Qwiki wins this year’s Techcrunch Disrupt Award. There’s a great shot of the team on-stage at announcement time; have you ever seen so much joy in tech? Jumping and screaming, they accept the $50,000 check in front of a large audience of technology entrepreneurs, press, venture capitalists and other presenting companies.
They climbed above the rest by offering a new way to consume information: text, audio, video, and images melded together in a seamless interface, generating a dynamic movie of whatever you search for.
Bubbalon is demonstrating their latest at the TechCrunch Disrupt Event this week in San Francisco. Touted as a location-based sentiment sharing application, Bubbalon allows people to express their opinions about people, places or things. Their sentiment can be distributed out to their own communities and the world at large, directly from their PC or through a mobile device.
Using Bubbalon, not only can you share and vote on your experiences in-the-moment as they happen, but you can also get trusted opinions from your friends and experts on a wide range of places, people, interests and things, including restaurants, hotels or a politician.
Users can share online, from their mobile device through their browser, or via Foursquare. The Foursquare connection allows users to add sentiment value to places at the same time they’re checking into a venue, making that check-in more valuable to friends in your Foursquare community as well as to the venue owner you’re rating.
You can sign up for free at www.bubbalon.com and follow them on Twitter to learn what they’re up, including trends on how people rate specific things, including products. Below is a short video clip that simplifies “why do this” and where it adds value, on top of being fun and incredibly addictive.
Mike Arrington talks to super angels and super VCs at today’s TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. On the panel included: Ron Conway (SV Angel), Chris Sacca (Lowercase Capital), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Roelof Botha (Sequoia), Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), Mark Suster (GRP Partners) and Israel-based Yossi Vardi, who provided an international perspective.
Drum roll, and the winners from more than 70 companies are: Veebeam, VoiceBase, Particle Code, Delphix, and Alpha company winner Ether 2. Dynamics (CEO Jeff Mullen pictured with check) won the $1 million People’s Choice DEMO prize. Some great shots of the event can be found here.
DEMOfall Late Night…..a little music, a little social media, a little Pearltrees, a little Ice Cream Man, a little round of martinis and a little networking.
Microsoft’s GM, Developer and Platform Evangelism Matt Thompson was on the DEMO stage talking about their vision for cloud computing and beyond. He refers to ‘mobile’ as the perfect platform for cloud and for them. (i.e, Microsoft.
Says Thompson, “we are embracing the cloud. Cloud is the BIG bet for the company. Everyone from our CEO down has embraced this. Cloud IS a PLATFORM, we’re all in on the cloud,” he goes on. Okay, got it Matt. CLOUD IS IMPORTANT!!!
Matt Marshall asks, “if you listen to what Google says, ‘private clouds don’t matter. Can you talk about that?” Thompson responds, “there are a couple of cloud conferences in the Valley, some say everything is going public. If you talk to anyone in the defense industry, public really isn’t a solution there. The other key one is healthcare. Microsoft has embraced this model where there will be private data centers just as there will be public clouds.”
He continues, “there’s this notion where you will be able to run our application across public and private, a hybrid solution. The world that we see is where both exist; clearly there will be private clouds (and you’re going to see thousands of them) and you’re going to see very large public clouds too, some of which will be run by corporations and some will be run by governments. We see the linking of these two pieces is what we can offer that is unique.” Video of his talk below:
Today, at DEMOfall in Santa Clara, CA, VoiceBase unveils a new search, share and store voice communications platform, which will allow users to easily access and organize meeting and conference content from any web-enabled device.
The goal of their new web-based service is to make voice communication as efficient and effective as e-mail communication. The new service offers storage, search and retrieval, as well as discussion and sharing of voice communications, through any Web-enabled device. Recorded content is uploaded to VoiceBase servers, where a time-synchronized transcription – human or machine – is added to the recording prior to its post to the participant's VoiceBase personal Webpage.
Basic use of the service is free. Content will be stored for one year, after which subscribers can purchase additional storage hours.
Video of their presentation and demo at DEMOfall below:
Matt Marshall interviewed Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on the DEMO Conference stage this afternoon in Santa Clara. Jack says of Twitter, “it still has a long way to go, but we built it initially because I wanted to use Twitter every day, I wanted my friends and family to use it everyday. You build things that you want to see in the world. Square(his new gig which is in closed beta) was built out of the same notion.”
Matt asks Jack about Square, where it currently is and how it will be used. “Twitter had this problem of being so abstract early on and no one knew how or why to use it. Square is similar, which started in February 2009. We’ve been working in a pilot.”
Jack says with conviction, “we want to make sure Square is known for its reliability as a payment network. We want to pace out the growth and get a lot of things right. We’ve been bringing more and more people into this pilot, to start processing cards, start taking payments over Square and currently we’re able to produce 10,000 readers to anyone who wants them. We keep fulfilling the readers to anyone who has signed up for Square, very similar to what Google did with Gmail.”
“That doesn’t sound too limited?” asks Matt. Jack, who doesn’t want to talk about ‘specific numbers, says, “we want to pace this out. We’re on the risk for frauds that come in and while we haven’t had any issues yet, we want to make sure that as we roll this out to millions of people, this will scale. We want every transaction, both from the merchant’s and payer’s standpoint, to be magical and to feel great.”
He returns to things he learned from launching Twitter and early days which apparently is hard to manage from an engineering perspective. “There’s a massive spike for an event and then it goes back to normal,” says Jack.
“One of the things I learned from the early days of Twitter,” he says, “while we were building a company based around transparency and open communication, in the beginning, we weren’t telling users why and when the system went down. Here they were spending hours on Twitter but we weren’t letting them into the conversation.
When we learned that and realized what we were doing, we started to have more outreach about what we were doing and our problems. Once we did that, we attracted a lot of new engineers, great tips and advice and our users were inspired by that communication. The issue was that we had no instrumentation, no data, no analytics about what was happening. We were pretty much flying blind.”
He adds, “my biggest fear for Twitter, for Square and for any company, is to cohesively move together, forward as one unit.” Jack says he’s a force for transparency and he wants Square to be instrumental in opening up transparency more and more, particularly with credit card payments.
Jack is a big fan of keeping a journal, you can really see your progress once its written down and you can see trends over time. On big ideas and coming up with big ideas, “it’s really about capitalizing on an opportunity and knowing how to tap into – it’s not about being lucky. It’s also about getting the ideas out of your head. Once they stay in your head, you come up with every excuse not to do it, not to make it happen.”
Below is the full interview on video: Parts I and II
Parallels world-premiered its Parallels Mobile iPad, iPhone and iPod touch app on the DEMO stage today, which enables customers to remotely access their Windows applications on their Apple mobile device from anywhere, any time and on any network. Users can download a free trial of Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac here and then get the complementary Parallels Mobile app from the app store and experience Windows, IE, Firefox and more from their Apple mobile device.
The app and service allows users of Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac and Parallels Desktop 6 Switch to Mac Edition, to use their iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch to access and utilize Windows applications running on a Mac from any network, from anywhere, at any time.
The Parallels Mobile app, a client and a service built upon the MyParallels services platform, is complementary with either edition of Parallels Desktop 6 and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store after 12:00 p.m. noon PT today.
With Parallels’ new mobile app and MyParallels service, people can freely perform tasks that have been unavailable or limiting to iPad users such as printing, viewing Flash-based websites and full use of productivity applications like Outlook.
Below I’m talking to Zeno, a Hanson Robotics robot, the most human looking robot I’ve ever had the opportunity of interacting with, at least in this lifetime.
Zeno’s skin is made from Frubber, which Hanson has a patent on – it’s soft to the touch and feels like a cross between real skin and rubber. Made from a spongy, structured elastic polymer that expertly mimics the movement of real human musculature and skin using 1/20th the power of other materials, the robot can emulate over 62 facial and neck muscular architectures, has micro-cameras inside the eyes and has both facial and speech recognition built in.
Eye contact face-tracking, and conversational capabilities utilizing the latest AI software is incredibly advanced, so much so that if Zeno had legs and it wasn’t so noisy in the room, you might be fooled into thinking you’re having a real conversation with a human, albeit a very strange and mechanical one.
David Hanson is interested in human cognition – “if humans grow away from human, you get very strange results,” says Hanson. “The same is true with robots.” I also had a chance to chat with other AI researchers working on development at Hanson, including Matthew Stevenson and Kino Coursey.
Hanson robots include the world’s first expressive biped robot, Albert-Hubo, heralded by WIRED as “genius”, and the small Zeno robot, which is also previewed in this video. Sorry, but he’s just not as much fun as the leg-less Zeno with the bandana. BTW, Zeno has accepted a date with me. My plan? A date with Zeno when he gets his legs, likely in Dallas, but we’ll see what Zeno says when the time is here.
