"incubadora" via Yuri in Google Reader

TI muda cara das salas de aula nos EUA

2008-07-07T21:23:28Z

BOSTON - De cursos online a laptops fáceis de usar por crianças e professores virtuais, a tecnologia está se expandindo nas salas de aula dos Estados Unidos,... (Reuters)

California Cracks Down on DNA-Testing Startups

2008-06-17T17:00:00Z

The California Department of Public Health has put a stop to sales by 13 genetic-testing startups, including 23andMe and Navigenics, stating that their tests do not meet state standards.

11 Search Trends That May Disrupt Google

2008-06-16T22:45:57Z

My first post for ReadWriteWeb (nearly a year ago) started with the premise that search was "game over", that Google had won and the only opportunity left was (re)search - i.e. what one does after the basic search. Unfortunately, none of the search start-ups since then has made a dent in Google's relentless march towards search market dominance. In this article, we outline 11 search trends that may change that.

The proposition that launched countless search start-ups was: "If we can get just 1% of the search market, we will have a very valuable business". That may be true, but getting 1% has proved elusive. It has been an all or nothing game.

That may be about to change.

It is possible that Google will not be beaten by one big competitor. It is possible that they will be pecked at by thousands of tiny start-ups using a new outsourced infrastructure.

But before getting to that punchline, here is my 11 point recap of the search market:

1. Disambiguation is (still) not enough motivation to switch. All those learned PhDs with backgrounds in natural language search and AI explaining that the words "paris" and "apple" have multiple meanings that Google cannot parse from a single search, massively miss the point. The average user has figured that out and either enters multiple words or refines the search based on the first search. Using natural language search - which is complex to code and expensive to process - is a classic "hammer to crack a nut" solution.

2. Webmaster push-back and basic economics will accelerate the trend towards an outsourced crawler market. Webmasters won't accept a proliferation of crawlers as some of them maybe malicious and all of them impact performance to some degree. Google Yahoo Microsoft (GYM) will always be accepted as they drive enough SEO, but marginal crawlers will struggle. Basic economics mean that only a very small number of players will be able to afford the giant server farms needed to index the whole Web. The YM parts of GYM (as well as Amazon) will increasingly offer their infrastructure to anybody who can build value on top.

3. Yahoo Search Monkey may have arisen from desperation, but we may also be witnessing a "Linus moment". SearchMonkey is the most well-defined entry into the outsourced crawler market. It comes from their recognition that it is too late to beat Google in a head to head battle, so it could be dismissed as a sign of desperation. However I prefer to see it as a "Linus moment", that point in time when Linus Torvalds simply said "here is what I have done so far, anybody who can take it to the next step is welcome to try". To be truly disruptive, Yahoo may need to open this up even more than they have to date.

4. There will be many more attempts to monetize Wikipedia. Well-funded search ventures such as Powerset have retreated to the much narrower goal of searching Wikipedkia. Freebase also uses Wikipedia as the their core data. Walking around the RPI Web Science Research Initiative, I could see many interesting R&D experiments coming out of Academia all of which used Wikipedia as a base. Wikipedia has just enough structure and normalization to be useful. Above all, the History feature makes "data provenance" possible and that is critical for trust.

5. Core search is still getting funded. This is not what one would expect in what is by any definition a consolidated market with one mighty big gorilla sitting on top. Look at Blekko getting $2m without even a prototype to show the world. Are the investor's nuts? Possibly, but they include some pretty smart guys like Marc Andreessen and the founder Rich Skrenta is clearly a smart guy (his Blog is a good read). Or look at Cuill, which got $25m as recently as April. Maybe they are idealists tilting at windmills. Maybe they know something that the rest of us don't. Only time will tell. These new entrants will eschew any hype, which they know has not one single point of value in adoption.

6. Image search is another "hammer to crack a nut". Searching images, video and audio is one of those "non-trivial" computer science projects that great engineers love to tackle. However great investors should steer clear. It is hard to code and incredibly expensive to process. The competition is tagging (see next point) which is classic "just good enough and improving all the time at virtually no cost" that is impossible to beat.

7. Tagging is quietly but massively disruptive. The fact that thousands of webmasters and bloggers tag their content so that they can be found by Google is Google's secret weapon. But it could get turned against them. A small incentive to be found by other search engines will change tagging behavior. This is likely to play out in lots of vertical niches, where a small change in tagging behavior can make a huge difference in findability and that can make a big difference to both buyers and sellers. Whether people use RDF or Microformats or some other defacto vertical standard will continue to be the subject of much debate, but the format itself is not the issue. The human drive to tag (to order one's world) is deep and strong and has financial motivations as well.

8. Whitelist is a good way to kill spam. Spam is the big problem for search as well as email and whitelists work well for both. In search this is done by a site that uses something like Google Custom Search Engine (or Search Monkey) to define what sites to search within a defined domain. Even if that means defining 1,000 sites and adding new ones every day, that is well within the range that a single human curator can do within a single market domain. The human curator deletes any spam sites manually.

9. P2P search could still be a long-term disrupter and Microsoft's route back to relevance. The only way to do search without putting all the Web's pages into one server farm is via P2P. I have written about Faroo's attempt here. It relies on .Net and this maybe Microsoft's card to play but only if Vista gets real traction. This is a real long shot, but an intriguing one.

10. There is tons of great data inside relational databases that is quite easy to search. It is the HTML layer that is getting in the way. As more sites learn how to expose their structured, relational databases as Web Services APIs, a lot more data will be available that does not rely on word search on HTML pages.

11. It's the Adwords, stupid! All the search wizardry don't matter a hoot if the monetization is not done right. There is plenty of motivation out there. Sellers want cheaper search words to buy. Publishers want a bigger piece of the cake. Buyers/searchers may even want cash back (we will see if Microsoft's crude tactic, lambasted in the Blogosphere, makes it in the real world).

Conclusion

Most of these trends point in the direction of search as infrastructure feeding thousands of innovators in niche markets - a long tail approach, in other words. Google will play in this infrastructure game - they already do with Google Custom Search - but it is vendors such as Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon with equally deep pockets and much more to lose from total Google dominance, who will be the disrupting innovators in this next phase of the search market.

Image credit: davemc500hats

Estratégia: Cisão da Telmex cria empresa com caixa de US$ 400 milhões

2008-06-11T01:18:21Z

A nova empresa, batizada de Telmex International, concentrará todos os negócios da companhia na América do Sul e já nasce com valor de mercado de US$ 16 bilhões e caixa de cerca de US$ 400 milhões para investimentos na região

News: Uso da internet móvel já é maior no Brasil que nos EUA

2008-06-10T14:03:13Z

Enquanto no Brasil a participação da internet sem fio é de 9% do total de 8,1 milhões de usuários de banda larga, nos EUA esse índice é de apenas 6%, segundo estudo realizado pela IDC, empresa de pesquisas e consultoria de negócios

Steve Jobs keynote live from WWDC 2008 - Engadget

2008-06-10T03:49:49Z

News: BH ganha Centro de Recondicionamento de Computadores

2008-06-09T20:26:07Z

Com investimentos de R$ 460 mil, a nova unidade do Projeto Computadores para Inclusão do governo federal vai oferecer oportunidade de formação para 125 jovens que vivem em regiões periféricas da capital mineira

Estratégia: EBX, de Eike Batista, confirma compra de participação na IdeiasNet

2008-06-07T00:34:33Z

A Centennial Asset Mining Fund LLC, empresa ligada ao grupo EBX, do empresário brasileiro, constituída nos EUA, cumpriu o compromisso de subscrição de 15 milhões de novas ações ordinárias da empresa, no valor total de R$ 100,5 milhões

China lidera investimentos em TI, diz IDC

2008-06-06T14:29:17Z

SÃO PAULO - O mercado de TI brasileiro movimentará US$ 23 bilhões até dezembro, 3 vezes menos que a China, diz estudo da IDC. (Claudia Rondon, do Plantão INFO)

Gmail Labs: A Public Stage for Googlers’ 20% Time

2008-06-05T22:03:55Z

Google invited members of the press to its main campus in Mountain View today to unveil Gmail Labs.

Gmail Labs is essentially a stage for Google employees to develop new features for Gmail under the public eye. Starting at 6pm PT tonight, all Gmail users in the US and UK will see a new tab in the settings area called “Labs”. The tab will show a selection of beta features, such as “Pictures in Chat”, which (unsurprisingly) puts portraits in chat sessions, and “Mouse Gestures”, which allows you to navigate Gmail using mouse gestures.

After testing these features, users will be able to submit feedback directly to the developers themselves. Google will decide to incorporate some of these features into Gmail as default enhancements based on the feedback and total usage of each. This makes potential beta testers out of the millions of Gmail users out there (although not all Gmail features under development will go through Labs first).

Gmail product manager Keith Coleman says that any Google employee can add their creations to this tab once they go through a simple code check. Pretty much any idea will fly, even recreating the game Snake within Gmail, or creating a fun feature that locks users out from Gmail for 15 minutes so they can take a break. Developers are given full access to the entire Gmail code base, so they can modify almost anything (although Coleman avoided the question of whether a feature could be developed that removed ads).

Google isn’t saying when they might open the development environment up to the public, but they have shown interest in doing so eventually. The company has encouraged internal development for Gmail by holding a 2-day hack-a-thon, and of course, Googlers are encouraged to use 20% of their time on projects unrelated to their main positions.

Google has traditionally tested feature additions to Gmail within the company by making them available first to other employees. This is the first time they’ve opened the testing process and brought in outsiders on such a large scale (however, they have held small-scale usability tests with visitors).

It’s yet to be seen whether Gmail Labs will evolve into a more sophisticated development environment, perhaps one that integrates Open Social and other social networking standards. Coleman says this Open Social is something that has been discussed internally, but no announcements regarding its integration are being made now.

Another Gmail PM, Todd Jackson, was also present at the event. See our video interview with Todd here.

Here are some screenshots of the Gmail Labs features that will soon be available:

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Gartner prevê aumento de notebooks com 3G

2008-06-02T13:40:00Z

Até agora, pouca cobertura e preços elevados limitavam a compra de aparelhos com essa configuração pelo mercado corporativo

NetMovies planeja serviço de venda e aluguel de filmes digitais em 2008

2008-05-30T21:04:12Z

São Paulo – Loja de aluguel de filmes da IdeasNet promete lançar serviço de comercialização de obras digitais até o final do ano.

The Education Transformation of China

2008-05-29T11:25:00Z

University education in China is skyrocketing. In 1996 China had less than 1 million freshmen, in 2006 there were over 5 million freshmen. The freshman class is continuing to grow and university graduates, of course, are just 4 years behind. About half of the entering students are in a hard science or engineering program. As a result, China today produces 3 times more engineers than the United States and will quickly overtake the U.S. in total graduates.

Many people worry about what the Chinese education explosion means for the United States but I am optimistic. First, as China and other countries grow wealthy the incentive to invest in R&D is increasing. If China and India were as wealthy as the U.S. the market for cancer drugs, for example, would be eight times larger than it is today - and a larger market means more new drugs for everyone.

Second, the growth in Chinese education is increasing the supply of new ideas and that too is a benefit to people around the world.

Surprisingly, China's education system is being transformed to a considerable degree by private forces. As late as 1999 the Chinese government paid for most university education but from 2001 onwards tuition and fees account for more than half of total educational expenditures.

I have drawn much of the data in this post from a fascinating new paper, The Higher Educational Transformation of China and its Global Implications by Li, Whalley, Zhang and Zhao. The paper has much else of interest.

I will be traveling to China to give a talk at Yunnan University in late June and will report on the transformation as it looks on the ground.

Fabricante promete conversor de TV digital por R$ 200 em quatro semanas

2008-05-29T10:00:00Z

São Paulo - Comsat trabalha com uma produção inicial de 10 mil unidades dos conversores, que chegarão ao preço prometido por Hélio Costa.

Live From I/O: Android Pulls An iPhone, App Engine Goes Public, and Google Embraces the Open Web

2008-05-28T16:47:18Z

We’re here at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for Google I/O, where the Mountain View-based search giant is covering a broad range of topics - from Android to App Engine, OpenSocial to Web Toolkit - in front of an audience of developers.

VP of engineering Vic Gundotra is kicking things off with a keynote, which will be streamed and live blogged below. Also see our gallery of photos, and a video from AndroidCommunity, below from an impressive Android demonstration given during the keynote.

See our expectations for the event here.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Brazilian outsourcer looks to U.S. for expansion

2008-05-27T13:00:00Z

Politec, an outsourcing vendor in Brazil, has just 50 employees in the U.S. now. But it plans to set up three new development centers with a total of as many as 800 workers.

News: Web 2.0 ainda não passa de promessa, dizem especialistas

2008-05-27T21:57:30Z

As empresas que ingressaram nessa onda até agora pouco conseguiram produzir em termos de receitas, embora esse novo conceito venha causando mudanças significativas no comportamento do usuário da internet. Por isso, elas ainda têm de construir sólido modelo empresarial, alertam os especialistas

An Advance In Image Recognition Software

2008-05-25T00:45:00Z

Roland Piquepaille alerts us to work by US and Israeli researchers who have developed software that can identify the subject of an image characterized using only 256 to 1024 bits of data. The researchers said this "could lead to great advances in the automated identification of online images and, ultimately, provide a basis for computers to see like humans do." As an example, they've picked up about 13 million images from the Web and stored them in a searchable database of just 600 MB, making it possible to search for similar pictures through millions of images in less than a second on a typical PC. The lead researcher, MIT's Antonio Torralba, will be presenting the research next month at a conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

Análise vê mais fusões em TI este ano

2008-05-23T18:47:55Z

NOVA YORK - O setor mundial de tecnologia deve se consolidar ainda mais à medida que empresas procuram adquirir recursos que atendem nichos de mercado. (Reuters)

Estratégia: Missão de empresas mostra tecnologia brasileira na África do Sul

2008-05-22T00:50:29Z

A expectativa da Apex-Brasil, organizadora da missão, é que as 35 empresas participantes fechem US$ 1,5 milhão em vendas durante o Brasil Tech 2008 - Tecnologia Brasileira para a África do Sul, evento que acontece de 26 a 29 de maio em Johanesburgo