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Paul Allen Backed Semantic Service Evri Has Been Acquired
Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we’ve learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today. Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways. Sponsor We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future . Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark ) Here’s how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report: Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics. Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots. Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn’t see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010 , even a year and a half after it launched. We haven’t been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web ( our coverage ) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move. A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages. Take that, semantic web doubters. We’ll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri’s work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company’s technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Discuss
Kiwis to Bring $900M in Bandwidth-Building Cables to New Zealand
For obvious reasons , we care about what goes on in various parts of the world, particularly New Zealand and other areas that are underserved in terms of Internet access. So, we were quite excited to learn this evening of a new proposal that would give New Zealanders – including a couple RWW staff members – a better broadband experience. According to NZ website Stuff , a haldful of well-known innovators and entrepreneurs are teaming up on a $900 million dollar project that would give Kiwis (and their Ozzie neighbors) “virtually unlimited” broadband access via an international cable that would run across the Pacific Ocean. Just how much of a difference would this cable make compared to current Internet access? Sponsor The difference would be significant, as Stuff’s graphic shows: The plan is to construct a 5.12 Terabits per second-capacity fiber cable to connect Australia and New Zealandto the U.S. – a cable that would deliver data at five times the speed of the current network. This proposal puts Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, TradeMe creator Sam Morgan, entrepreneur Rod Drury, and techies Mark Rushworth, John Humphrey and Lance Wiggs in competition head-to-head with Southern Cross Cable, a large network partially owned by Telecom New Zealand. The team, called Pacific Fibre, hopes to complete the project by 2013. Of course, the next step is figuring out the exact cost of the proposed cable – the group thinks $900M might be a highball figure – and find investors. However, as Tindall eloquently noted, you have to spend money to make money – something anyone with an interest in NZ’s economic future and global competitiveness must consider. “The New Zealand Institute identified billions of dollars in economic potential by unleashing the Internet,” he said, “and it is beyond time to address the issue. This is necessary and basic infrastructure – we must decrease the distance between New Zealand and the international markets. “Doing so will be incredibly valuable for New Zealand and Australian businesses and consumers. If we are able to deliver on this cable this it could be as valuable to our NZ economy as the quantum leap refrigerated ships were to our export trade many years ago.” How feasible do you think this project will be? Is 2013 a realistic time table? And where do you think Pacific Fibre’s investors will be found? Let us know your opinions in the comments. Discuss
Open Thread: Why Go to Tech Conferences, Anyway?
When it comes to tech conferences, the first thing most people think about is the parties. They might think about networking opportunities or learning experiences, but all too often, these are brushed off as mutual admiration societies and redundant, unoriginal chatter. I’ve heard every critique imaginable about some of the best-known tech conferences – but are there still valid reasons for shelling out a thousand dollars or more to spend a few days “partying” with your peers? Sponsor The greatest thing I’ve ever gotten out of conferences is friendship – mutually beneficial, educational friendship. And the greatest task a conference organizer can hope to accomplish – swag, parties and panels be damned – is getting the right people into the same set of rooms so those friendships can be formed. Aside from the pure serendipity of meeting new people (or meeting online friends in real life), I have found that the main benefits of conferences are those I create for myself. In other words, when I have complained that the content was boring, I am to be blamed for not seeking out content that was interesting or, in a single-track show, for not participating in the conversation and helping to make it more interesting for me and my fellow attendees. When we say that a given show is good for nothing but parties, well, that’s a pretty good sign that partying is more of a priority for us than gaining real value. If we say a conference is populated by “the same old douchebags,” as one person recently said to me, then perhaps we’re not taking the time to socialize and network outside our zone of comfort and familiarity. To be blunt, bad attendees make bad conferences. An engaged, interesting and curious person can go to the exact same show and, in most cases, can derive huge benefits from it though a little effort and a lot of great attitude. There’s no show too big, too small, too boring for that person to not be able to learn something from it. What do you think? Have you ever been to a truly, in-and-of-itself bad conference? Would a shift in your own focus have helped? How would you characterize the best conferences of your career to date? Let us know your opinions in the comments. Discuss
Cloud Religion: Do’s, Do Not’s, and a Glimpse of Nirvana
As the cloud is getting more players and interfaces, best and worst practices are emerging. As the market grows and more companies try to plug in, the cloud may benefit from guiding principles. Similar to new technology movements in the past, a natural process is underway to define “what is good”, which, for some in the industry, equates to “what is open”. Like religion itself, open can be defined in ways that are uplifting, or on the other side of the coin, restricting. Also, we learn again, nothing is free. Sponsor Cloud APIs Must Walk on Water If you’ve been part of a software development project, you know that sometimes it’s hard to get the team to all agree on best practices for interface design, database optimization, or even what technology to use. In this analysis, we take a look at some of the movements in cloud computing that start to lay a framework of good as it relates to this technology. In this context, API designers for cloud applications need to think ahead and avoid common pitfalls. For several reasons, more than ever before. First, because many people will be accessing your one piece of code. Second, is that in this world of open APIs, it’s easy to compare your code against another. We notice that data management practices are at the core, and details matter when provisioning in platforms. At the same time that groups are forming to align practices and forms of virtualization and cloud standards, a voice whispers that perhaps this is a free-market problem. People who benefit at solving it, will; others will ignore it or compete directly. We enjoyed this post from Joyent on where standards matter in a practical sense. In essence, the question raised: If a vendor makes it easy and bakes in the ability to “just do it”, do you know or care about the standards? This seems to mirror an iPhone development paradigm, which is to expect work from the vendor SDK or libraries. The SDK wraps standards implementations, which is done in the way best understood by that vendor. Do Unto Others as You Would Have Done To You We know the cloud is big – perhaps it will inevitably be bigger than the Internet itself as it usurps our conception of location, space and time. Where power forms, rules, groups, and organizations do as well. In information technology there is always tension between open standards and defacto standards. The former are crafted through agreements, the latter through leadership and market dominance. We asked in a prior series ” Will a single company become the dominant provider in the cloud? ” Today we look at the more practical side of “who is winning now” – who is setting the rules and who is in the trenches. Quite a number of the responses to our earlier posts emphasized that “the cloud should be free”, meaning that it should have governing principles to avoid one vendor from owning the landscape. Here are a few groups that have emerged to provide some context in how this may come together, both philosophically and practically. In both, the devil is in the details. A good summary of some of the current combining of forces is by the Open Grid Forum . (In our opinion, grids have given way to clouds as the dominant concept in this technology makeover). A resource directory of initiatives is located at the Cloud Standards Wiki , which in itself was formed by a handful of organizations and movements working to align around setting rules and patterns for cloud computing. The Open Cloud Consortium is organized around developing practices around sharing resources and has recently focused on a developing a test bed. The DMTF is working at the core definition of virtualization. It recently focused on the 1.1 version of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification that focuses on packaging virtualization instances and creating a portable mechanic distribution by defining envelope and collection parameters around the virtual machine and its services. The organization, which contains members of IBM, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, XENSource, Sun, and NEC, has submitted 1.1 for consideration as an ANSI and ISO standard. The efforts by the federal government in its data.gov initiative shows that there’s a market that’s starting to see the value of raw government data formats . Soon, we would expect this to be powered by a mesh of computer resources that allow all sorts of jobs – integrated jobs – to work with these data sets. It would comprising an active government cloud. Do Not Covet Thy Neighbors Network Resource When looking for things to avoid, we found a lot of philosophical questions around data ownership, logging and portability. These discussions are alive and well and seem to be being absorbed into vendor solutions and consortiums like the ones mentioned earlier. For a more practical view, we turned to a friend of ReadWriteWeb, Thorsten von Eicken , and have summarized his thoughts from a recent post, ” Top Cloud API Sins . Bold items are our (loose) mapping to biblical terms. Do not covet your neighbors resources. : Listing of resources without the details, e.g., a list-servers call that doesn’t return all the details for each server. This makes it very expensive to poll for server state changes … Do not make cast idols : Not returning a resource id on creation. Some APIs don’t give you a server i.d. when you request a server … Labor six days, rest on the seventh : Providing a task queue. Several APIs I’ve seen have a task queue that is supposed to provide updates on tasks that are in progress E.g., you launch a server and you get a handle onto a task descriptor. For us that’s just overhead … Though shall not bear false witness : Not returning deleted resources in a “list resource” call. In particular, terminated servers must be returned in a list servers call for a certain duration, probably at least for an hour. Ouch! … Shall not covet his neighbor (or force me to repaginate) : Pagination that goes page-wise instead of using a marker, e.g. where you get page one or the first 100 resources and then issue a query for “page 2″ or “from 100 on”. Explain to me how a client can get a consistent resource listing when resources can be added and removed concurrently … Randy Bias added to Torsten’s post: Treat others as you want to be treated Your UI MUST use your API so you understand how to be a consumer of your own API … We plan on keeping up with this list and seeing how it intersects with implementations and standards that evolve. Please let us know your thoughts below. Nirvana: Smells Like Services Orientation Torsten goes on to describe a picture of the future. “Now here’s what I’d really like to see. This is what we’re working on for internal purposes and it’s not easy, which is an event based interface instead of a request-reply based interface… ” This sounds like a vision where we all win. Smart services in the cloud, rather than resources alone. This starts to get us closer and closer to an object-orientated network. Maybe that’s what the cloud will be for platforms, infrastructure and software. The industry has been quick to identify the layers. But perhaps the point is piecing them together in a smart transactional framework. A way to engineer highly reliable systems around these architecture challenges may sound familiar to those who monitor existing data centers today. Torsten continues, “We run a good number of machines that do nothing but chew up 100% cpu polling EC2 to detect changes. Fortunately cpu cycles are cheap 
”. This is practical intervention between vision and get it done. We find it refreshing to hear this type of dialog in the industry and see a fresh opportunity for defining efficient patterns for this next generation of the cloud infrastructure. Perhaps a new concept is forming: “Divine Computing”. Where do you sit in the “just do it” spectrum? Photo credit: tsarkasim , Amsterdam Esogna Discuss
Insights: Three Reasons Why Zoho Joined the Google Apps Marketplace
Since the announcement went live yesterday about the Google Marketplace , we’ve had a number of companies come to us about how its applications will fit with the service. We’ll do a fuller look at these companies this week but for some immediate perspective we decided to take a look at Zoho , a service that competes with Google Apps. So it is it interesting that the company joined Google Apps Marketplace in its launch. Sponsor Buy why would Zoho offer its applications to integrate with Google? Yes, the companies compete. But Raju Vegesna of Zoho says that it is far more important to complement Google Apps. Over the past few years the company has worked to make it simple for Zoho customers to use its services in tandem with Google Apps. Zoho offers Google Sign-in, Google Apps Sign-in and recently it integrated with Google Docs. Vegesna gave us three reasons why Zoho decided to be part of the launch. His perspectives should provide some insights about the symbiotic relationship Google Apps Marketplace will foster. Extending The Relationship For many developers, integrating with Google Apps represents a significant business opportunity. Google announced at its launch that it passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend. Vegesna: “First, we have 50% more apps than Google, especially on the business side (CRM, Project Management, Web Conferencing etc). This means, these additional apps can really complement Google Apps. Google has over 20 million users on G Apps and our Business apps can be sold to those customers. ” Google Dominates The Landscape To play in this era, you have to play with Google. They dominate as much as any company has in the past 30 years. The domination in large part is now solidified by its investment in its cloud infrastructure. Vegesna: “Second, we understand that this is going to be a Google dominated eco-system (IBM dominated Mainframe era, Microsoft dominated PC era and Google will dominate the web era) and we wanted to be an important player in this web era. We talked more about this here and here .” A Platform Built On Email, Not CRM Yesterday, we touched on why the marketplace makes sense for companies standardized on Google Apps. With all the contacts in one place, people can add applications to fine tune Google Apps. Does a company start with the same foundation if the platform is built on CRM? Vegesna: “Third, when someone builds a platform, email is a great app to build the platform around, rather than CRM (which salesforce did). We think it’ll be a good and succesful platform for online apps which will move the web app momentum forward and we want to be a key player (the same way Adobe was a key player in PC era).” For more about the Zoho integration: Discuss