I’m seeing a trend of new search technologies and semantic databases that make the services we use more productive. You’ll see more of those over the next few weeks, but today Scribd and Apture kick off a new way to get more info from documents stored on the web. Here’s some examples — just highlight … Continue reading Scribd and Apture herald a new more usable web (New wave of Semantic services arrives)
Paul Graham, founder of YCombinator, covered a bunch of places to “see Silicon Valley.” Good start, but he missed a bunch of places. Here’s my list: 1. IBM’s New Almaden research lab. This is where the hard drive was invented. They have a cool research team that moves single atoms around. You can see a … Continue reading Silicon Valley places that Paul Graham didn't cover
I love seeing innovations. Especially ones that are so easy to understand you slap your head and say “why didn’t I think of that?” Shopkick showed me one of those. What does it do? It is a mobile app that can tell when you’ve actually walked in a store. How did it do that? Use … Continue reading Shopkick shows innovation in location-based services is not over
Last week I finally got to visit one of the companies that’s getting a lot of attention inside the location-based service world. No, it’s not Foursquare or Gowalla. It’s SimpleGeo, headquartered in Boulder, CO. But one thing I’m interested in is why all these services don’t share data (I wrote about that in Techcrunch recently). … Continue reading Tour of SimpleGeo reveals why location services can't get along
You know Siri. Back in February I said that if you miss Siri you’ll miss the future of the Web. Apple didn’t miss it. Just a few days after that blog ran Apple bought Siri for somewhere around $200 million. It is the 2010 startup success of the year. But here’s the first part of … Continue reading The story behind the 2010 startup success: Siri (why it's so important to Apple's future)
I’m seeing lots of tweets saying I caused Flipboard to have a bad first day. Why? Because its servers were overwhelmed and it wasn’t letting new users sign up properly and even existing users, like me, were having trouble getting to the service and getting utility out of it. Is that my fault? Yes and … Continue reading Flipboard: A startup's first bad day or success?
If you’ve been following me on Google Buzz or on Twitter you can skip this, but it’s useful to wrap up some of the conversations we’ve been having online. Last night I got together with my friends Luke Kilpatrick and John Poore. Between the three of us we have nearly every cool smartphone known to … Continue reading Ye olde Android vs. iPhone debate (my experiences without an iPhone for six days so far)