Finnish startup bets on universal media manager

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Finnish startup Linkotec hopes to create a flourishing business by making consumers' lives easier: its free software links all digital media devices to all key social networks.

The firm's Dazzboard (www.dazzboard.com) is an Internet-based application that connects with phones or digital cameras, storing all media in the same location and allowing it to be shared with different networks. "I have one interface, one window to manage all the content," Tero Salonen, chief executive of Linkotec said. "You have no interest to copy your content to seven places."

Similar offerings from other software firms are usually limited to sending content from one device to multiple social networks.

The company, which opened Dazzboard to the public in July, aims to build up a user base and then start making money by offering paid content in addition to users' own content.

Linkotec is owned by its founders and a number of Finnish private investors.

Source : Reuters, 2/10/09

IBM takes on Google in business Web-mail market

BOSTON (Reuters) - IBM is introducing an inexpensive Web-based corporate email service that will compete with Google Inc's Google Apps, which has recently suffered several high-profile outages.

International Business Machines Corp will likely try to capitalize on the damage that those outages have caused to Google Apps over the past year. Last month millions of business users could not access email for almost two hours.

An IBM spokesman said on Thursday that the company will start selling its LotusLive iNotes next week. The lightweight email service will cost $36 per user per year, about 25 percent less than what Google charges for a more robust product.

IBM's offering does not have as many bells and whistles as Google's, but the technology giant could attract more customers because it has decades more experience serving the business market. Its products include Lotus Notes, one of the world's two most widely used email programs.

Google, on the other hand, generates the bulk of its revenue from advertisements placed on free search products targeted at consumers. It is just getting into the business of selling to businesses.

"The IBM brand will help a lot," said Forrester Research Inc analyst Liz Herbert.

iNotes will also compete with a Web-based email service from Microsoft Corp that costs about $120 per user per year, according to the software maker's website.

Source : Reuters, 2/10/09

Starbucks teste le m-commerce dans la Silicon Valley

La chaîne de magasins de café Stabucks vient de lancer pas moins de deux applications mobiles pour l'iPhone d'Apple aux Etats-Unis. La première, baptisée "MyStacrbucks" propose une fonctionnalité de géolocalisation des magasins les plus proches, ainsi qu'un service de partage de recettes de café, via laquelle plusieurs contacts peuvent s'échanger leurs parfums et dosages préférés. Les utilisateurs de l'application peuvent également se laisser guider par un sélecteur de saveurs, qui leur permet de choisir une boisson chaude correspondant à leurs goûts.

Plus originale, la seconde application, baptisée "Starbuck Card Mobile" est actuellement expérimentée dans plusieurs villes de la Silicon Valley, comme Cupertino (siège d'Apple), Mountain View (siège de Google), Sunnyvale (siège de Yahoo) et San Jose (siège d'eBay). Basée sur un principe de codes barres, elle propose un système de crédits permettant au possesseur d'un iPhone d'acheter son café en magasin sans espèces. L'utilisateur de l'application sélectionne la boisson qu'il souhaite acheter. Starbuck Card Mobile génère alors un code barres unique, scanné en magasin, qui débite le compte du client du prix du café choisi. Ce compte peut ensuite être rechargé sur Internet.

Source: JdNet

Une peinture anti-WiFi pour se prémunir de l'Hadopi ?

Des chercheurs de l'université de Tokyo ont mis au point une peinture anti-intrusion qui bloque les ondes radios, et notamment celles du WiFi (2,4 GHz) et du téléphone portable (800 à 1 900 MHz). Le scientifique Shin-ichi Ohkoshi et son équipe ont fait la démonstration d'une peinture, contenant des particules magnétiques d'oxyde d'aluminium et de fer, qui absorbe (au lieu de simplement refléter) et donc bloque les ondes jusqu'à une fréquence de 200 GHz.

Appliquée aux parois d'une pièce, elle rendrait celle-ci hermétique aux ondes. Seuls les dispositifs sans-fil placés à l'intérieur pourraient alors communiquer entre eux, mais aucune interaction ne serait possible avec l'extérieur, dans un sens comme dans l'autre. Elle peut ainsi remplacer un brouilleur qui émet quant à lui un surplus d'ondes, potentiellement nocives pour la santé.

Les chercheurs japonais envisagent plusieurs applications, à commencer par la sécurisation du réseau d'une entreprise, qui ne serait ainsi plus accessible que depuis l'intérieur du bâtiment, ou encore par principe de précaution pour des vêtements destinés aux femmes enceintes et aux enfants. En France, on pourrait aussi se prémunir des vilains pirates et donc de l'Hadopi en installant ce véritable parefeu.

Source: NetEco , By Romain Heuillard

Voiture électrique : le gouvernement engage le chantier des bornes d'alimentation

Après les grands discours, les actes. Jean-Louis Borloo, le ministre de l'Ecologie et de l'Energie, doit lever ce matin le voile sur un vaste plan de développement des véhicules électriques prévoyant un investissement de l'ordre de 1,5 milliard d'euros consacré aux infrastructures publiques. Ce montant devrait englober à la fois l'installation des bornes d'alimentation et les travaux de raccordement au réseau électrique.

Dans un premier temps, le gouvernement entend confier à ERDF, la filiale de distribution d'EDF, l'installation de 75.000 bornes. Un appel d'offres sera prévu dans un deuxième temps en 2010, sachant que l'idée est de déployer au total 400.000 bornes sur le territoire national, dans les rues ou les parkings souterrains. Jean-Louis Borloo considère qu'à terme, et pour éviter les files d'attente, il faudrait une moyenne de 2,5 bornes de recharge par voiture électrique en circulation. Espérant éviter toute confusion avec sa mission de service public, le gestionnaire du réseau va créer une filiale spécifique pour le déploiement des bornes.

Parallèlement, ERDF sera d'ailleurs appelé à exercer sa mission originale dans le cadre du « plan de développement des véhicules électriques et hybrides ». Comment ? En raccordant les bornes d'alimentation au réseau électrique. Pour cela, il va investir 145 millions d'euros d'ici à 2015, un investissement financé par la péréquation et le tarif d'utilisation des réseaux publics d'électricité (Turpe).

Un défi non négligeable

Pour le gestionnaire de réseau, qui n'avait pas anticipé un tel chantier si rapidement, le défi n'est pas négligeable. Aura-t-il les ressources suffisantes pour assurer les ouvrages dans le calendrier fixé par le gouvernement ? Le gestionnaire du réseau de basse et moyenne tension a déjà du mal à effectuer les raccordements classiques. Aujourd'hui, on compte jusqu'à huit mois d'attente.

Depuis plusieurs jours, le gouvernement cherche à faire démarrer concrètement la filière et à éviter l'échec d'une première expérience ratée dans les années 1990. De grandes entreprises publiques ou privées, dont La Poste, EDF ou Veolia, et les collectivités locales devraient acquérir prochainement 50.000 véhicules rechargeables sur secteur, chiffre qui pourrait doubler à terme. Et l'Etat participera financièrement à la future usine de batteries électriques que Renault va construire à Flins (Yvelines).

Source : Les Echos, 2/10/09

Google acquisition and investment map

((Pour agrandir la carte, cliquez sur le titre du post.))

Back in January 1996 Google began as a research project for Larry Page, a PHD student at Stanford, who was working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). It was his aim "to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library." In his search for a dissertation theme, Page considered exploring the mathematical properties of the web, understanding its link structure as huge graph. His supervisor at the time, Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick up this idea, and Page was later quoted as saying this was "the best advice I ever got."

With his research project, which was nicknamed 'BackRub', Page was soon joined by close friend Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford PHD student. Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page's own Stanford home page as a starting point. To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm. Analyzing BackRub's output - which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance - it occurred to them that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques.

Originally, the search engine used the Stanford website, with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain of google.com was registered on 15 September 1997, and the company was formally incorporated on 4 September 1998. The name of 'Google' originated from a mis-spelling of 'googol', which refers to the number represented by a one followed by one-hundred zeros. August 1998 saw the first funding for Google as a company when it received a US$100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages. The homepage may have still been marked 'BETA', but an article in Salon.com argued that Google's search results were better than competitors such as Hotbot and Excite.com

In 1999, Google moved into their Mountain View headquarters, where they still remain today. The Google search engine started to build a loyal following from those that liked its simple design. By June 1999, a round of equity funding, which totaled US$25 million had been announced.

2000 saw Google begin to sell advertisements based on keywords, which is known as Google AdWords. The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and click-throughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click. It wasn't until Google started to offer AdWords, that it started to make any money.

In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger. The acquisition secured the company's competitive ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in a companion product to the search engine, Google News.October saw Microsoft approaching Google for a possible partnership or merger, yet nothing ever materialized. January 2004 saw Google hiring Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group to arrange an IPO projected to raise as much as US$4 billion. Later in the year, in April, Google made an S-1 form SEC filling for an IPO to raise more than US$2 billion.

As Google increased in size, it developed a long-term and well-documented rivalry with software giant Microsoft. Great competition between both company's search engines and applications soon arose and many Microsoft employees, recognizing the innovation and cutting edge style of Google's operations, left Microsoft to join the California-based company.

None of these were more notable than Kai-Fu Lee, a former vice-president of Microsoft, who quit to join Google's operations in China back in 2005. Microsoft tried to sue Lee, but the case was settled out of court in December of that year.

Google's growth and presence as a giant conglomerate continued with a further acquisition in January 2006, following the purchase of the radio advertising company, dMarc. In the same year, Google acquired Upstartle, a company responsible for the online collaborative work processor, Writely and the technology in this was combined with Google Spreadsheets to become what we now know Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

In October 2006, the company announced that it had bought YouTube for US$1.65 billion. By the end of 2007 the company had acquired four more companies, Gapminder's Trendalyzer software, Adscape Media, PeakStream Technologies and DoubleClick - potentially their most lucrative acquisition to date.

Page and Brin are currently ranked 26th on the Forbes list of the world's billionaires. They are the 6th richest people in America. Not bad for something that started out a side project. Meanwhile, as a company, Google simply continues to grow, expand, develop and dominate.

Source: Meettheboss.com

So Why Did Apple Buy a Mapping Company?

Apple purchased digital mapmaker Placebase in July for an undisclosed sum, according to Seth Weintraub at Computerworld. Placebase, which we wrote about last year, is a Google Maps competitor that focuses on adding layers of public and private data to existing maps with an easy-to-use API. One use for the product, called PolicyMap, layers various types of data — like home sales, crime, or employment — over maps to help visualize data geographically. It’s big business, and the company was profitable without VC funding. So, why did Apple buy Placebase?

There are many reasons. For starters, it is becoming obvious that maps and geo-location are becoming crucial components of any modern operating system. Nokia was the first one to realize this and snapped up companies such as gate5 and Navteq.

Secondly, the acquisition allows Apple to decrease its reliance on former BFF Google. Apple could use Placebase’s technology to replace the Google Maps functionality in the iPhone and iPod Touch (and the new tablet, perhaps?) with its an in-house mapping solution. The ongoing legal fight between Apple, Google and the FCC over rejected apps on the iPhone App Store is well-known, as is Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s departure from Apple’s board in August.

Weintraub claims the Placebase purchase closed in July, which is a curious timeline. Did Schmidt know of Apple’s plans to purchase the company, or was this an instance of him “sitting out” of a board meeting, because it was a place where Apple and Google were possibly competing?

Apple and Google are competing on more and more fronts, and Apple may be looking to cut as many ties with Google as possible, in a seemingly belated attempt at keeping the fox out of the henhouse. The highest profile tie at the moment? The Google search-box currently in the top of every Safari user’s browser window — a search-box that likely sends a decently substantial amount of referral funds from Google to Apple. Given Microsoft’s need to expand its search share, it wouldn’t be inconceivable that Apple replaces Google with Bing. As long there is enough “cashback” for Apple!

Source: Gigaom, By Jason Golson