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"My background is in Artificial Intelligence and my last business was building predictive data. Most of our customers were oil companies, and you can hold that against me if you like. But my pitch back then was 'just give me enough data, I'll figure out something.' And often enough I did figure out something." That's how Houston-based 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar describes his background. Tonight his web-crawling-as-a-service company will put up for sale tens of millions of data points extracted from public social networks and other websites. He says it's only a matter of time until everyone's doing it and he wants to be one of the good guys. "You can figure something out from just about anything," he says. That's the kind of geek Shion Deysarkar is. Sponsor Starting at $350 per month, 80Legs customers can now purchase 10 to 20 million monthly user profiles from LinkedIn, MySpace and some other social networks. Facebook and Twitter are not included, but there are a variety of other data sets from places like retail websites available as well. I've bet Deysarkar a beer that LinkedIn isn't going to put up with this, but he says 80Legs has been crawling them extensively for quite a while and would have stopped them if they wanted to. We'll see. 80Legs launched at DEMO last fall and has been on our radar since last Spring. Its core product is crawling the web for a small fee - to index whatever its customers want. As Sarah Perez wrote in September : What 80Legs does is no easy feat. It provides its users a service which offers up 50,000 computers which can crawl up to 2 billion web pages per day. Yes, it's like having your own little search engine that you can rent for a small fee. How small? 80Legs is about 50% less expensive than any other competitive service out there. Tonight it's putting up for sale some pre-configured crawls, in hopes to reach a new market of people for whom the core service is too complicated. Either way, Shion Deysarkar may be a man from the future. We're watching closely the slow opening of aggregate social network user data for bulk analaysis and innovation. It's a hotly contested area. Here's what Deysarkar thinks about four of the biggest questions in this area today. On The Slap-Down of Nice Facebook Data Harvesters Academic and innovation-minded researchers are harvesting large quantities of public Facebook user profile data, only to be threatened by Facebook's legal department. Pete Warden is the best known example and one that Deysarkar called "a shame." The people using that data are not doing anything that's shady or wrong. They are trying to make new value on top of that data. In ways that Facebook or whoever is not doing. Facebook is in the business of bringing people to their site, they aren't leveraging that data for other things, and there is many things they'll never use data for. No harm is being done to Facebook. What would help them would be to become a data standard. As long as people are adding value then it's good. On Users Approving of Data Aggregation Say "aggregate user data analysis" and most people freak out - presuming it's a screaming privacy violation. Might that ever change? Deysarkar thinks so, perhaps too optimistically. "Going forward, the end user will hopefully understand that people are creating services that will benefit them. If I take a couple of actions and I see it benefits me that's hopeful. The challenge is that people have to understand that it came from aggregation. The more people that are making a case and building things around it, the better. "If you look at social networking, quite often connections are made in unintuitive ways. Obviously market researchers can take advantage of that, but it can also help people connect with that we couldn't otherwise. "At the end of the day, it's going to happen. Sites are going to fight it, but that data is going to become available. Wherever there is value to be had, people are going to go for that value." On the Black Market for Social Networking Data One of our arguements has been that Facebook and other networks should open up access to their public user data for aggregate analysis because the bad guys who want to do bad things with it already are, through the black market . Meanwhile, positive uses of data analysis are prohibited. Deysarkar confirms again that the black market is real. "Companies should want to work with us because we're above board. The black market definitely exists. We have heard about it from some of our potential customers, who have asked about things we wouldn't do. They just say, 'we can get it through other ways.' Things like wanting a crawler to log-in and get private data. It's too bad that exists." On the Still Infant Market for Good User Data 80Legs is cool. It's a crawler-as-a-service. Pete Warden, one of our Big Data favorites, uses and endorses it. But it's also a little complicated, especially because it's like selling potential . It sells data that you then have to derive value from, it doesn't deliver value directly in ways people are familiar with. The Economist's Special Report on Big Data last month argued that data was a key new form of economic input, on par with land, labor and capital. Deysarkar says he agrees with that, "it is definitely a unit of value," but also admits that too few people get it yet. "We do have customers who are using 80legs the way we intended, we have a decent set of customers. But we know that there is a whole other set of customers who are intimidated because it is a bit technical now. These pre-configured crawls we're now selling still fit into the big picture, but the whole data market is not well defined. There isn't a rich enough ecosystem of companies using the data, that's the market we'd like to serve, but it's still being formed right now." What do you think? Is 80Legs just a little ahead of its time? A lot? Totally crazy and wrong? We would love for you to share your thoughts on these matters in comments below. Discuss

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Thoughts From the Man Who Would Sell The World, Nicely

I love to sit on the beach.  One of the coolest things about the beach is the number of layers of visual depth.  Look at the sand and it's beautiful, but zoom your eyes in closer and you'll see a whole layer of life running around on the sand that you didn't see before.  Look even closer and you can see individual grains of sand, water and light dancing between them.  Look closer still and you see that each grain of sand is a unique object with its own texture.  If your eyes are strong enough, or you have a machine to help you, you can see even more layers by looking closer still. That's what Twitter is going to be like with the launch of Twitter Annotations this Summer. It's a beautiful vision, with huge potential, but there's another way to look at this analogy: you don't build on the beach sand because it shifts too much. Will Annotations live up to its incredible promise? Sponsor What Annotations Are Last week Twitter announced a forthcoming feature called Twitter Annotations: it's a system for almost any metadata to be connected to any Twitter message when it's published. Inside every Tweet is now a space where you could put or find anything, including links out to further instructions or larger bodies of information. That's always been the case with the 140 characters of content - but now we're talking about systematic metadata intended for machines, to augment the content. The idea is dripping with potential, but also some risk. Isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? Twitter has been considering adding Annotations for at least two years, according to Platform Team member Raffi Krikorian. That's a relatively large portion of the company's young life. Every time a new bit of metadata was added to Tweets, like geolocation information was last Fall, the company would ask itself "should we be doing this, or should we just open up the platform for and and all metadata?" Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content. What might this look like? We could see Annotations fields like: Link to a media file, like podcast enclosures, photos linked to, etc. Context about the Tweet like where was the author when it was published, maybe what the weather was like there at the time. Your Twitter publishing interface could offer you a special option to write reviews of movies, books, or links you're sharing. The ISBN of the book, a link to a preview of the movie and the number of stars in your rating could be included in the Tweet Annotations. Any way you can classify, describe, append or otherwise enrich a Tweet with words or numbers can be included in Annotations. You Tweet, you (or more likely your Twitter app) attach a characteristic or quality, you define the characteristic and then you provide a value of how or what that Tweet did relative to the quality being referenced. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and more will make it easy for users to add these annotations. Yes, this is meaningful in large part because of the 140 character limit on Twitter messages themselves, but isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? From Annotations Come Analysis Annotating a single Tweet is uninteresting, it's when you hit the Twitter databases and gather together all the Tweets that share a characteristic that things get exciting. When those selected Tweets can then be cross-referenced with other sets of data from outside Twitter - that's when the word fecund starts feeling inadequate. Show me all the Tweets from my friends that have links to music and play me those songs. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others are going to make viewing that kind of data a whole lot easier. Tweetmeme's Nick Halstead believes that Annotations will be used most extensively to communicate webhooks, links to instructions for a Twitter client to follow. He thinks it will enable game play and help Twitter start acquiring more users again. "Because of the size of the data you can put in the annotations, I think people will come up with links to offsite resources. Seesmic is building their own platform for Windows to support plug-ins, but this reaches much further, but this lets Twitter clients augment a tweet with other services. Sf you were Stocktweets, you could attach a link in the namespace that's in stocktweets, Seesmic could follow that link back to Stocktweets and ask it how to render it. So you could put a chart and any other associated information. It's like FBML [Facebook Markup Language], the ability to embed applications inside the Twitter clients. Maybe threaded conversations. A game of Scrabble where the link points at a currently rendered scrabble board, so other people could look at the board and join in playing it. Annotations and webhooks would allow gaming to start happening on Twitter." Halstead believes an Alpha version of Annotations could be made available to developers in a month. How about showing me all the Tweets from anyone that are referencing the President of the United States (subject: POTUS?), analyze the sentiment in the messages, show me where those Twitter users were located and tell me how those local sentiments change over time. Send me an alert when one of those starts to shift radically. Show me all the Tweets by people in their 20's and in their 50's (imagine an author age tag in Annotations, why not?), living near the site of a disastrous event. How do those discussions differ? There are all kinds of interesting questions that could be tackled when the developer world's imagination runs wild on the terms of description applied to our messages. Of course it will be tempting to draw all kinds of conclusions from this rich data. We'll surely be able to draw a whole lot of value from it. "You can learn something from almost anything," Big Data cruncher and 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar says. "Just give me enough data, I'll figure out something." But let's keep in mind the words of social network scientist danah boyd, who wrote the following on her blog this morning: Time and time again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic...Big Data creates tremendous opportunities for those who know how to assess the context of the data and ask the right questions into it. But mucking with Big Data alone is not research. And seeing patterns in Big Data is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer. Tweet Power Politics Twitter's Krikorian says the site will probably list "trending annotations" just like it lists trending topics today. There will probably be a wiki where anyone can find out what namespaces are being used for what purposes. Really though, the classification system is going to be determined by the market. That's something that worries a lot of people. "People who believe in building standards are conerned about our blase attitude about how we want to run annotations," Krikorian says. He believes that the developer community will work things out for itself, just as it has in the past. "There has been a lot of emergent behavior around how to relate to tweets anyway, without our imposing much structure around it. The Twitter platform is continuously evolving - the developers will figure it out. Twitter developers iterate in public." That's likely to be cold comfort for people focused on the power of structured data standards. Many people are calling for Twitter to embrace the well-built efforts of the Semantic Web community. Krikorian says that 90% of Twitter developers don't know what the Semantic Web is but that there's certainly room for standards lovers to work within the Annotations scheme. It's not just about standards, either. "We need serious consideration from folks who know their stuff before we create a convention," says Teresa Boze , who suggested the American Society of Indexers in particular. It's hard to think that creating a giant living library without consulting some librarians is a good idea. The absence of standard terminology could really be a problem. Annotations can't be changed retroactively, either. Krikorian says that major players will dominate the obvious use cases for Annotations and the company will monitor and highlight really innovative Annotations developed by people on the margins. We'll see how well that will work. Imagination will make the sky the limit for this publishing platform used easily by more than 100 million people around the world. But a shortage of forethought, planning and agreed-upon standards may bring that platform's aspirations back down to earth quickly in the future. Time will tell. Discuss

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What Twitter Annotations Mean

Today, digital textbooks for higher education and career education account for only 0.5% of all textbook sales in the United States. According to a new study by social learning platform Xplana , this could soon change. Xplana predicts that digital textbooks will account for almost 20% of all textbook sales within the next five years. This will make digital textbooks a $1 billion market. Sponsor According to Rob Reynolds, who is one of the co-authors of this report and also the director of product design and research for Xplana, this rapid growth will be driven by a number of factors, including the proliferation of tablets and e-readers like the iPad and Kindle, the availability and pricing of e-textbook content and an increasing interest in online learning. According to this study, sales of digital textbooks will increase 100% year-over-year in 2010 and the continue to grow rapidly for the years to come. Factors in Favor of Digital Textbooks Pricing, as the authors note, is a major factor that will make digital textbooks more interesting for students, who often spend hundreds of dollars per semester on textbooks. Flat World Knowledge , for example, offers its e-textbooks for free and only charges students for the print versions. Currently, teachers at over 400 colleges use Flat World Knowledge's textbooks for their courses. Other e-textbook companies like CourseSmart and MBS Direct also saw very strong growth in their sales last year. Other factors in favor of digital textbooks include the increasing availability (and affordability) of e-book readers and netbooks, as well as the move towards the ePub publishing standard for e-books. It is also important to note that textbooks publishers have long seen digital textbooks as way to shut down the market for used textbooks, which accounts for close to 35% of the textbook market today and which - of course - doesn't earn these publishers a single dollar. What Will these E-Textbooks Looks Like? It will be interesting to see what these textbooks will look like. Thanks to new initiatives from Wolfram Alpha and other data and service providers, interactive textbooks could soon replace static texts. The problem there, of course, is that these textbooks are more expensive to produce than today's textbooks. The lower cost of digital distribution and the publisher's ability to cut out the middlemen (distributors, campus bookstores etc.) will help to offset some or all of these additional costs. You can find the full report here Discuss

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1 Out of 5 Textbooks Digital by 2014

When looking to start a potentially venture-backed company, it's important to check the numbers to see if VCs are more or less likely to invest their funds. Back in January, we proposed that venture capitalist investments could see a bump in early 2010 thanks to increased fund raising at the end of last year. New data from the National Venture Capital Association , however, shows that in the first quarter of this year, VC investment has been modest at best, dropping slightly from the previous quarter, but starting stronger than 2009. Sponsor In a report completed in cooperation with Thompson Reuters, MoneyTree and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC), the NVCA reported last week that $4.7 billion was invested in 681 deals by venture capitalists in Q1 2010, falling 9% and 18% respectively from the final quarter of 2009. The dip in activity is, however, still a stronger start to the year from last year when just $3.4 billion was invested in 635 deals. Though activity dropped from last quarter, the average deal size grew $650,000 from $6.25 million per deal in Q4 2009, to $6.9 million per deal this year. NVCA president Mark Heesen says the first quarter data "bodes well for the remainder of the year," but still sees a slow and steady climb is in the near future of the VC community. "With health care reform passed and an improving exit market, we are expecting venture investment to increase moderately throughout the rest of 2010," says Heesen. "However, we still anticipate investment levels to mirror that of the mid-1990's as many venture firms will be focused on fundraising this year." It seems the VCs were more careful and more focused with their investments this quarter. Less money was spent, but more money went into each investment. A looming consolidation of VC firms is likely creating a scenario in which the investors want to exercise more caution than usual as to avoid spreading themselves thin and collapsing. While our January prediction didn't completely come to fruition, the VC investment scene certainly took a baby-step forward toward a brighter future. Just as it is much easier to gain weight than it is to lose it, the VC community is quick to drop investment spending and slow to bring it back. So like someone trying to shed some pounds to fit into their swimsuit this summer, slow and steady will likely win this race as venture investments crawl out of their economic slump. After the dot-com bust in 2000 and 2001, it took until the end of 2007 for VC investments to return to "normal" (only to fall again with the recent recession). So riding the boom and bust cycle, it looks like we could be in for another slow and steady climb over the next 6 to 8 years (so yank all your stocks around 2016). Previous first quarter data from 2010 has been hitting extremes, as we saw the slowest opening quarter for VC fund raising in 17 years, as well as record high M&A numbers . This data, on the other hand, splits the difference of the extremes and is a modest dip. For those entrepreneurs champing at the bit to found a startup, now may as good a time as ever to go out and seek venture funding as VCs will likely be less selective and less cautious over the course of the year. Discuss

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Are VC Investments Getting in Shape for Summer?

The Internet of Things is the idea of a web of data provided by things like real-world devices and sensors. It's something we've covered in great detail here at ReadWriteWeb because where there is data, there is a platform for services and mashups. When that data is intimately tied to our real lives off-line, that's exciting. The Internet of Things offers a whole new world of opportunities for improved decision making, innovative services and (unfortunately) social surveillance. It's loaded with implications to consider. Whether you've got 5 or 30 minutes to spare, check out the two following videos (one short, one long) that both do a great job of explaining where the Internet of Things is at and why it's so exciting. Sponsor Last week industry thought leader Tim O'Reilly, the man widely credited with popularizing the term Web 2.0, gave an opening keynote talk about the Internet of Things at his organization's MYSQL conference . Some readers here might assume that a MYSQL talk is too technical for them, but this was a speech that anyone could appreciate. We've embedded below two videos. The first is a great 5 minute explanation of the Internet of Things from IBM. The next is O'Reilly's 36 minute keynote. We highly recommend you check both out for a great picture of where the future is headed. Above, from IBM's Smarter Planet . Below, Tim O'Reilly at the O'Reilly MYSQL conference . Of course it's not all peachy keen. As O'Reilly explains at the 18 minute mark, there is a battle over control of all this data the web is being flooded with. "You see increasingly the giants of the internet are trading for their own account, they are building a platform in which all roads lead back to themselves. Now there is a contervailing force for openess, but we have to wary, we have to be aware of that, we have to work for openess in that web." What do you think about the Internet of Things? Caption image from the Internet of Things 2010 Conference coming up in Tokyo this November. Discuss

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Tim O'Reilly Explains the Internet of Things