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Google is now accepting applications from businesses to be among the first places the company sends photographers to take panoramic photographs of the insides of buildings. Street view? You aint seen nothing yet. We reported in February on rumors that this project was in the works. The company says the photographs will be taken by professionals trained in low-lighting, will be as unobtrusive as possible, will initially be traditional in format and will be stitched together to form panoramas in the future. Sponsor In September we wrote about a company called Micello , billed as Google Maps for the Indoors, which is creating floor maps for places like shopping malls around the country. That would make a nice compliment to the new indoor photography feature. Startups like Micello are probably no more worried about Google stepping on their toes than they were before, but the new indoor photography launch does have at least one independent professional photographer worried. "Did Google just put low- to mid-range commercial photographers out of business?," social photography blogger Aaron Hockley tweeted this morning. If that was a consequence of Google's new feature, the world would be much poorer for it. Discuss

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Beyond Street View: Google Photographers Begin Going Inside Businesses

Every now and then we hear the story of the entrepreneur who left his or her steady job at a large company to follow their dreams and create a startup, but we aren't all as daring and brave to quit steady work, especially in a time of economic uncertainty. If you have the entrepreneurial itch but aren't in a situation that would allow you to sacrifice your day job, there are still ways you can scratch said itch and bring innovation to a "startup" within a larger company. Sponsor This morning I talked with Eric Ries , the driving force behind the " lean startup " movement, which encourages high efficiency and meticulous metrics tracking within entrepreneurial ventures. Ries, who is often asked to speak on the subject, says he noticed a trend among some of the people attending his talks. Many managers from large companies were coming to his sessions to learn what they could, because, as Ries discovered, the principals of lean startups can exist within larger corporations that are attempting to innovate. "A startup is a human institution designed to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty," Ries told ReadWriteWeb. "There is nothing in there about the size of the company, or what industry you're in, or whether you're the manager of a division or if you're two guys in a garage, its just about the conditions in which you operate." As he points out, there are times in larger corporations when divisions are created to work on a new project, and similar rules and guidelines for managing that project which come from startups can be used here as well. Ries says that managers, like entrepreneurs, are taking risks on new ideas, and when they create a new division, they are essentially investing the company's time and money as a VC would invest funds in a startup. "The more I started to work with those managers I started to notice that they were having very familiar sounding arguments," Ries says. "The arguments between a venture-backed entrepreneur and a venture capitalist are almost exactly the same word for word as between these 'intrepreneurs' and their CFOs because the same issues come up." One of the ways larger corporations can implement entrepreneurial innovation into their businesses is to allow for what Ries calls "innovation inside the box," or a fenced off sandbox for experimentation with new products. By creating a place where employees with ideas can test a tweak to a feature, or where new ideas can be built within certain constraints, companies can greatly increase their potential for innovation. "The real value is [this] starts to catalyze change because by changing the way you work you start to accelerate that feedback loop and that can become the basis for making other changes," Ries says. Unfortunately, most larger corporations aren't allowing for this open sandbox of innovation within their companies, and choose to buy up technology and talent from startups. Ries agrees that many entrepreneurs get frustrated working inside a larger company, but he says the combination of these entrepreneurs with a walled off innovation playground could provide for some amazing innovations. Companies could also benefit from the addition of a sandbox by inspiring their existing employees to be innovative, instead of wrangling up entrepreneurs from a startup, which would save them money in the end. "They have this idea that a certain alchemy will happen that 'if I bring these special people into my organization, they will teach my regular people how to be special,' and that's just a formula for breeding resentment," Ries told ReadWriteWeb. "If the people doing the acquiring had more of a theory about how entrepreneurship is supposed to work they could start to think of better ways to plug an acquired company into the larger organization, taking advantage of what they're good at without destroying it." If you're a budding entrepreneur or a manager at a large company, there is an excellent chance to hear from Ries and others on these concepts and others this Friday at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco. If you can't make it to the Bay Area, there are simulcasts occurring Friday in nearly 50 cities worldwide, many of which are free or very inexpensive, so RSVP and bask in the lean startup goodness. Photo by Flickr user longhorndave . Discuss

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Thinking Inside the Box: Eric Ries On Creating Startups Within Large Organizations

For websites that find themselves stuck in the middle of the ongoing feud between Apple and Adobe, there might be another way out of the mess - Ripcode . According to the company, its latest product is a server-side solution for websites that want to get their Flash-based content onto Apple's iPad and iPhone. Sponsor The somewhat futuristic sounding "TransAct Transcoder V6 can intercept Adobe Flash-based file or live video" and translate the video into a format compatible with both the iPhone and the iPad. As the company points out in its blog post , Flash is used in a number of settings, especially live streaming of news and sports and other video content. And while HTML5 is one solution, it is not yet widely adopted and the company's transcoding service offers an immediate and seamless solution. The transcoder is a completely server side solution, meaning it does not have to be installed by users or pass by Apple's scrutiny to get into the app store. Instead, it runs on the website server and detects the requesting platform and transcodes the video as needed. "The 'Flash on iPad' dilemma is really just the latest in a long line of speed bumps on the road towards 'any-content, any-time, any-place, any-device' that we all desire. Fortunately, our technology removes this barrier in a way that is attractive to content hosters, a key device manufacturer, a key video player provider, and the end user alike," RipCode CEO Brendon Mills says in the company's blog. The best part of this solution, as far as it relates to both Apple and Adobe, is that it has nothing to do with either. And rather than having to swap out services and modify your whole website, a simple server-side install handles the issue entirely, outputting the appropriate video format for whatever the device. The service supports a number of formats and will be demonstrating this week at the NAB 2010 in Las Vegas. Discuss

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RipCode Brings Streaming Flash Video to iPhone & iPad

Here at ReadWriteStart, we've mentioned the importance of credibility as an entrepreneur when meeting with venture capitalists and potential investors, but it is also important to carry that credibility forward into your company as you interface with customers. Amid rumors that it was extorting businesses by offering to de-emphasize negative reviews in return for adverting purchases, social review site Yelp announced Monday that it would be "lifting the veil" on its review system and removing controversial features in hopes of securing customer trust. Sponsor Yelp features a review filter that sorts through reviews of local businesses to determine which is more trustworthy and places the top ones on the business' profile page. Some have claimed that Yelp was helping businesses pick the best reviews to show if that company was purchasing advertising on Yelp, a clear case of extortion that the company has vehemently denied , calling the claims a "conspiracy theory." Now when users visit a business' Yelp profile, they can choose to look over the reviews the filter has automatically reviewed by clicking a link near the bottom of the page near the pagination links (not exactly the easiest feature to find, I had to search for "filter" to find it). Yelp has put a CAPTCHA pop-up between the profile and the filtered results to keep robots from crawling the filtered data. Perhaps this is an attempt to prevent them from figuring out how to game the system. When I tested this new feature on one of my favorite downtown Phoenix restaurants, LoLo's Chicken and Waffles , I saw some similarities among the 25 filtered reviews. A handful were from users who live in other states or who are what Yelp calls "less established users," and some were either very short, or filled to the brim with Internet abbreviations and misspellings or slang. Others, whose content was hidden from view, had managed to violate Yelp's review guidelines or terms of service, which I can assume means a variety of things including profanity or obvious spam. Yelp is also discontinuing the use of the "Favorite Review" feature, which Yelp packed with advertising deals to businesses. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says they decided to remove the feature in hopes of eliminating any confusion. "Despite our best efforts to educate consumers and the small business community, myths about Yelp have persisted," writes Stoppelman. "[The "Favorite Review" feature] led some people to the wrong conclusions about whether businesses could control the review content on their page. (They can't.) So, to eliminate the opportunity for that misconception, we've eliminated the feature." By allowing users to go under the hood and see filtered results, Yelp is, I believe, taking a significant step in the name of transparency and openness. While they aren't revealing any special algorithms for how they determine what makes trustworthy reviews, they are responding in a timely and appropriate manner to the continued allegations of foul play. Regardless of the merit of these claims, Yelp seems bent on securing the trust of their users, a practice every startup should mimic. Also it is important to remember that a certain level of transparency is attractive to users, but not too much. There is a boundary between what should be shared with the community and what should be deeply guarded company secrets, such as fancy algorithms or the inner workings of the site's major functions. Users can trust a company more when they feel they have some sort of insider's view of the company through partial transparency. Simply blogging about the company's activity is sometimes enough to satisfy this need, but other times is may be appropriate, as Yelp has done, to incorporate features which help to underscore the product's attempts at truth, honesty and validity, if those are major facets of your business. Discuss

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Lessons From Yelp's Ordeal: Retaining Customer Trust is Key

Web-video management startup Brightcove announced Monday that it had secured an additional $12 million in venture funding and hopes to make its first public offering as soon as next year. As we reported Monday, the first quarter of 2010 saw a significant rise in IPO and M&A activity for venture-backed companies, and Brightcove seems to preparing itself for one of these options in the next year. Sponsor Josh Hawkins, director of corporate communications for Brightcove, mentioned on the company's blog that the new funding would be used toward "expansion in Asia and Europe, the rollout of new product lines like Brightcove Express on a worldwide basis, R&D innovation, and possible M&A activity." Brightcove has three offices in the U.S. as well as offices in England, Spain, Germany, China and Japan. Much of its strategy for 2010 seems to be focused on expanding its presence in these regions, possibly by using some of its fresh cash to buy out upstart companies in those areas. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company also plans to use what could be their final round of funding to build runway before going public, and that it could see revenues as high as $50 million in 2010. The news of Brightcove's plans to go public is further evidence of the rebounding M&A and IPO market that we mentioned on Monday , especially if investors are willing to pump money into the web-video industry which has seen less than stellar revenues. Brightcove also can serve as an excellent example for young startups looking for an IPO or buyout day of their own in the future. The company is not sitting back and hoping the day comes that it can go public or be acquired; it is making sure they have the proper capital to continue to innovate and grow its company to that point. The company realizes that being able to go public is not entirely about having a steady revenue stream, but it is also about carving out a significant portion of its market by expanding its current products and creating new ones. Just last week the company announced it was launching a service to allow its customers to create iPad-compatible HTML5 based video players , keeping the company on the cutting edge of video management. Last year rumors circulated that Google was in talks to buy Brightcove, but the rumors were later revealed to be false . It seems they weren't far off, however, as Google just last week announced it had acquired video service Episodic . Google, which has been picking up companies left and right in 2010 , could be signaling an impending consolidation within the web-video industry with their recent purchase and rumored interest in Brightcove. Brightcove appears to be hunkered down with its new funding and is ready for future prosperity, a strategy every startup should recognize and attempt to emulate in their future rounds of funding. Followers of Internet startups have been waiting for a major IPO for a few years and Brightcove could provide that in the next twelve months. Discuss

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Brightcove Closes Series D Funding, Expects IPO By 2011