IMIA Web 2.0 Taskforce Portal

Kwedit, the innovative and suddenly controversial payments platform for virtual goods, is releasing some early data.

The service lets users promise to pay later in lieu of a direct credit card payment when they want virtual currency for social games like Farmville. It’s not a legally binding promise, but users have an incentive to pay amounts owed because that allows them to get more virtual currency through the service. Users can pay by, among other methods, mailing in cash or paying at a 7-11.

When the product first launched they had no idea what percentage of promises would be repaid. Anything at all is incremental revenue to game publishers, and since the stuff they’re selling has no marginal cost (virtual currency), it’s all upside. But after nearly two months of being live, they say the repayment rate is 25.9% If you’re a credit company that would put you out of business.

But for game publishers, that’s a staggeringly attractive monetization option. Hopefully the company (or its partners) will also disclose the monetization rate as well down the road. Because right now game publishers are only able to get cash out of 1-3% of users. If they can get another few percent to pay via Kwedit, and 25% of that money is actually paid, revenue from games can double or more.

It’s controversial because Colbert made fun of it, and then the Huffington Post and CBS jumped on the bandwagon. CBS actually called it “toxic.”

Founder Danny Shader posted a long response here. But the short version is this – the criticism is ridiculous. It’s coming in one case from a competitor (the Huffington Post article was written by the CEO of a company that promotes Visa cards to teens and adults, without any sort of disclosure on the conflict). And the author of the CBS article doesn’t appear to actually understand the product and seems more concerned with getting parents all worked up.

The really scary stuff in social games was the Scamville nonsense where teens and pre-teens where being tricked into putting long term subscription charges on their parent’s cell phone and credit card bills. Kwedit isn’t even close to that kind of evil. It’s simply a very clever way of monetizing social games, and the most innovative new payments product I’ve seen in a very long while.

CrunchBase InformationKweditInformation provided by CrunchBase

Fascinated by the cloud and what it means for the future of Web apps, social gaming, open-source and the after life? Then you have plenty to keep you busy if you are heading to SXSW this year.

This is part of a series of ReadWriteWeb guides to SXSW Interactive 2010. If this guide isn't your cup of tea, be sure to check back for more information soon!

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Can You Run a 'Serverless' Business?

This discussion looks like one of the better cloud panels at SXSW. It features panelists such as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who is there to discuss how cloud computing platforms have evolved so that it is possible to run a ''serverless'' business with confidence.

Accessibility: What It Is For and Where It is Going

How does the cloud affect accessibility? Will cloud-computing allow for a metaphorical curb cut out, allowing access to rich Internet applications? Ahhh - another example of how cloud computing is affecting all aspects of our word.

From the SXSW guide:

"Could a Software as a Service (SaaS) model deliver assistive technologies as a cloud-based service? The National Public Inclusive Infrastructure (NPII) is trying to do just that. As a facilitator for more rapid deployment of assistive technologies and a means to prototype new business models for emerging assistive technologies, AT could become part of an extensive infrastructure of readily available, electronic curb cuts that allow for seeamless access for a broader range of users than have been included to date."

Drupal in the Cloud!
Pantheon is an open-source cloud hosting initiative for the Drupal development community. Josh Koenig will examine "The Cloud" as a concept, look at the marketplace for cloud services, and dig into what it takes to build an application on a cloud-based platform.

Our Interactive Culture Clouds

Were not sure about this one. Looks like it's made for SXSW with its discussions about how business and love meet. We're uncertain how the cloud plays into this one but just about everything does these days, doesn't it? Next!

You Developed the Content -- Now Build The Hardware

The cloud is sending developers back to the labs to rethink and build new hardware that fits the wave of cloud-based applications in the market. Cool! From the SXSW Guide:

"This presentation discusses how software/content developers can use open-source hardware to build devices that integrate tightly with their applications."

Become Immortal: Understanding the Digital After Life

Now talk about ghosts in the machine. Just think, when we die our identities will float in cloud networks all over the world. This may be the most philosophical discussion around cloud computing that we see at SXSW. It's time to explore the digital beyond!

Finally, can one man be a cloud? The cloud is just about anything at SXSW so a man on a bike with a wifi hotspot in his backpack must qualify. Look for "The Jason Cloud," as you walk the streets of Austin. Considering AT&T's service, you may want to hire a bike taxi and follow Jason around for a few days.

Discuss

We’ve talked a lot this week about the so-called “Location War” brewing at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas starting tomorrow. That war will happen, but actually, there are likely to be a lot of winners because a few of the location-based services should be able to leverage the exposure to gain usage after the conference. Those with real bloodlust should probably be watching another war: AT&T versus everyone in Austin on their network.

AT&T’s struggles to stay up last year are well-documented. CNN recently ran a piece about how AT&T hopes to avoid a similar fate this year. But actually, “struggles” is way too kind of a word. If you were at SXSW last year and happened to be on AT&T’s network — like, say, if you had an iPhone, like many festival-goers did — it was an absolute nightmare. You couldn’t make a call. You couldn’t send a text. Data? Ha. At a few points early on I seriously wondered if I had forgotten to pay my bill and AT&T had simply shut my phone off — except that it was happening to everyone.

AT&T has a funny word for the failure, they like to say “unprecedented.” As in, the usage of its network was at level previously unseen as a strong percentage of the over 10,000 festival goers (just the interactive part) were using iPhones. Well guess what? Word is that is year, there will be some 15,000 people there for the interactive part. As Samual L. Jackson’s character, Mr. Arnold, says in Jurassic Park, “Hold on to your butts.”

I’m leaving for Austin tomorrow and I’m terrified of what the AT&T situation will be when I get there. So much so, that I have a back-up plan (which Sprint sent me just in time to test out during SXSW after reading some of my rants against AT&T). With attendance up as much as 50% from the previous year, the number of iPhones in use is sure to be through the roof as well. Did I mention that just about every location-based service known to man is launching an app at the event and hoping every single one of those 15,000 people use it all the time? And based on the early signs, they intend to.

You’ll remember that after Mr. Arnold says the above line in the movie, he’s savagely ripped limb from limb by a velociraptor.

But there may be hope for AT&T. They’re clearly well aware of the failure last year, and did try to solve the issue to minimal effect towards the end of the conference. I asked a company representative what they’re planning to do this year, and they have a plan of attack.

Much of what they sent me is fairly technical, but basically, they now have a system around the Austin Convention Center (where SXSW takes place) that’s the equivalent of 8 cell sites, with 50 antenna nodes to cover the whole venue. Also, they’ve greatly expanded network capacity, moving from one radio network carrier to three, boosting the spectrum available for phones to use. They also say they’ve expanded the capacity of the so-called “high quality” 850 MHz spectrum, which works better indoors because those signals can go through walls more easily. They also have the new HSPA 7.2 software installed at all of the 3G cell towers now. But don’t be confused: that doesn’t mean their network has been upgraded to 7.2 Mbit/s speeds (sadly, at the peak, it’s still half that in almost all of the country), it just means that the upgraded software is in place and should be more reliable and efficient.

But there’s more. AT&T has brought in two Cells on Wheels (the so-called COWS that they brought in to help last year), and also a third rooftop temporary cell site. Each of these are equipped with both 3G and WiFi networks to help alleviate overall network strain. AT&T says these three cells are placed in optimal positions around the city of Austin where they expect the most strain.

All of that sounds great, but I’m still terrified. Why? Because I live in San Francisco. AT&T has known for months that the network is awful here, and while there have been baby steps taken to improve it in some areas, more often than not, it’s still awful. Take tonight, for example. So if AT&T knows it’s bad here, but still can’t seem to fix it, why should I believe Austin will be any different? I don’t. I’ll just have to hope I’m wrong.

Or I’ll have to kick back, relax, and take joy in the bloodbath as iPhones are magically turned into glistening bricks being hurled in anger left and right. As I boot up the Sprint Hotspot, of course.

[photo: universal pictures]

CrunchBase InformationAT&TInformation provided by CrunchBase

Zimbalam, the digital music distributor from Believe Digital, launches in the US today.

The service lets artists submit and distribute their music through 25 of the most popular music platforms, including Apple’s iTunes and Spotify, in addition to “several hundred additional stores worldwide”. This makes Zimbalam the largest music distribution network as measured by number of stores and geographic reach, says the Paris-based company.

To distribute their music via Zimbalam’s network, artists are charged a simple annual fee ($29.99 in year one then $19.98 per year after for an EP or album) and then once the fee is recouped, get to keep 100% of royalties – after, of course, whatever commission is taken by each store. Additionally, following year one, artists won’t be charged by Zimbalam if they don’t make enough sales to cover the annual fee.

Today, the California Health and Human Services convened a summit with an expected three hundred people in the interest of a state HIE (Health Information Exchange). This project has been tasked by volunteers and state groups and led by Jonah Frolich, deputy secretary of California Health and Human Services. The teams formed have met a series of hurdles already in preparation for the next big phase of executing the next generation system and raising an initial seed of $38.8m to move the effort forward.

At stake is at least $3 billion by connecting to these services for doctors and hospitals that qualify by using the HIE as built. This means that doctors can bill for more Medi-Cal and Medicare payments that are expected to be available in coming years from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds while using HIE services. Additionally, the services being created will need to support applications that engage consumers as they play a role.

We see the opportunity for California's investment to touch many interesting areas of cloud computing, identity management, and mobile - right as it is getting interesting.

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Last week, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and California Health and Human Services Agency Secretary Kim Belshé named a new nonprofit entity called Cal eConnect to oversee the development of Health Information Exchange services. One of the first tasks at hand is to finish the CA HIE Operational plan and to finalize details in budget, technical, and engagement plans to execute with the recent first grant by ONC for $38.8m.

Today's meeting and web conference is part of a process kicked off last July and offers monthly reports towards a state plan to direct funding for building a next generation model of HIE.

Leading up to this point, the CHHS efforts were led by Jonah Frohlich and comprised of many organizations and individuals contributing time to the effort to get the funding for the state. In addition to work group updates, the meeting included major parts of the organizations impacted the most, including quick fire discussion with CalPSAB's Bobbie Holm, Medi-Cal's Kim Ortiz, and for Public Health, Linette Scott.

Internet of Services, or, a Big Private Pub/Sub/Hub/Sub Cloud?

Shown here is the different core services that exist and how they provide links through HIE secure practices. And, how secondary services are build from there. This framework is focused on simplifying the overlay with existing services in a complex environment.

Here are some of the goals for the technical architecture:

• Provide a trust infrastructure for the electronic exchange of health information across organizations that have no pre-existing data-sharing arrangements


• Provide a directory infrastructure for providers to locate each other and to determine the format(s) that they mutually support for health information exchanges


• Assist organizations to match exchanged health information to the correct patient records


• Address gaps in the NHIN (Nationwide Health Information Network) specifications with respect to achieving HIE for meaningful use

Core, Context, and You

Determining what to offer and model the core services was a major part of the discussions in the technical work group.

One challenge the group faces in how to straddle this difficult issue is that identity and assertions for a person to live at the edge today, they are embedded in each application today in the form of passwords or tokens. Therefore, the CA HIE wants to be pragmatic in approach and have the first phases of architecture mirror the situation today.

At the same time, it was noted in the meeting today that the absence of a citizen registry is absent from the core services may be fatal. In this model, authorization, access, and consent is dealt with in the architectures as being "best effort" to integrate the patient data, but not "guaranteed". This is due to the practical challenge that all the endpoints aren't perfectly aligned in data, nor practices. And, that the HIE itself isn't a panacea for identity on the Internet.

On high level, the question becomes: Is the HIE a services where citizens are registered "agents" and have a requirement to be joined directly to each message about themselves, or is there information about people in the system being exchanged is by agents? We think the more people are engaged the better and solving for this will lead to a citizen registry concept in the future.

Here we show the planned services, networks, registries and directories architecture view.

A New Network Forms Around Providers and Documents

The CA HIE project aligns with the work at the federal level with NHIN.

We got a briefing from Brian Behlendorf on the recent work from the NHIN Connect project. He gave some context of the base thinking going into the models.

The NHIN standards are, in a way, DNS (who has records for this patient? etc) and HTTP (transfer this data, securely) for health IT. Building as much as possible upon pre-existing components (SOAP standards, HL7, etc), using a document-exchange-oriented paradigm that matches the use cases closely. It encourages the use of information models for health IT, to make the data as computable as possible, but it does not require it. It is being used for needs as diverse as patient record search, public health reporting, and disability determinations. The trust model is the least well developed portion of it - every node on the network signs an agreement called the DURSA that sets a high bar for patient privacy, consent, auditing, and such - but it is agnostic to who a node is.

Shown here CA HIE is both a supporter of NHIN and also has several suggestions for modifying the scope to include a tighter link to Provider registries and communication practices, for the practical reasons of insuring end-to-end provider to provider communications.

This seems like a good balance where the state is more focused on the entities doing business and should have a tighter link with these entities and the business they conduct on HIE.

People: The Hardest Service

While moving forward with HIE for California, an important question is being raised. Do clouds consist information about citizens, or do they contain user identity services that join and connect individuals?

This is something that is somewhat hard to grasp, but we feel it will play a role in how the experience of HIE is for the person who is coming into the system. We'd like to see third party authorizations and trusted identity federation for citizens evolve and HIE seems liek the right backdrop to get it done. As reported earlier, third party logon can work, with the right incentives.

Jokingly, we ask ourselves will HIE work with RSS for all my provider feeds.

And with a more critical eye, we ask the same question. Shouldn't all the services of HIE be using the best sharing technologies and patterns already in use? If I have a health concern, it seems that it should be as easy as "following" "Mike's ashtma" to get every update from providers in a real time feed. It should be mash it up with other personal data, devices, and social forces.

We hope that the architecture gives extra consideration to the person, so they can do just as much, if not more, "mashing" of their own data streams.

We Worked Extra Hard to Weave in Lady Gaga

Celebrities, even ones not from California, are people with trials and tribulations too. In fact, in her recent video released today, "Telephone", she addresses the access and issue of too much interruption and the benefits of both glamor and lifestyle.

She was spotted in California recently. The pictures of her hanging out at a SoCal mall reminded us that she is very much human.

Considering Gaga, we have added a few practical questions that the health cloud will need to manage as final food for thought.

• Will it work for traveling citizens and non-citizens alike that may have different records, languages, and locations.


• How will it enable care providers who manage children or elderly and will sign in and out of systems to pick up medications, for example.


• Does it work with mobile communications and social networks?


• Can it really offer true privacy for superstars, and everyday citizens with their health information? Is this even the right question?

We bet Jonah, the work groups, and the new team at Cal eConnect will be working hard to find answers.

Those answers may us to a next evolution. A health cloud - that powers the Internet at large.

Why does Health Information Exchange seem harder than colonizing Mars?

Discuss

First, we'd like to thank all 596 survey respondents and the many Open Thread commenters who gave such interesting and valuable feedback in our recent post "Should Social Media Experts Be Required to Know Their Tech?"

Over the past couple days, we've been able to put together a decent picture and identify some knowledge gaps and points of confusion for many would-be social media experts. But first, let's address why some of the RWW staff - and many of our readers, some of whom must hire social media experts - feel it's important for even the most marketing-oriented of consultants to have a rudimentary understanding of the workings of the Web, including its ecosystem of companies and applications.

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You will always need to know more about the Web.

Konqueror is a popular browser among Linux users. The browser Mozilla hasn't been supported since 2006, having been replaced by Firefox and, to a lesser extent SeaMonkey, both products of the Mozilla Foundation.

The Web does a lot more and a lot less than the average bear would think.

For the most part, we humans have a hard time admitting that we're "average bears," though. Before you earn the moniker of "guru" or "expert" or even "professional/consultant," you need to be far above average in your knowledge of the Web, not just how to get a few thousand Twitter followers or how to increase sales by X percent through Facebook promotions. Those things can come down to common sense or secondhand advice from true pioneers in social media.

Generally speaking, a social media expert will have been around the block long enough to know a CMS from a CPU, to know a bit about servers and DDoS attacks, to know what kinds of operating systems and browsers and even hardware the tech elite prefer to use (or debate over). And the good ones will remain humble enough to keep learning and will always admit there's more to know. Some of the wisest social media advisors I've know will ask to not be called experts, in fact, for how can any one person truly be an expert on something as vast as the Internet?

Flip Side of the Coin: Imagine someone telling you he was a broadcast media expert. That includes television - national, local, cable, satellite, you name it - and all kinds of AM/FM and satellite radio. It might also include pre-show advertisements in movie theaters. That also includes media spend, account management and metrics for all kinds of ads, from branding to direct response. Essentially, the person is claiming to be a one-man ad agency - an impossible claim at best and a fraudulent one at worst.

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Start listening to people who disagree with you. Search the farthest corners of the Web for new people and new ideas. Stop hanging out in echo chambers and start telling yourself every day, "I know that I know nothing." That phrase seems to have done Socrates some good; chances are it could help you, too.

You need to communicate with developers.

Haskell is a rare and complicated programming language. .NET sounds more familiar, but it's a framework, not a language.

In almost every social media project that doesn't involve something as simple as setting up a Twitter account, you'll have to work with and rely on the expertise of developers.

You might not want to learn a programming language yourself - it can take a lot of time, which is a precious commodity. But if you don't know the basics of what programming languages can and cannot do, as well as what languages your developer colleagues use, you'll end up frustrated and inefficient. And the aforementioned developer colleagues might feel disrespected as well; being asked to deliver fantastical products or results from someone with no understanding of your work isn't a fun experience.

Flip Side of the Coin: Imagine a CTO telling you, an interactive marketer, to run a direct mail campaign and get 500,000 new registrations. It could be done, perhaps, but it's not efficient or a good way to use your skills. Even if he told you he wanted 500,000 new signups, is that a realistic goal? Is it based on current adoption trends? Does this guy have any idea what he's asking for?

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Read up on the basics of programming languages; spend a few hours here and there on Wikipedia and O'Reilly books. Then, ask questions of developers you trust. Don't be afraid to "sounds dumb" or be inquisitive.

You need to rely on hard data and facts, not gut feelings.

It may seem to be the ad-free fluffy bunny of the social networking world, but Twitter turned a profit through search deals in 2009.

On occasion, we social media folks make intuitive choices that turn out to be dead wrong. While there's a lot to be said for making bold choices for your users and clients, there's much more value in making solid choices based on observed trends, analyzed data and tested outcomes. In fact, it's plain irresponsible to make recommendations to clients based on feelings rather than facts.

Always challenge yourself to make sure your opinions and advice line up with facts, not the other way around. As a wise man once wrote, "You don't use science to prove that you're right, you use science to become right."

Flip Side of the Coin: Rather than looking at marketing budgets or user traffic, your CEO tells you to spend $1 million on an AdWords campaign because "Google and advertising are where's the money's at online, right?" It seems like a ridiculous gamble with no logical reason of rhyme.

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Test everything you might suggest. Test it over a reasonable period of time, making sure to take peak times into account, and get a reasonable data sample. Learn about A/B and multivariate testing, website analytics, SEO and all the dirty details of traffic and user responses. Most of all, never, ever assume.

You need to know about the finance and investment market to identify competitors, potential partners and pitching opportunities.

Friends and family (and fools) will always be the first to invest in any startup.

Especially if you're communicating with or about startups, you need to understand a little bit about venture capital, if for no other reason than to understand an app or company's place in the market. VCs can sometimes be good barometers of a startup's health or the likelyhood of future success.

Likewise, with regard to our survey question about profitable social media apps and companies, knowing about various stages of development can help you know when to suggest key partnerships. Collaboration between two entities can give a boost to both.

As a strategist, a consultant or any kind of expert, you need to be able to spot a sure bet just as quickly as a sinking ship. And in the startup-filled world of social media, few are better at this all-important task than those with an understanding of tech investment.

Flip Side of the Coin: Your CEO informs you that the company is about to start a marketing campaign on a website that, through your social and industry connections, you know is about to go out of business. In fact, every website of its kind if flailing; you're surprised he wasn't aware of the situation.

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Read ReadWriteStart, of course! We recommend (and frequently interview and comment on) various brilliant VCs, angels and experienced entrepreneurs on this channel.

We hope you've found this information entertaining and informative. The remaining questions on the poll were, by and large, answered correctly. There still seems to be some confusion on the definition of the word "hacker," but I'm convinced that one will simply take more soapboxing on my part.

What words of advice do you have to share with your less technical colleagues in social media? How can we all improve our game online while making the Internet a better, smarter place? Let us know in the comments.

Discuss

The official Foursquare account just sent out a tweet letting everyone know that today is already the service’s biggest day ever. This is interesting since it’s actually the day before the SXSW conference kicks off in Austin, Texas.

According to the tweet, Foursquare broke 275,000 check-ins (the previous record, set last Friday) for the day “hours ago.” This means they’re very likely well past 300,000 now and perhaps even higher. To put that in some perspective, just a month ago, Foursquare set a record with 1.2 million check-ins for the entire week. And that was double was it was the month prior. At today’s rate, Foursquare would be doing well over 2 million check-ins a week.

Today happens to be the first birthday of Foursquare, so they shared some numbers earlier. The service now has over 500,000 users, they’ve given out over 1 million badges, there are over 1.4 million venues in the system, with over 1,200 specials available. And in total, there have been some 15.5 million check-ins. But that was before today’s record numbers.

While there are well over a dozen location-based services launching something at SXSW, the main two competitors vying for users’ time are expected to be Foursquare and Austin-native Gowalla. For its part, Gowalla noted that it was “Amazing to watch the Gowalla action on the eve of SXSW. AMAAAAAAZING!,” earlier today. Both recently revamped their websites, and both yesterday launched their new iPhone apps. And judging from the Vicarious.ly data provided by SimpleGeo, both are absolutely on fire right now and could go nuclear this weekend.

Update: Gowalla has a range of just about every possible venue you can imagine for SXSW and so far (again, the day before the conference), they’ve seen 352 check-ins at the SXSW Badge Pick-Up alone.

CrunchBase InformationFoursquareGowallaInformation provided by CrunchBase

There are no shortage of location-based services launching this week at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Many of them allow you to “check-in” places to let others know you are there. So how do you differentiate between then and decide which to use? Well, here’s one good way.

CauseWorld, is a free iPhone and Android app that lets you check-in places, but it has an added real-world bonus: big brands give money to charity when you do so. And this week at SXSW, CauseWorld is teaming up with TechCrunch to offer double point (which they aptly call “karma”) when you check in to one of over 50 venues around Austin (I’ll paste the full list at the bottom of the post), including the Austin Convention Center (where SXSW is held).

We’ve covered CauseWorld, which is the first offering from the soon-to-launch ShopKick, a few times now. It’s a great product because it takes an area that is red hot right now, location-based check-ins, and converts it into good deeds in the real world. For example, if you check-in at a store, you may earn 20 karma points. As you continue to accumulate these, you can turn them into real dollar donations for causes such as water in Sudan or trees in the Amazon. Brands such as Kraft Foods and Citi are currently giving the donations based on what users choose to trade their karma points for. The best part is, you don’t even have to buy anything — you simply check-in at various venues and earn the points. And again, this week at SXSW, checking-in with the app at a bunch of venues will earn you double karma points.

And like any good service with a gaming element, there’s a leaderboard to show who has donated the most karma points. And yes, checking-in can earn you badges, such as the TechCrunch one show in this post.

So if you’re going to be in Austin for SXSW this week. Or really, if you just want to do some good with your mobile device, check out CauseWorld. Find it in the App Store here, or in the Android Market (on your Android device).

Below find the 54 participating double karma Austin check-in spots:

1. Aces Lounge
2. Alamo Drafthouse
3. Amsterdam Café
4. Austin Convention Center
5. Austin Music Hall
6. B D Riley’s Irish Pub
7. Barbarella
8. Beso Cantina
9. Bob Bullock Theater
10. Buffalo Billiard
11. Café Mozart
12. Carver Museum and Cultural Center
13. Cedar Door
14. Chupacabra Cantina
15. Chuy’s
16. Clay Pit
17. Club Deville
18. Cuba Libre
19. Dirty Dog Bar
20. Elysium
21. Emo’s
22. Emo’s Annex
23. Flamingo Cantina
24. Hyde Park Bar & Grill
25. Iron Cactus
26. Karma Lounge
27. Kenichi
28. Kerbey Lane
29. La Zona Rosa
30. Lambert’s Downtown
31. Lustre Pearl, Lustre Pearl Bar
32. Malaga, Malaga Tapas & Bar
33. Malverde
34. Mellow Johnny’s
35. Molotov Lounge
36. Moonshine Bar and Grill
37. Opal Divines
38. Palm Door
39. Red 7
40. Red Eye Fly
41. Rudy’s Country Store and BBQ
42. Rusty Spurs
43. Salt Lick BBQ
44. Spider House Café
45. Stubb’s BBQ
46. Stubbs
47. The Belmont
48. The Best Wurst I
49. The Highball
50. The Scoot Inn
51. Uncorked Tasting Room
52. Velveeta Room
53. Victory Grill
54. Vortex Repertory

Reporters Without Borders released its annual report [PDF] on online access today. They call it Enemies of the Internet, and it shows a world where online censorship, intimidation and worse is increasing.

It's not surprising that as access to the Internet expands, more and more dictators and tyrants will try to suppress it. But what's troubling about this year's report is the inclusion of two democratic countries: Australia and South Korea.

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Both countries were included in the report's Under Surveillance list - a sub group of the main Enemies list.

Australia's proposed online filtering system is something RWB says it has "never before seen in a democracy." Additionally, in the state of South Australia it's now against the law to be anonymous online if it's in the context of an election.

In South Korea, a new censorship law allows for five-year prison sentences for anyone found using the Internet "to disseminate false news intended to damage the public interest." The same law requires online visitors to register their real name and national ID card number when visiting sites with more than 100,000 members.

Here are a handful of the worst violators of online freedom of expression on the Enemies of the Internet list:

Burma
Two high-ranking government officials have been sentenced to death for having e-mailed documents abroad. Net censorship is a serious matter in Burma. Massive filtering of websites and extensive slowdowns during times of unrest are daily occurrences for the country's Internet users. The legislation governing Internet use - the Electronic Act - is one of the most liberticidal laws in the world.

China
As its polemic with Google and the United States on the Internet's future unfolds, China continues to intensify Web censorship, faced with an increasingly forceful online community.The much-vaunted promises made by organizers at the open ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have proven to be mere illusions for the world's biggest netizen prison. Expanded dissemination of propaganda, generalized surveillance and crackdowns on Charter 08 signatories are commonplace on what has become the Chinese Intranet - with significant consequences for trade.

Egypt
More than a mere virtual communications tool, the Egyptian Internet has become a mobilization and dissension platform. Although website blocking remains limited, authorities are striving to regain control over bloggers who are more and more organized, despite all the harassment and arrests.

Iran
Iran, one of cyber-censorship's record-holding countries, has stepped up its crackdown and online surveillance since the protests over the disputed presidential reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009. The regime is demonizing the new media, which it is accusing of serving foreign interest.While a dozen netizens are serving out their terms in Evin Prison, bold Internet users are continuing to mobilize.

Saudi Arabia
An emerging bloggers' community is up against harsh censorship. These bloggers are confronting the traditional forces of Saudi society, which are attempting to prevent the Internet from becoming a forum for free discussions. Saudi Arabia is one of the first countries to have been authorized to write Internet domain names in Arabic.The Internet penetration rate, currently estimated at about 38% of the population, is rising. How- ever, it is still one of the most repressive countries with regard to the Internet.

Syria
Syria is reinforcing its censorship of troublesome topics on the Web and tracking netizens who dare to express themselves freely on it. As a result, social networks have been particularly targeted by omnipresent surveillance. The promised technological improvements are slow to materialize. The authorities' distrust of the potential for dissident online mobilization may be playing a role in this delay.

Vietnam
The progress made by Vietnam in the domain of human rights, which allowed the country to become a member of the World Trade Organization in 2007, is nothing but a distant memory. As the 2011 Communist Party Congress draws nearer, the regime is muffling dissident views on the Internet, and its first target is critics of the country's policy toward China.

Discuss

Rupert Murdoch, the legendary founder of News Corp., has always had a love-hate relationship with the digital world. Sometimes (read: during the bubbles) he loves it. Sometimes (read: during advertising recessions) he hates it. His recent moves – whether it be getting rid of some of News Corp’s digital holdings or shuffling the chairs at MySpace — are a continuation of that love-hate relationship. (Watch the video below the fold.)

And as we all know (and have read), he is not so enamored with Google, the so-called content stealer. (Never mind that he was OK taking Google’s $900 million when the search giant wanted to run ads on MySpace.) In an interview with Fox Business Network in Abu Dhabi, Murdoch said:

“Well Fox is now paid for. People when they pay their cable bills some of it comes to Fox. Cable television is paid television. But search on the Internet whether it be Bing or Google, whatever, it’s free and they simply take all our expensive and we think very good content such as Wall Street Journal or whatever and what they call they scrape it and they use it for search, it gives them their raw material for nothing and then they have this very clever business model of charging for searching it, we don’t get any of that. And they are technologically brilliant, they are a long way ahead but they do not have the right to do it if we want to stop them.”

In contrast to Google, it seems he loves Apple’s iPad and what it can do for the publisher.

Now that Apple is coming out with the Ipad that will be a very interesting way, more media is going to go into the Ipad…And they’ll get better and better and you’ll be able to do more tricks with it…And particularly with advertising and you see an advisement and you touch it and it becomes a 30 second commercial it’ll be these sort of things will happen not this year perhaps.”

Back in November, the location-based social event service Hot Potato launched at our Realtime CrunchUp. Today, they’ve taken what was a solid service, and made it a lot better with a number of upgrades.

First and foremost, there is a new iPhone application that just went live in the App Store. With a completely revamped user interface, the app makes it easier than ever to find and participate in events. Perhaps more importantly, it makes it really easy to create new events — and notably, the service has the nicest third-party Foursquare integration I’ve ever seen. When you click on the button to create an event, you can still manually enter a location, but if you happen to be around the venue, you can simply pick it from Foursquare’s list of venues with the click of a button. This drastically simplifies the event creation process since the venue metadata is already there.

This new app will be crucial for the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, which starts tomorrow. If you’ve been reading TechCrunch over the past week, you’ve undoubtedly seen that just about every location-based service has an app they’re unveiling. And another service based around planning events, Plancast, just launched their app this evening. But Hot Potato offers the best of both worlds as it allows you to both plan future events, and interact with ones currently taking place. The new app makes it very easy to chat about the event, and upload photos and videos.

And they’ve cleaned up the stream of information around these events. There is now a filter to show everyone commenting, or just your friends. There are also now number indicators to show unread items. And the check-in process has been simplified thanks to big green buttons that make it obvious.

Also new for SXSW is Twitter integration. On a case-by-case basis, Hot Potato will be pulling in tweets about certain events at SXSW, using a filter to make sure only relevant ones show up. You’ll be able to do things such as filter those tweets to show only those by people you actually follow, which will make them potentially much more meaningful to you. You can also reply to tweets thanks to integration of Twitter’s API. And you can share tweets from within the app that will show up as retweets on Twitter.

Another new features is Calendars — something which each Hot Potato user now has. Obviously, you can add the events you wish to be a part of to your calendar, but people you are friends with on the service can also add you to other events as well. The app also now features Push Notifications now (on top of revamped email notifications).

On top of the new app, Hot Potato has rolled out a completely revamped website with just about all of the same functionality of the new app (as well as the new look and feel). And at the highest level, Hot Potato finally has its own social graph, which can pull in friends from the usual suspects: Facebook, Twitter, your address book, etc.

And here’s something that should really help Hot Potato this week: each time someone checks-in to a SXSW event with Foursquare, that service will recommend they also join the event on Hot Potato. Clicking on the accompanying link provided in the Foursquare app with open the Hot Potato app and let them join the event with a click (if they have an account). As you might expect, you can also check-in to a venue on Foursquare within Hot Potato. With Foursquare likely to be one of the key apps used by conference goers, this cross promotion is simply huge.

On top of all of this, the service now has its own full API, so others can use and interact with their data.

Simply put, all these updates are full of win, and make a good app even better. And remarkably, they’ve managed to cram in all these new features while at the same time simplifying the overall experience.

Fine the new iPhone app here in the App Store. It’s a free download.

CrunchBase InformationHot PotatoiPhoneFoursquareInformation provided by CrunchBase

Location based social networks - are you over it already? It feels like location is all we ever hear about anymore, especially this week leading up to SXSW.

We're excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-ups What Twitter's Geolocation API Makes Possible and The Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived. But it's getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness.

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1. That Phrase: "Location, Location, Location"

   You're going to hear journalists use it far too much. Want to know where it came from? Language sleuth William Safire investigated for the NYT last year and concluded that the phrase was probably first used in a 1926 real estate classified ad in the Chicago Tribune: "Attention salesmen, sales managers: location, location, location, close to Rogers Park." Don't you feel more savvy now?

2. Too Many Startups?

   We're under embargo on almost all of them, but we can tell you there are at least 25 companies making location-related announcements at SXSW this week. Probably more. The Dunbar number of startups in a particular market, if you will, is something like 5. More than that and most people stop taking new entrants seriously. It's one thing to offer different technologies along the value chain of location, but sharing your location and aggregating messages by things like hashtag are two very crowded niches right now. One of my favorites is SitBy.Us, an app that lets you see where your Twitter friends are sitting in a conference session. That's pretty cool.

   You've got to wonder if and when Location will Jump the Shark and what consumer exhaustion for it might mean for the long-term prospects of the market. Everyone wants to be "the Twitter of SXSW 2010" but the fact is that SXSW represented a statistically insignificant increase in Twitter usage, historically speaking.

3. Location Startups "Not Playing Nice"

   There are loads of ways to post your location but it's very hard to get a feel for who exactly is where. SimpleGeo launched a site called Vicarious.ly today that aggregates check-ins across scads of services, all around Austin. It doesn't work very well, though. SimpleGeo's Matt Galligan told us today that the site is really just a proof of concept and that our perception that these startups aren't playing very nice together is very true. "And it's a real shame," he told us. It's hard for a 3rd party service to clearly identify whether these competing services are really talking about the same location, for example. No one tells their users what users on competing services are up to in the same location. Gowalla's Josh Williams says he doesn't know what the problem is and that Gowalla is very open about user data by open standards.

4. We Need Cross-Service Venue Tracking

   If you're thinking of going to a place, or you're there and wonder who else is, what you need is a place where you can see who has checked in there across all services. For the place to be at the center of your experience, not the service. Michael Arrington says the new AOL Lifestream lets you track particular locations, but that service only supports Foursquare among location services. What we need is something like that across any and every check-in service. That's the kind of thing that data standards can enable.

   Google's Chris Messina told us that the Activity Streams standard has a namespace for "place" and would probably add support for GeoRSS soon, but that so far Google Buzz is the only location service that seems to be supporting it.

5. Gowalla Doesn't Get Enough Love

   Gowalla's API is read-only, meaning that 3rd party apps can't publish check-ins to the service like they can to Foursquare. Gowalla says they are working on it, but they are the underdog already and this isn't helping. AOL's cool new Lifestream product, for example, only supports Foursquare, not Gowalla. That's a real shame. You know what's nice about Gowalla, though? You can see who has checked into a place and when, even if they aren't friends of yours. That's not something that's easy to do with Foursquare at all. It's also much prettier than Foursquare and uses peoples' full names, instead of grade-school-style first names and last initials. Gowalla's API just isn't seeing the adoption that Foursquares is, though. Have you seen Avoider.org for example? That's pretty funny stuff and it's built on top of Foursquare.




The above is for illustration purposes only. I like both these guys just fine.

6. Imagine the Future, It's Going to Be Different

   If location based services ever become popular with the mainstream, every urban area might end up looking like the Foursquare map of downtown Austin this weekend. That means services are going to have to come up with creative and interesting new ways to make that data usable day-to-day and not overwhelming.

   Likewise, when you think about the future, imagine Facebook being a player in this market, because they are going to be soon. It's possible that Facebook and Twitter could be where all these other services meet-up. Brightkite has different features than BlockChalk but we can see what our friends are doing across any of these apps on Facebook, perhaps. And Facebook is where your mom checks-in, if she's not an early adopter.

   Finally, will location tracking be persistent? Loopt right now uses mobile carrier tie-ins to track your location constantly and expose it to a circle of trusted friends. Is that something that all services will enable in the future? Gowalla CEO Josh Williams told us "no way" does he think that will be the dominant model, but Adam Duvander, author of the forthcoming book Mapscripting 101, says he agrees with Loopt: that the value in persistent location tracking will be so compelling that everyone will end up going for it in the end, once proper privacy settings are figured out.

   What do you think, do you think persistent location tracking is the future of location based services?

   These are some of the things I'm thinking about location this week.

   Discuss

   
   

Ohai has grand ambitions of jumpstarting an industry for social massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. Think World of Warcraft crossed with FarmVille — engaging and rich, but also easy to use and social. The San Francisco-based company has a great ambassador in CEO Susan Wu, a former venture capitalist who became fascinated by the emerging market for virtual goods, then teamed up with MMO tech wizard Don Neufeld, formerly of Sony Online Entertainment, and raised $6 million from August Capital and Rustic Canyon Partners. But it still has a long way to go.

Ohai’s first game, the vampire-themed City of Eternals, came out in November and has 40,000 players across Facebook and the web, and its second game, Project Unicorn Parade (“an evocative, interactive world environment” with animals, says Wu), is coming soon. Ohai needs to be prolific, efficient and innovative to take on gaming heavyweights like EA and new juggernauts like Zynga, while growing its user base and revenue per user. So the company has tried to make itself nimble, building a platform for Flash-based games that can be tweaked and expanded on the fly and transformed completely to build a separate game (Ohai aims to release eight games per year). “I don’t view us as being in the content business,” said Wu. “I view as as being in web services, where we look at things like data and conversion rates.”

We offered Ohai the chance to come in and show us what they’ve got, so they offered the one-two punch of Wu talking about the company and what it represents, combined with a Ohai content designer coming along to build, in pseudo real time, a virtual representation of the GigaOM office beset by “PR zombies” as a mission for City of Eternals. It’s a little hokey, to be sure, but it got me playing the game! If you’d like to help Om and I fight the PR zombies yourself, click here. The video of our chat with Wu is embedded above.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• How the Next Zynga Could Reinvent Social Games
• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities

It’s getting tough to keep up with all of the location-related developments leading up to this year’s SXSW, and they just keep coming. Tonight, on the eve of the event, Plancast has just had its iPhone application approved. The service, which we’ve previously described as a ‘Foursquare for the future’, allows you to tell your friends where you’re planning to be as opposed to where you currently are (in other words, it lets you and your friends plan ahead). You can grab the new iPhone app here.

The application itself looks solid, and includes the core functionality you’ll find on the Plancast website. The main view allows you to scroll through a list of your friends’ upcoming events, and tapping on an event will show you where it is on a map and who else is going. At SXSW, where there are always many panels and parties going on, this can come in handy — sometimes it’s more practical to plan ahead than it is to walk across town when you notice a few of your friends are checking in somewhere.  One feature I’d like to see is a way to get push notifications when a bunch of friends are planning to attend the same event (e.g. “Hey, your friends are all going to Salt Lick in a few hours!”); hopefully we’ll get something like that in the next release. There’s also a mobile version of the site available for users on other mobile platforms.

Plancast was founded by TC alum Mark Hendrickson, and recently closed an $800,000 seed funding round that included a bevy of well known angels like SoftTech VC, Dave McClure, and Joshua Schachter.

For other SXSW-related location news, see Loopt’s new iPhone app, Gowalla’s new app, and Vicarious.ly, a new app from SimpleGeo that brings all of this location data together.

CrunchBase Information Plancast Information provided by CrunchBase

TechStars is an early stage venture fund based in Boulder, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb was given an early peek at historical results data on TechStars companies, which the organization is about to release. The data shows acquisition and failure rates, as well as how many of the TechStar companies have gone on to receive angel or venture funding.

TechStars reports that nearly 6 of 10 of their companies have historically gone on to receive outside angel or venture funding (not including friends or family). Five other companies reported that they are now profitable without outside funding, so overall 27 of 39 (69.23%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability.

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Of the 39 TechStars companies analyzed, 29 are still active (74.36%), 4 were acquired for > $2M (10.26%), 1 was acquired for < $2M (2.56%), and 4 failed (10.26%). One of the companies is listed as "other" (2.56%), but there is no explanation of what that means.

The data that TechStars reports is similar to a recent study by the blog Awesome Zombie, which did an analysis in December of similar early stage venture fund Y-Combinator. Awesome Zombie found data on 145 Y-Combinator companies from a variety of non-official sources, such as CrunchBase, news articles and discussions on Hacker News. It found that 82 Y-Combinator companies are active (24 having received further public investment rounds), 33 failed, 14 were acquired. The rest were stealth, unknown or "other" (e.g. merger or private investment).

The TechStars numbers are very encouraging for early stage companies. Nearly 70% of TechStars companies have raised outside funding or have become profitable on their own, which is comparatively better than the more high-profile Y-Combinator (with the proviso that the Y-Combinator data was unofficial and gathered by a third party).

TechStars attributes this success rate to its "mentorship driven approach." The program also only funds 10 companies per batch, which TechStars says is due to its focus on quality over quantity.

TechStars CEO David Cohen told ReadWriteWeb, "I think that the programs that will ultimately prove to be most powerful for their local entrepreneurial communities are those which follow the mentorship+community formula that we pioneered. It's powerful in so many ways when you get dozens of mentors involved in very hands on, meaningful ways with each company from day one of the program."

I happened to be in Boulder on Wednesday, where Elyssa Pallai and I met with a group of TechStars companies for lunch. The knowledge and passion for web technology exhibited by each person at the lunch impressed me a lot. If this group of young entrepreneurs were representative of the Boulder startup scene, then it's a city with plenty of vitality and smarts.

If you're a U.S. company interested in applying to TechStars, applications for their Boulder program are open for a few more weeks. TechStars also has a new Seattle program starting soon.

Discuss

One of the more solid and genuinely useful Internet startups out there, travel fare aggregator Kayak, was dissected in a report released today by NeXt Up Research for SharesPost. NeXt Up thinks that with a heavy advertising spend, Kayak should have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18 percent from 2009 to 2012. Based on estimated revenue and comparison to competitors, the report estimates Kayak’s market cap at between $705 and $771 million.

Is Kayak a promising IPO candidate? You decide. Here are some of the relevant assessments:

• Meta search engines like Kayak accounted for less than 8 percent of online travel booked in 2009, due mostly to low awareness.

• Kayak is spending heavily to make itself better known — NeXt Up estimates an advertising budget of $50 million a year, but Kayak has said itself it plans to spend $100 million on marketing.

• The travel industry should recover from the recession and see a CAGR of 4 percent from 2009 to 2013, with online travel agents growing with a 7 percent CAGR.

• Promising Kayak initiatives include its iPhone apps (see our story) and Travelpost, its TripAdvisor competitor.

• Kayak is projected to have revenue of $180 million in 2010, growing to $305 million in 2014 with EBITDA margins of 30-35 percent.

• Kayak has raised about $224 million in venture funding and debt from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Oak Investment Partners, Tenaya Capital, Trident Capital, Gold Hill Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and AOL.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

What Twitter Airfare Sales Tell Us About Real-Time E-Commerce

This week geo-crazy mavens were pleased to hear of location-based updates to Facebook, the launch of Foursquare analytics and of course yesterday's news of Gowalla's comment and picture functionality.

So far the most common way to monetize these types of services is through sponsored leader boards and tips on nearby promotions. But the question remains, can local ads really sustain the entire location-based ecosystem?

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Geo-locational services are only now finding a business model and for the first time service providers are forced to think about maintaining the balance between user trust and revenue generation. After all, if there's anything Yelp's class action extortion lawsuit has taught us, it's that communities lose credibility when a thirst for ad revenue sets the tone. Short of selling user data to marketers, below are a few ways companies can monetize while still offering value.

Charging Rent: Location-based service MyTown allows users to buy and own their favorite locations and charge virtual rent when others check-in. If MyTown-style services introduced currency exchange like SecondLife's Linden dollar, users would be incentivized through revenue share and app developers could collect a percentage on micro-transactions.

Tuángòu: Scoop St. founder Justin Tsang admits that his group buying company is inspired by the Chinese practice of tuángòu or flash mob-style shopping. As a teen, Tsang would organize a group online in order to arrive at a store and barter for a group purchasing discount. The same concept can be monetized in niche shopping sites as users could organize large discount purchases via location-based app. Developers could either charge for the app as a subscription-based directory or charge the store owner for directory listings and referrals.

Gifting: Rather than earning badges, Gowalla users pick up and receive virtual items. If startups charged for virtual gifts, users could geocache items for their friends to be unlocked on-site. Better yet, imagine arriving to work on your birthday and finding a friend has geo-cached an album download or video file. Pending approval and check-in by the recipient, these services could form the basis of a lucrative treasure hunt / gifting business.

We know we're just skimming the surface here. If you've got more ideas on how startups can monetize location-based services, let us know in the comments below.

Discuss

Plancast, the plan-sharing startup with big-name angel investors and "future as platform" aspirations, has just had its iPhone app accepted into the iTunes store. The app was built by contracted star developer Leah Culver. It's simple, functional, attractive and useful. It's going to be very good for SXSW and probably beyond, if the service continues to stick with users as it has so far.

Here's the iTunes link and below you can see some screenshots.

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Discuss

Not too long ago, Toyota reigned as the seemingly untouchable hybrid leader. That dominance — in terms of both market share (50 percent of hybrids sold in the U.S.) and mindshare (no alt-fuel vehicle on the market is better known or more widely recognized than the Toyota Prius) — means that as the Prius image takes a beating, other models across the spectrum of green cars will also get bruised.

Mike Omotoso, senior manager for J.D. Power and Associates’ global powertrain unit, told me the firm plans to lower its hybrid and electric vehicle forecast for 2010, although it has yet to determine how big the hit will be. For the first two months of this year, the hybrid share of light vehicle sales hovered at around just 2.3 percent, compared to 2.8 percent for all of 2009 and 2.4 percent in 2008, according to Omotoso. That’s due to a number of factors — including high unemployment, a weak economy and the biggie: gas prices. But the Prius and its technical troubles loom too large to ignore.

Prior to 2009, the Prius’ share of U.S. hybrid sales had slipped below 50 percent only once since 2005 — in 2006, when it dropped to 42 percent. But even that offers a sign of Toyota’s dominance in the hybrid space. Omotoso explained that 2006 marked “the first year for the Camry hybrid and the first full year for the Highlander hybrid. So other Toyota models cannibalized Prius sales.”

Regulators are only beginning to look into the most recent incidents. But initial reports suggest the problems may not have been linked to a floor mat that pinned down the gas pedal in other Priuses and prompted Toyota to issue a recall last year for 2004-2009 models of the hybrid. Last month, when problems surfaced with the regenerative braking system of some 2010 Prius models, Toyota attributed them to a software glitch.

Regardless of what investigators and Toyota may turn up if they check out the cars involved in this week’s incidents more closely, however, one thing’s already clear: Videos that zipped around the web and TV news shows this week of a visibly shaken driver, and quotes from the 911 call he made during the 23 minutes that his 2008 Prius hurdled at high speeds down a Southern California highway before a highway patrol officer helped him stop, aren’t helping to repair the reputation of either Toyota or advanced vehicles.

Given the Prius’ status as the poster child for hybrids, Omotoso explained, “consumers might think that if the Prius has a problem then all hybrids might be dangerous.” That concern creates one more obstacle for new vehicle technologies to penetrate the mainstream, as some car buyers may forgo experimenting with the next generation of green cars — among them plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles from General Motors’ Chevy Volt and Nissan’s LEAF to BYD Auto’s e6, Coda Automotive’s Coda Sedan and Fisker Automotive’s Nina — rolling out over the next few years.

That perception problem is a hurdle that many car makers can’t really afford in this nascent market. Plug-in vehicle developers are competing for a niche that’s likely to remain quite small for years to come. Nearly a decade after the Prius debut, hybrids still hold a single-digit sliver of the pie. And despite optimistic projections from investors like Warren Buffett, who has said he expects all cars will run on electricity by 2030, other forecasts suggest significantly slower adoption, mainly due to high price tags.

Lux Research forecasts that even if oil costs $200 a barrel in 2020, just 4 percent of vehicles sold globally will be all-electric or plug-in hybrid because of the high costs of the battery technology. According to Lux, plug-in hybrids could sell 3 million units per year by 2020 if the price of oil reaches those heights, while hybrids can be expected to sell that many by 2020 regardless of oil prices.

In addition to presenting a challenge to companies vying to win over consumers to advanced vehicles, Toyota’s ongoing troubles also highlight a need for the government, the auto industry and even drivers to collect and manage (or in the case of drivers, to file), vehicle safety data and complaints in a more open and timely manner. Noting in prepared testimony that regulators and Toyota had received complaints of unintended acceleration in Toyota models seven years ago, Consumers Union is issuing that challenge – to increase transparency of vehicle safety data – in a hearing this morning on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s oversight operations. As much as technology may be part of the problem with Toyota’s vehicles, it could also be part of the solution — helping identify problems before too many drivers are put in the situation of having to call 911 from behind the wheel of an out-of-control car.

This morning Google announced a new Blue Dot feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search that shows whether a product is in-stock at nearby stores. This seems to pose a threat to startup Milo, which highlights local inventory in product search results both on the web and mobile devices. Milo’s co-founder Ted Dziuba subsequently responded to our post with a Tweet that read “Google Product Search has availability for 5 retailers vs. Milo’s 49. Super cool web service, bro.” At launch Google only has partnerships with Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and West Elm. Milo’s list of merchants includes a range of retailers, from BestBuy and Nordstrom to Midwestern regional department store Blain’s Farm and Fleet.

When we asked for an additional response, Milo sent us this amazing set of pictures below. Milo’s Palo Alto office’s are located at 165 University Avenue, in the same space as Google’s first office back in 1999. Look closely at the picture and you may even see a few of the famous faces from Google’s original team. The building itself is legendary in Silicon Valley and has also housed PayPal. Here’s a 2007 New York Times article detailing the building’s history and apparent lucky karma. The picture of the Google employees was given to Milo by one of its investors.

Milo CEO and co-founder Jack Abraham was quick to respond that they are not implying that Milo is the next Google, but just meant to inject some light-hearted humor into the situation. In all seriousness, Abraham said that Milo has a tremendous amount of respect for Google and its Product Search but aren’t scared of the search giant entering the market and actually welcomes the competition. Abraham and his team have been working for the past two years to scale their product and feel that their offering is more comprehensive than Google’s Blue Dot specials. While Milo is steadily expanding its merchants both regionally and nationally, the startup is also looking to partner with mom and pop shops in cities. Currently, Milo indexes 2 million products.

And Forrester reports that the “online research, offline buying” consumer market represents $917 billion in consumer spending, which is 30 percent of all U.S. retail sales. Online, e-commerce spending accounts for less than 5 percent of U.S. sales. With those numbers, it comes of no surprise that Google wants a piece of the pie. But perhaps there’s enough room for a number of players to monetize from this space.

CrunchBase InformationGoogleMiloInformation provided by CrunchBase