In this latest instalment in our series on recommendation engines, we look at ATG - an e-commerce services vendor which, among other things, provides recommendations technology to retailers such as Tommy Hilfiger and BetterWorldBooks. ATG has a similar "blended" approach to recommendations as richrelevance, whom we profiled last week - in other words it uses a mix of personalization and wisdom of the crowds. ATG's current approach to recommendations is heavily influenced by a product it acquired in January 2008, CleverSet. We spoke to ATG this week, to find out more about their recommendations product and what makes it stand out in (what we're discovering) is a crowded market for recommendation technologies.
The tech event season is beginning to heat up. If you're a speaker, you know that standing in front of a crowd isn't half as hard as getting critical feedback on your talks. People who disliked it will generally remain silent or opt for a snarky tweet or two. Those close to you will tell you "You did great!" no matter how poorly you performed. Getting the feedback you need to improve can be the most difficult part of the whole process. Until now. Meet SpeakerRate.
The DEMO conference, a Silicon Valley institution, will announce a changing of the guard tonight. Executive producer Chris Shipley will begin a hand-off of leadership to Matt Marshall, San Jose Mercury News reporter turned blog founder at VentureBeat. That's right, DEMO is being taken over by a blogger.
If you're not familiar with DEMO, it's a very slick conference where startup companies are selected to present to an audience of potential investors, reporters and others. It's been around for decades and has roots in the mobile world. All the major tech blogs now race to cover the scads of companies that launch there each year. It's also become very controversial as the media and tech landscapes have changed.
Google's VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, showed both a new mobile version of Gmail running on the iPhone and HTC Magic today, as well as a new mobile version of Google Maps running on the Palm Pre. The new mobile Gmail app, which Gundotra demoed at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, makes extensive use of new features that are only available in HTML5. Among these new Gmail features were offline access, even in the browser, as well as support for labels.
Twitter just announced that it is slowly releasing a new interface to a subset of its users that will put Twitter Search and Trends right on users' profiles. Until now, Twitter's real-time search function, which was acquired from Summize last year, lived on a separate subdomain and was not fully integrated into Twitter. Clearly, Twitter has realized that real-time search is one of its core features if it wants to monetize its service successfully.
Have you noticed those little links next to blog posts and news stories that say "Share This"? Click on that link and you get a pop-up with options to share an article on Delicious, Facebook, StumbleUpon or other services. Did you know that ShareThis.com has raised $21 million from venture capitalists for its version of that service?
If you think that's crazy - you're wrong. ShareThis is a great example of the kind of company that could become a key foundation for innovation in the next era of the web. If it doesn't sell out to advertisers too quickly or too completely. The company released a new version of its widget today and I took the opportunity to talk to CEO Tim Schigel about where the company is headed in the future.
Google I/O is a now annual event being held this year on May 27 - 28, 2009 in San Francisco. It's aimed at web developers, to whom Google will showcase "how to develop web applications with Google and open technologies." ReadWriteWeb has 10 free tickets to give away to Google I/O; and we thought an interesting way to do that would be to ask for your feature requests on current Google products. Choose any product you like - e.g. Google Reader, Google Health, or the new Google Latitude - and tell us what feature you'd like to see Google add to it. Or if the product has an API, what third party app you would like to see.
It was 5 years ago today that Yahoo! stopped using Google to power its searches and started using its own search technology, the company wrote today in a blog post. Everyone knows that things aren't looking good for Yahoo! in business terms, and the company's search and advertising market shares look even worse. But you know what deserves some celebration on this 5th birthday? The search team's work on some really cool search related technologies.
Yahoo! Search Monkey, BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) and Delicious are three big wins for the Yahoo! search team - even if no one has yet figured out how to turn them into money. That's not the only reason why we're all here on the web is it? Isn't it largely for love of innovation? Yahoo! in general, including the search team, deserve applause for their embrace of innovation.
It has now been confirmed that Hulu.com has indeed pulled its videos from TV.com. Until yesterday, you could watch embedded Hulu videos on TV.com, but since last night, these videos have become unavailable. TV.com relaunched its site as a video portal last month and Hulu apparently believed that TV.com, which is owned by CBS, was becoming too much of a competitor to its own service.
A new radio system developed in Australia is transforming the vehicles on the street into nodes on a network. The technology, designed by scientists at the University of Southern Australia's Institute for Telecommunications Research, is an application called "Dedicated Short Range Communications" (DSRC). Using a combination of GPS and Wi-Fi, cars can communicate their location data to a central office, but it also enables them to communicate with each other.
