamiq (a hosted mockup tool) and began checking PHP code into Studio's hosted source control system.

Cleverly, the team built Google Latitude into their site design to automatically post activity to Google Maps, so friends back home could see their actions – tweets, where a Google Doc was saved, or where a code commit was made to Studio, all from push-pins added to Google Maps using Google Latitude's geo-location service.


Where are they now? Take a look in real time on their website. The bus will travel some 1,800 miles and arrive in Austin, TX for SXSW tomorrow.

Here's a fun short video describing the combination of Google Apps and JIRA Studio, the tools powering theStartupBus on their journey.



Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Developer team

Apple fanatics will be able to place their iPad orders at 5:30 AM Pacific time (8:30 Eastern) tomorrow, Friday, March 12th. The pre-orders will be available through Apple.com, and are expected to ship in the United States next month — April 3rd to be precise.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog learned about the pre-order time after it asked Apple for the information in an e-mail.

Let’s assume you’re the sort of person who wants an iPad; if so, you can still wait for the launch date and pick up an iPad at your local Apple store (or at Best Buy a little bit after launch). However, there’s a possibility that it will sell out and you’ll be left hanging. If this scenario worries you, you’ll want to place your order online to be sure you get one before your friends and colleagues. You know, if you’re into that kind of one-upmanship.

But if you’re the sort of person who thinks the device is more hype than substance, you can go ahead and sleep in tomorrow.

Are you going to be up bright and early for the iPad pre-order? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: apple, Apple Tablet, ipad

Foursquare means business. The 1-year-old startup now has a huge brand — Starbucks — using its platform to test out an experimental customer rewards program.

Starting today, frequent Starbucks visitors who check in at retail locations using Foursquare will earn customer rewards. Although there’s no financial incentive or free coffee to begin with, customers can unlock the “Barista badge” after five checkins.

Of course that’s just the beginning; the coffee behemoth plans to use Foursquare as a testing ground for alternative reward strategies and to unlock “the pulse of the experience” for each store.

If you think this is a straight-up play to offer location-based mobile coupons, think again. The New York Times Bits Blog writes that the company is “hoping to use Foursquare to provide even more meaningful prizes, like invitations to special events, photo-sharing or online reputation scores.”

As Starbucks figures out how best to leverage the checkin, we have to step back and appreciate the magnitude of this decision. With Starbucks on board, there’s no question that Foursquare has all the tools necessary to appeal to — and reach — a mainstream audience. Plus, now that a second company (the first was Tasti D-Lite) is tapping into Foursquare as a loyalty program platform, the additional proof of concept will pave the way for other businesses to follow suit.

[img credit: Bits blog]

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Reviews: Foursquare

Tags: foursquare, MARKETING, starbucks

It seems like in the past few months Google has relentlessly released new applications, some of which perhaps could have used some more baking in the oven before they were unleashed on the general public. To some it's becoming a tiresome exercise simply to try to keep up with everything that Google is doing week in and week out. But there is a method to the madness, and it has a lot more to do with Google's bottom line than you may think.

We all know that the way the search engine giant makes money is through advertising - over $23 billion in 2009 - but what may surprise you is that its advertising-based revenue comes almost exclusively from sites that are owned by Google.

Sponsor

Guest author Daniel Cawrey is a freelance writer and tech enthusiast, among other things. You can check out his latest musings in blog form at thechromesource, where he writes about Chrome browser, Chrome OS and just plain Google in general.

Take a look at this graph from the Silicon Valley Insider that depicts the location of advertising and the dollars associated with it:

Ever increasingly, Google is relying on itself to make money through its own real estate - places where it can position the ads that advertisers purchase. This is a concern for publishers that rely on Google for revenue through Adsense because there has to be a point at which this is no longer a profitable exercise for the company.

If it reaches that point, Google will essentially be subsidizing publishers. And it may not have a choice but to keep doing so. Because without fresh content creation, what is there for users to search for on the Internet that is of value? The main tenet of the search business is to provide quality results, and while that may be the case now, if publisher's Adsense revenues were affected, one can wonder what kind of effect that would have on content.

So although Google may have made some mistakes with applications like Buzz, along with the half-hearted emergence and now slow death of features like Gears, expect them to continue to increasing space for content to grow, even if that means one of several strategies:

Become an ISP

An experimental program has been announced whereby Google will provide gigabit service via fiber directly to homes in select markets. Interested municipalities and community organizations are encouraged to submit a proposal for this right. At the World Mobile Congress, CEO Eric Schmidt talked about the goal of this program being purely experimental, which means showing infrastructure operators such as cable companies that this is possible, rather than Google becoming a full fledged ISP. But once the fiber has been rolled out, it doesn't roll back in, does it? How long does the "experiment" last?

Trounce the Competition in the Browser Wars

Google's Chrome browser is getting a lucky break over the next few weeks. That's because Windows users in Europe who use Internet Explorer will be getting an update to their machines notifying them about browser choices that they have. This is in response to the European Union's ruling that Microsoft's practice of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows restricts competition. While the update offers many browser choices, the result will be a boost to market share for Chrome. It has steadily grown in popularity and already has roughly 5% of the market since emerging in 2008.

Offer Computing Architecture to Device Manufacturers Completely Free

We've seen this already with Android, and it appears that the no-cost operating system has basically saved Motorola from a fall to obscurity with its release of the Droid. Expect to see more of these developments as 2010 unfolds with Chrome OS attempting to break into not only the netbook market, but also tablets and smartbooks, which fill the gap between a high end mobile phone and a netbook.

So when you hear these new announcements of applications and services that Google rolls out, think of content. Think of how they can better deliver information to users. They want it to be as easy and as seamless as possible. While sometimes these initiatives don't always work out, they aren't going to stop trying.

Discuss

Random video chat site Chatroulette is a pop culture smash right now, and while it’s easy to assume its days are numbered, it’s a lot of fun to immerse yourself in the little subculture building around it. Despite the increasing negative press, there’s almost as much heart on the service as there is genitalia. Well, maybe not quite. But there’s some heart, really!

These videos are proof. We picked four that incorporate footage from Chatroulette, and two bonus videos that are about the site. In all cases but one, we tried to pick videos that were good-spirited and fun, not malicious or twisted — not an easy task, actually, since most of the Chatroulette videos on YouTube are a little messed up.

Enjoy this collection, and if you have any to add, tell us in the comments!

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1. “Dance or GTFO”

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This is the simplest of the videos. There’s no gimmick here. The author of the video placed in front of the camera a piece of paper with a drawing of the Peanut Butter Jelly Time dancing banana that went viral ages ago, and a note suggesting that the person on the other end dance or move on. The people in this feel-good montage danced.

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2. “If You Turn Your Head, I Win”

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Here’s another one involving a written note. This guy wrote “If you turn your head, I win” sideways and kept a tally, among other things. He got lots of smiles and thumbs up. It seems like people actually log onto Chatroulette to be pranked a bit, so they don’t mind!

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3. Auto-Tune the Chatroulette

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When you mix together two of the hottest YouTube culture trends, you get our favorite video on this list — an (allegedly) improvised song using the same sort of tech they make Auto-Tune the News with. The author of the video “sings” jokes about the people he talks to as he moves from connection to connection.

We were pleased to hear that it wasn’t all insult comedy; too many Chatroulette videos out there are malicious, but this one’s a delight.

Oh, and the author is wearing an “I’m On a Boat” t-shirt, which alludes to the comedy sketch that features T-Pain, who’s partially responsible for all this Auto-Tune madness.

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4. Star Wars Stormtrooper

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The geek behind this video sent out an image of a Star Wars storm trooper and used a collection of storm trooper sound effects (including the infamous Imperial March) to entertain folks on Chatroulette. Every reaction you see in this video is a positive one. He even runs into another person wearing a Star Wars mask.

Be warned, though, that this video has some explicit language.

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BONUS: Chatroulette Explained

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We covered this a few days ago, but in case you missed it, the author of this video tried a few things to explain the phenomenon of Chatroulette and how it works.

A little sample: When he logged on, he was “nexted” within just a few seconds 19 out of 20 times. When an attractive girl sat in front of the camera instead, 9 out of 10 people stayed to talk to her for at least a couple of minutes, or until she nexted them.

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BONUS #2: Jon Stewart Surfs Chatroulette on The Daily Show

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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Tech-Talch – Chatroulette
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

This is another one we already wrote about. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart made fun of the mainstream media coverage of Chatroulette by taking a fake spin on it to chat with reporters like Katie Couric and Brian Williams. It’s funny — check it out.

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Reviews: YouTube, news

Tags: chat, chatroulette, jon stewart, live video, the daily show, video

Google Maps has finally added bike routes. That’s  great — but how well does it work?

You tell us.

Google’s “Bike There” mapping tool provides directions for cyclists in 150 cities and covers some 12,000 miles of trails. There’s no way we can even begin to assess the accuracy of so vast a dataset. We don’t have to. We’ve got you. Help us crowdsource a review. Is Google Maps for bikes “pretty awesome,” as one cyclist told The Boston Globe? Or is it “full of potentially fatal flaws,” as the New York Post claims. Let us know.

Here’s what you  do: Map out a route. Any route. Ride it. Snap some pics along the way. Then send us a blurb telling us about it. How direct was the route? How good were the roads? Did it try to put you on the Long Island Expressway or over that hors catégorie hill climb between you and the office? Anything and everything that might come to mind is fair game.

In about a week or so, we’ll compile the best of the blurbs into a review and pick one or two submissions at random for a prize.

UPDATE: 4:15 p.m. — Wow! We’ve already gotten about a dozen blurbs. Keep ‘em coming! Remember to send pics…

Photo of a cyclist braving Times Square: Matteo De Felice/Flickr

Is designing a car a science or an art? Actually, it's both. But sometimes the final product is simply too bizarre, expensive, impractical (or even dangerous) to gain much public interest.

As with any category of art -- or attempt at art -- vehicle inventors, designers and manufacturers have come up with some pretty perplexing prototypes over the years. In this article, we'll take a look at the 5 strangest vehicles, as determined by HowStuffWorks.com's proprietary "Strange-O-Meter" ranking technology.

• Terrafugia Transition: The Terrafugia Transition is what the company calls a "roadable aircraft." That is, it functions as a street-legal automobile in driving to the airport. When it's time for takeoff, the driver activates controls that deploy a set of stubby, fold-down wings. The craft's rear-mounted pusher propeller then launches the Transition down the runway and skyward.
• Catmobiles: Cars shaped like Cheshire cats, cat convertibles, a cat-shaped bus -- the Strange-O-Meter placed this litter of kitty cars in a statistical dead heat in terms of strange factor.

Full list at HowStuffWorks.com.

Total aggregation of HowStuffWorks.com.

Photo credit: Fotolia

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

It was exactly a year ago when Naveen and I flipped the switch on foursquare.  It was the day before we headed down to SXSW - back when we were still feeling 50/50 on whether people would think the “let’s turn real life into a game!” idea was really interesting or whether they’d laugh us out of Austin.

We took separate flights.  I remember walking down the tarmac into the plane still on my laptop fixing the database.  Naveen landed in Austin and texted me something along the lines of “its still alive!”.  We made it though the weekend with a bunch of hiccups but nothing disastrous (special thx to friends in NYC who were keeping an eye on the melting database).

And so here we are one year later.  It’s amazing how far we’ve come…

Over 500,000 users 
Over 1,000,000 badges have been awarded
Over 1.4 million venues with 1200 offering specials
Over 15.5 million checkins

… and last Friday we had our biggest day ever, weighing in at 275,000 checkins over the course of the day.

And here we are again.  I’m about to get on a flight out of JFK.  Naveen’s about to get on one out of Newark.  We’re now at 16 employees (!!) and a whole foursquare entourage is flying down tomorrow.  And I feel much better about the server being up and running when we land  :)

I can’t tell you how psyched we are to see you all again in Austin this weekend.  It’s been an amazing year and thanks to everyone who’s pitched in to help and support us along the way. We’ve got a lot planned and we owe you all a beer (or a temporary tattoo or ten).

See you in Austin,

-team foursquare

ps:  Party on Monday (w/ Brizzly & Katalyst).  8pm @ Cedar Street Tavern.  The best way to skip the line?  Be wearing some foursquare tattoos :)

With iPad preorders officially starting tomorrow, attention has shifted to iPhone 4.0 software and what features it might bring to both the iPad and future iPhone models.

Apple Insider is now adding fuel to the long-standing rumors that the next big update to Apple’s iPhone OS will feature support for multitasking — that is, the ability for third-party apps to run in the background.

As anyone with a jailbroken iPhone knows, the multitasking limitation for third-party applications in the iPhone OS is purely artificial. Whether it is for security purposes, performance or battery life, Apple has chosen not to allow third-party developers (or even third-party Apple created apps) to run concurrently in the background.

This means that if you want to listen to Pandora while surfing the web in Mobile Safari, well, too bad. Of all the complaints levied against the iPhone, this is probably the one that impacts consumers the most. It doesn’t help that you can, for instance, use the iPod application while surfing the web or using other apps.

Push notifications have mitigated some of the need for many use cases for multitasking — but it’s not a true solution.

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Multitasking in iPhone 4.0?

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Even a year ago, the multitasking issue with the iPhone 3.0 OS wasn’t as problematic as it is now, in part because while competing mobile platforms did offer support for running third-party apps in the background, the competition from those platforms wasn’t as strong.

A year later, we have Palm’s webOS, the BlackBerry, Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series, and of course, what many see as the iPhone’s biggest competition: Google’s Android platform.

For the iPhone to remain as enticing to developers as it is now (and in turn, as attractive to users), future versions of the software will need to support multitasking by third-party applications in some capacity.

AppleInsider says that its sources say Apple has developed a “full-on-solution,” but details about how that solution will be implemented and what rules applications will need to follow to address multitasking was not revealed.

Steve Jobs is famous for taking features out of a product if they don’t meet his standards. As a long-time smart phone user who has used devices on almost every major smartphone platform, I can attest to some of the very real problems that multitasking or excessive backgrounding can cause for those devices.

They include, but are not limited to:

Decreased Battery Life — More apps running at once means more CPU usage, which means battery life can be reduced.

Slowdowns, freezes, crashes — As a long-time BlackBerry user before I migrated to the iPhone, I remember the “three finger salute” reboot mechanism far too well. At least once a day (more often if I happened to open up my RSS reader or my e-mail was particularly heavy) I had to reboot my Berry in order to reset the memory cache and allow the device to work at a pace that didn’t resemble molasses. Android devices I’ve used have had this same problem (although not to the extent as my BlackBerry Curve) and homebrew Palm Pre developers have even written a tool that schedules phone reboots to handle the issue.

Switching apps can be awkward — This is probably one of the biggest challenges Apple will have to face — beyond just the technical tricks for implementing better resource handling and allocation — the mechanism used to switch between open applications can be cumbersome, depending on the type of application. With it’s one-button design, the iPhone will likely have to employ some sort of gesture for opening or accessing other apps — if indeed it implements multitasking the same way that BlackBerry and Android do.

Rumors about multitasking coming to the iPhone in a supported form have been swirling for literally years, so any report on whether or not it will be a reality in iPhone 4.0 is pure speculation.

That said, if Apple doesn’t address multitasking with its next big release, it risks falling behind other players moving forward.

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Reviews: Android, BlackBerry Rocks!, Google, Pandora, iPhone

Tags: apple, iphone, iPhone 4.0, iphone os, multitasking

From jagged, snow-capped mountain peaks to peaceful villages adorned with colorful prayer flags, there are perhaps no more breathtaking views on earth than from high above the Himalayas. Five paragliders are right now flying and hiking the length of the Himalayas all the way through Nepal, and they’re sharing the once-in-a-lifetime experience with anyone who has a computer.

While paragliding in the Himalayas is a fairly common trip for experienced fliers, no team has gone all the way through Nepal. These guys are seasoned fliers and between them they have experience flying all over the world. But they’ve never tried anything like this before: hiking and flying more than 800 miles from Dharamsala to Sikkim, India.

“This journey has never been done by a team,” said Nick Greece of the U.S. Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association. “People have flown from Northern India to the Nepal border but never further. This team will fly across Nepal as well. For a team to do this live tracking is imperative, and it is only in the last year or two that it has become realistic and relatively reliable.”

The Himalayan Odyssey Team is carrying some impressive tech. It has the obligatory iPhones and three solar chargers to keep them going, variometers to track their rate of ascent and descent, two-way radios for staying in touch and GPS for staying on course. When they’ve got cellphone coverage, the team will upload track logs to their website, allowing those of us who prefer our feet on the ground to follow their adventure from our cubicles. SPOT GPS trackers also will update their route every 10 minutes.

“These will allow visitors to reply our flights on Google Maps, or Google Earth and visualize every circle, every zig, and every zag we make, and even what the terrain underneath us looks like while we’re zigging and zagging,” team member Eric Reed said. “It’s beautiful, but it will depend on GSM service.”

Hopefully they’ll have better coverage in the Himalayas (.pdf) than in Manhattan.

Reed, a member of the U.S. Paragliding Team who was laid off last year from a management position at Microsoft, says he’s already received e-mails of support and can’t wait to start offering live updates on his progress. He’s been through the Himalayas before with team leader Brad Sander, and at the end of last year’s trip they decided that this time they’d “take the line as far as we could.”

“All of the communication is great fun — both for the readers and the writers — and I think it does actually improve our safety level, but it also inevitably make the wilds just a little less wild,” he said.  “That’s the way with technology. But I’m not complaining. There’s still plenty of wild in the world.”

In addition to letting the rest of the world come along for the journey, Reed says all that technology is essential for safety, helping keep the team connected even when they land in different locations. The Himalayas can be just as inhospitable as they are inspiring, and as they began their journey Wednesday, according to their blog, conditions were already far from ideal.

“We plan to fly and land together as a team, as much as possible, but inevitably there will be days when we get separated,” he said. “Once we’re all on the ground if we’re not all together, communication gets hard via cell or radio. The SPOTs will help us here as well — we’ll use them to send our position via SMS to everyone on our team once we’ve landed.”

Photos: Nick Greece

Location based social networks - are you over it already? It feels like location is all we ever hear about anymore, especially this week leading up to SXSW.

We're excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-ups What Twitter's Geolocation API Makes Possible and The Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived. But it's getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness.

Sponsor

1. That Phrase: "Location, Location, Location"

   You're going to hear journalists use it far too much. Want to know where it came from? Language sleuth William Safire investigated for the NYT last year and concluded that the phrase was probably first used in a 1926 real estate classified ad in the Chicago Tribune: "Attention salesmen, sales managers: location, location, location, close to Rogers Park." Don't you feel more savvy now?

2. Too Many Startups?

   We're under embargo on almost all of them, but we can tell you there are at least 25 companies making location-related announcements at SXSW this week. Probably more. The Dunbar number of startups in a particular market, if you will, is something like 5. More than that and most people stop taking new entrants seriously. It's one thing to offer different technologies along the value chain of location, but sharing your location and aggregating messages by things like hashtag are two very crowded niches right now. One of my favorites is SitBy.Us, an app that lets you see where your Twitter friends are sitting in a conference session. That's pretty cool.

   You've got to wonder if and when Location will Jump the Shark and what consumer exhaustion for it might mean for the long-term prospects of the market. Everyone wants to be "the Twitter of SXSW 2010" but the fact is that SXSW represented a statistically insignificant increase in Twitter usage, historically speaking.

3. Location Startups "Not Playing Nice"

   There are loads of ways to post your location but it's very hard to get a feel for who exactly is where. SimpleGeo launched a site called Vicarious.ly today that aggregates check-ins across scads of services, all around Austin. It doesn't work very well, though. SimpleGeo's Matt Galligan told us today that the site is really just a proof of concept and that our perception that these startups aren't playing very nice together is very true. "And it's a real shame," he told us. It's hard for a 3rd party service to clearly identify whether these competing services are really talking about the same location, for example. No one tells their users what users on competing services are up to in the same location. Gowalla's Josh Williams says he doesn't know what the problem is and that Gowalla is very open about user data by open standards.

4. We Need Cross-Service Venue Tracking

   If you're thinking of going to a place, or you're there and wonder who else is, what you need is a place where you can see who has checked in there across all services. For the place to be at the center of your experience, not the service. Michael Arrington says the new AOL Lifestream lets you track particular locations, but that service only supports Foursquare among location services. What we need is something like that across any and every check-in service. That's the kind of thing that data standards can enable.

   Google's Chris Messina told us that the Activity Streams standard has a namespace for "place" and would probably add support for GeoRSS soon, but that so far Google Buzz is the only location service that seems to be supporting it.

5. Gowalla Doesn't Get Enough Love

   Gowalla's API is read-only, meaning that 3rd party apps can't publish check-ins to the service like they can to Foursquare. Gowalla says they are working on it, but they are the underdog already and this isn't helping. AOL's cool new Lifestream product, for example, only supports Foursquare, not Gowalla. That's a real shame. You know what's nice about Gowalla, though? You can see who has checked into a place and when, even if they aren't friends of yours. That's not something that's easy to do with Foursquare at all. It's also much prettier than Foursquare and uses peoples' full names, instead of grade-school-style first names and last initials. Gowalla's API just isn't seeing the adoption that Foursquares is, though. Have you seen Avoider.org for example? That's pretty funny stuff and it's built on top of Foursquare.
   

   The above is for illustration purposes only. I like both these guys just fine.

6. Imagine the Future, It's Going to Be Different

   If location based services ever become popular with the mainstream, every urban area might end up looking like the Foursquare map of downtown Austin this weekend. That means services are going to have to come up with creative and interesting new ways to make that data usable day-to-day and not overwhelming.

   Likewise, when you think about the future, imagine Facebook being a player in this market, because they are going to be soon. It's possible that Facebook and Twitter could be where all these other services meet-up. Brightkite has different features than BlockChalk but we can see what our friends are doing across any of these apps on Facebook, perhaps. And Facebook is where your mom checks-in, if she's not an early adopter.

   Finally, will location tracking be persistent? Loopt right now uses mobile carrier tie-ins to track your location constantly and expose it to a circle of trusted friends. Is that something that all services will enable in the future? Gowalla CEO Josh Williams told us "no way" does he think that will be the dominant model, but Adam Duvander, author of the forthcoming book Mapscripting 101, says he agrees with Loopt: that the value in persistent location tracking will be so compelling that everyone will end up going for it in the end, once proper privacy settings are figured out.

   What do you think, do you think persistent location tracking is the future of location based services?

   These are some of the things I'm thinking about location this week.

   Discuss

   
   

   
   

Betaworks, a New York City-based Internet company, has raised $20 million in new venture funding, according to company executives. Intel Capital and previous investor RRE Ventures led the current round, which included Softbank, Founders Collective, DFJ Growth, AOL Ventures and the New York Times. The company had previously raised $8 million.

Betaworks, the brainchild of former AOL executives John Borthwick and Andrew Weisman, views itself as a holding company that both invests in and operates Internet and digital media companies.

In some ways for its investors, Betaworks is a bet on the newly emergent sector amorphously described as the real-time web. It is best known for its bets on the Twitter ecosystem.

The company first tasted success when it sold Summize, an early entrant into the real-time search market, to Twitter in July 2008 for a reportedly big stake in the San Francisco-based company. Since then Betaworks has launched and subsequently spun out URL-shortener Bit.ly, which ended up raising $2 million from the likes of Mitch Kapor and Jeff Clavier of Softech VC. It also created social media analytics company, Chartbeat, a company that emerged from the ashes of a failed Betaworks startup, Firefly.

In comparison to Bit.ly and Chartbeat, Betaworks is purely an investor in Tweetdeck, a very popular Twitter reader. “We have stakes in 24 companies –- some small and some large stakes,” says co-founder Borthwick. It owns a big chunk of five companies -– Bit.ly, Chartbeat, Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed and another startup currently in stealth.

Borthwick explains that the company will use the new funds to do two things: be more aggressive in investing in more startups while at the same time, do follow-on investments as their companies scale up.

Borthwick bristles at the idea of being equated to an incubator.  He views Betaworks as a holding company in the mold of, say, Liberty Media and Barry Diller’s IAC. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum are disgraced names from another era, like CMGI.

P.S.: If you want to get a better idea of how Betaworks thinks about the world of Internet and digital media, check out this  post from Betaworks’ Josh Auerbach.

Now U.S. Senator Al Franken has been enlisted to lobby Google in a bid by two midwestern cities to get free upgrades to gigabit internet connections. Comedy from the funniest man in Congress may give the towns of Duluth and Superior an edge in the increasingly clownish bids by municipalities across the country to win a piece of the Google action as well as bragging rights as the fastest town around. But below the surface, like where all those fiber optic cables might go, this is no laughing matter.

In his video Franken joins the ranks of the fake mayor of Duluth, the real mayor of Duluth, and the towns of Topeka, Kansas and Sarasota, Florida (temporarily renamed “Google” and “Google Island” respectively) in trying to curry Google’s favor through humor on YouTube — potentially one of the biggest winners in a world of ubiquitous ultra-speed broadband and net neutrality.

The competition for a ground-breaking Google experience is stiff — but so is much of the attempted humor by the above municipalities. Meanwhile Madison, Wisconsin, 16 towns in Utah, Huntsville, Alabama, and hundreds of other cities and towns are vying for Google’s attention more soberly, but have failed to attract the widespread attention that the pranks have. So Minnesota is wise to bring out the big gun that is Franken, late of Saturday Night Live and such unforgettable screen moments as gorilla-baiting Baggage Handler #1 in “Trading Places.”

It’s clear what the recipients of Google Fiber stand to gain: the world, delivered via pulses of light. But what’s in it for Google?

Google hasn’t said when it will decide; the deadline for submitting a formal request is March 26. The request form itself is pretty straightforward — perhaps too much so, since it has brought out the inner carnival barker in public officials whose localities want in, jumping up and down, banging pots and pans and doing whatever else will get them noticed.

Their humor hides desperation, even though their goals mesh perfectly with the agenda Google is pursuing.

Given the sour state of the economy, which offers little cause for mirth, any American town or city that suddenly sees its broadband speeds increase 10,000 percent as a result of being connected to Google’s infrastructure will instantly become more attractive to spendy technophiles, start-up employers, telecommuters with jobs on the coasts and the latest flock of college graduates — many of whom currently migrate to hotspots (with hotspots) like Brooklyn or San Francisco.


Sarasota, Florida, appears to have gaffed in its video, by using a song Warner Music Group does not allow to appear in user-uploaded videos on YouTube: Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Perhaps Sarasota should have worried more, because now, more people are viewing the video on Facebook’s competing video service than on Google’s YouTube, which is no way to impress a would-be benefactor.

It’s clear what the recipients of Google Fiber stand to gain: the world, delivered via pulses of light. But what’s in it for Google?

Basically, Google is so flush with its cash, and so frustrated by slow American ISPs, that it has decided to step in and improve connection speeds itself or goad someone else to — all the better to increase traffic to Google, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, Picasa, YouTube, and so on.

The company’s thinking appears to be, “if you want something done right, do it yourself,” rather than depending on the oligopoly of entrenched internet service providers currently serving (but mostly under-serving) American consumers relative to those in other developed countries. But it might also be sandbagging in an attempt to do as little as possible but scare others into doing something.

Who can forget Google’s brilliant play in the 2008 bidding war for the 700Mhz spectrum auction. The search and ad giant was a high-visibility player but somehow managed to A) be outbid by Verizon and AT&T and B) still get all it really wanted: FCC’s openness regulations ensured that any compatible device — including those it had in the works — would be able to work with any network on the band.

Google makes its money connecting people with data and showing them ads along the way. Anything that increases the number of people on the internet and the amount of data they seek is good for the company. On most ISPs, YouTube videos can stutter or stop due to low connection speeds, even from “high-speed” providers. One way or another Google, seeks to quicken the net by connecting cities to high-speed fiber optic lines that transmit data with pulses of light rather than the wire-based electrons employed by most ISPs (fiber-optic Verizon Fios excepted).

Wherever Google decides to put these pipes, they will be open-access, meaning that residents will subscribe via competing third-party providers — a gesture of goodwill that could deflect criticism that Google is trying to own the internet.

And then, of course, people will start scratching their heads and pointing fingers at their ISPs in the 99.99 percent of the country that doesn’t have it so good.

Senator Franken jokes as he kowtows to Google in the above video, but he’s also dead serious about courting Google’s fiber optic connection. Also no laughing matter: competition in the ISP market is so weak that it takes an act of GOOG to move things forward.

See Also:

• Google To Build Ultra-Fast, Consumer Broadband Networks in U.S.
• I Have Renamed My House “Google”
• Google Hunts for Undersea Fiber Capacity as Traffic Surges
• YouTube’s Bandwidth Bill Is Zero. Welcome to the New Net …
• Google Denies ISP Rumors
• Verizon Experiments With 100 Mbps FiOS
• Feds Need Your Broadband Suggestions, Google Says
• Broadband Providers Suck. Can Google Help?

NEW YORK—Cool guys Shawn Goldstein, 26 (left) and Walt Traxel, 26 (right) just hang out Thursday afternoon. Please check back in for updates as The Onion continues to follow this developing story.

Live TV can be tough, especially if you’re in a cranky mood. Case in point: WVLT TV Volunteer News reporter Gordon Boyd, whose on-air freak-out has gone viral this week.

Reporting from a courthouse in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, Boyd seems to be having a bit a trouble wrapping up a story about a harrowing sentencing. As he goes to deliver the final sentiment, he botches the line, saying gravely: “Staying and doing nothing is as heinous as doing at all.”

The slip of the tongue prompts the reporter to throw his notes to the ground, a snarl contorting his livid face. The best part of the video, however, is the anchor’s expression as the camera cuts back to the studio, and his ensuing explanation of the tantrum: “All right, we’re having technical difficulties we can see, a little frustration there…” Yeah, technical difficulties…

Check out the video below, as well as a few favorites from the annals of botched news reports:

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Snowpocalypse

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Giant Bird

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Lizard Attack

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[via Buzzfeed]

Tags: video, viral video

In the past 50 days, Firefox 3.6 has been downloaded over 100,000,000 times by people looking to improve their web experience, and install the world’s best web browser. Mozilla believes that the user’s choice of web browser matters, and is extremely proud of how many people have chosen to use Firefox.

Starting today, users running older versions of Firefox will be offered the choice of upgrading to Firefox 3.6. We’re presenting this upgrade offer for our users who may not realize that a new version is available:

As always, users will be able to choose between:

• deferring the decision for 24 hours (“Ask Later”),
• declining the offer (“No Thanks”), or
• accepting the free upgrade (“Get the New Version”).

The offer screen will only appear after 60 seconds of keyboard inactivity to ensure we don’t get in the way of anyone’s activities. If a user declines the offer and later regrets that choice, they’ll be able to get it again simply by selecting “Check for Updates” from the “Help” menu.

Firefox 3.6 has already been chosen over 100,000,000 times by users, and we’re proud to offer it to the remaining Firefox user base. It’s fast, stable, compatible with over 90% of the thousands of Firefox Add-ons, and contains new features such as lightweight themes and plugin version checking.

DES MOINES, IA—Only when Steve Gibson started getting enraged by mustard-related issues did he realize he had become entangled in a dense, thickening web of mustard obsession. "I saw my wife put French's mustard on a bologna sandwich and I just lost control," he said.

(Cross-posted with the Google Merchant Blog)

Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, demonstrated last December a preview version of Product Search for mobile with local inventory, which lets you see right in your search results whether items are in stock at nearby stores. We're happy to announce that as of today, if you're searching for a product that is sold by participating retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, or West Elm, you can just look for the blue dots in the search results to see if it's available in a local store. If you see a blue dot, you can tap on the adjacent "In stock nearby" link, and you'll be taken to the seller's page where you'll see whether the item is "In Stock" or has "Limited Availability" near you. You'll also see how far away the stores are from you -- as long as you've enabled My Location or manually specified your location.

If you have an iPhone, Palm WebOS phone, or any Android-powered device, and you're in the US, just go to Google.com in your mobile browser, tap on the "more" link, and then select "Shopping." Or look for the "Shopping results" section in Universal Search results when you search on Google.com.
Finally, if you're a retailer and you'd like to participate in this program, we want to hear from you. Please fill out this brief form to let us know that you'd like to be considered. In the meantime, you can get prepared by making sure your Local Business Center data is up to date, and ensuring that your Product Search data is in great shape.

Posted by Paul Lee and Yury Pinsky, Product Managers