Caterina Fake was one of the co-founders of Flickr, an iconic web 2.0 online photo service that was sold to Yahoo. Her latest product is Hunch, a service that started out as a Q&A service but is now being positioned as a personalization service. It's basically a recommendation engine that shows you movies you want to see, books you want to read, vacation destinations you want to go to, and much more. Fake and her three co-founders at Hunch - Chris Dixon, Tom Pinckney and Matt Dattis - are on a mission to "map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person."
I spoke to Caterina Fake to find out how Hunch got started and the progress the company has made in its ambitious mission.
As we have reported here before, the sales figures from the iPad continue to exceed the predictions of even the most optimistic Apple fan. And those fans will surely like the contention of CNBC, who using data from Bernstein Research, today crowned the iPad as the consumer electronic with the fastest adoption rate ever, stealing the title from the once-coveted DVD player.
The iPad sold 3 million units in the first 80 days after its release in April, and its current sales rate is about 4.5 million units per quarter, says Bernstein Research, a rate far surpassing that of the first iPhone.
It's Google TV week, with major announcements coming from early application development and media partners and the unveiling of Google TV hardware from Logitech on Wednesday.
How big a deal is Google TV? Mike Hudack, the respected CEO of free video publishing platform Blip.tv, wrote today that Google TV is the real deal - a technology that will knock down the walls between traditional broadcast studio TV and the long-tail of open video content produced by consumers, producing free choice and competition. It will bring new and previously marginalized voices to the world's stage. Steve Jobs said in his latest Apple TV unveiling that consumers "don't want amateur hour" on their TVs. Google vs Apple will once again be the Open Web vs. the Curated Web, this time on TV.
Google's URL shortener Goo.gl has launched its open service and companion website to the public this afternoon. The service looks a whole lot like upstart innovator Bit.ly.
"I guess Oscar Wilde was right, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery," Bit.ly's John Borthwick told us in response. "They took all the basic features and copied from bit.ly." That is true for the user interface, but in the larger context of both companies' offerings, there are significant differences.
Television is one of the biggest markets in entertainment, but it is at the early stages of a huge shift online. While most people still watch TV through cable and via traditional linear programming, increasingly TV will be delivered over the Internet and with the user in charge of their own programming. The big TV networks are already making moves to prepare for this shift, of course, with efforts like Hulu.
Just as interesting to watch is how new startups will design for the changing usage patterns of TV consumers. Clicker is one such company. Co-founded by ex-Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone, Clicker aims to be the TV Guide of Internet TV. I spoke with Lanzone to find out how the idea came about and to hear his thoughts on how Internet TV is evolving.
For some, Twitter is a social network and for others it is just a broadcast medium. Judging from the latest data from social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos, for the majority of users, Twitter is indeed mostly a broadcast medium. After analyzing over 1.2 billion tweets, the Sysomos team found that only 29% of tweets actually produce a reaction - that is, a reply or a retweet. According to Sysomos, just 6% of all tweets are retweeted and these retweets have a very short lifespan. Virtually all retweets happen within the first hour after the original tweet.
Mozilla announced today a new add-on to its email program Thunderbird, a button called Mute Thread. It's a simple way to say "I'm not interested in this right now, but I might come back to it later." It's an alternative to unsubscribing forever and it's a very smart idea.
If everything had a button like that, people would feel comfortable subscribing to more things in the first place. Can you imagine if your cable TV provider said "this package includes 100 channels - but you have to watch every single one of them every day"? You wouldn't buy cable TV if that was the case. Why then does subscription on Facebook, Twitter or RSS have to mean all content all the time?
Today we're launching our sixth channel, ReadWriteMobile. Sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent, ReadWriteMobile is dedicated to helping its community understand the strategic business and technical implications of developing mobile applications.
ReadWriteMobile will be authored by Sarah Perez, who you all know as a feature writer for ReadWriteWeb. Sarah admits in her Twitter profile that she's "obsessed with mobile," so I think you'll agree that she's the ideal writer for this new channel. I'm also thrilled to announce that Sarah is now a full-time member of our team! Sarah is the ninth full-time person at ReadWriteWeb.
Sometimes a successful web product takes a while to find its niche. Occasionally it morphs into a different product altogether, along the way. Both things have happened to GetGlue, the service where users "check in" to watching TV shows, reading books, listening to music - indeed, to just about anything.
I caught up with GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold to discuss the evolution of the product since its inception. It's changed from an under-used geeky Firefox browser add-on, to a mainstream service where hundreds of thousands of people check-in to Mad Men and other popular entertainment shows. How has GetGlue made this transition? One word, by getting emotional.
Foursquare has quietly added a new feature to its website this afternoon that you won't want to miss: a new "add to my foursquare" button that can be embedded on any website.
If you own a business or publish a web page about any real-world location, this very simple button will allow visitors to your website to add going to your location as a "to-do" item and receive a push-notification to their phones whenever they check-in anywhere nearby. This small button could deliver a substantial part of the promise of Foursquare - tying together our discoveries online with our experiences offline.
