Venture Beat

OK, so all that personal data doesn’t really belong to Google, but it would be nice to know how much the search giant has on us — embarrassing e-mails, search histories and all.
The company released a dashboard today that shows all the data it has from the Google products you use. That includes Gmail, Docs, Web History and YouTube among others. For example in the Gmail category, Google tells you how many e-mails you’ve sent and received and how many conversations you’ve had through its chat client.
The dashboard is also a central hub with links out to the privacy settings on all of these apps, so you can manage your personal information easily. It doesn’t include several of Google’s newer apps including Wave, along with analytics and book search.
It’s a smart move for the company as it wants to assuage growing consumer and political concern about the sheer amount of data it collects and its clout over the Internet ecosystem.
What I’d be curious about is if there are any secondary inferences about us that Google makes from this corpus of data. Based on our search history and Google Reader subscriptions, what does the company know about our general interests for advertising purposes? What adjustments has it exactly made to improve our personalized search results? That I don’t know yet.

More than a year ago Google and Facebook started a head-to-head race to build a social layer across the web with Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. The vision was — if you visited a web site, you’d get a custom experience based on your own interests and what your friends have been doing.
Today that’s becoming a bit more of a reality.
Google is releasing a series of widgets for its Friend Connect-enabled sites to give them personalized content, custom e-mail newsletters and advertisements. That’s a leg-up on rival Facebook, which offers widgets to find other Facebook fans, comment and along with log-in credentials so you don’t have to come up with a new ID and password. (Facebook has done an intensive integration with Huffington Post that shows content a person’s Facebook friends have recommended on commented on, but they haven’t scaled it out to wide range of other publications yet.)
Google also built features so that strangers with similar interests on the same Web site can find and interact with one another. Publishers can add the functionality with a snippet of code. When readers visit their site, a publisher can give them a custom survey to learn about their interests and the user demographic they’re hitting. (This also helps Google offer more relevant content in its widgets.) On top of that, visitors can share content out to their MySpace, Twitter or Facebook networks.
Right now, the data Google learns about through the Friend Connect polls and customized content links don’t feed into its other recent social products like social search, although it’s certainly a possibility for the future. Google has been pushing more social offerings as of late, launching an experimental search feature last month that shows results from friends.
“Our view of social isn’t that it’s a single thing — it’s a capability that’s symbolic of people engaging with one another,” said product manager Mussie Shore. “And in that process, there ar

An ambitious educational site called Smart.fm has made inroads in Japan, and starting today it’s setting its sights on the United States, with a revamped website and a new iPhone application.
Smart.fm’s strong point has been teaching languages, but theoretically you could use its technology to create learning activities around any subject. Customers upload their structured data (basically, facts like what a Japanese word means in English), and Smart.fm generates appropriate questions around those facts. Smart.fm’s Brain Speed Facebook app launched in September and offered a taste of what the technology can do by asking you questions based the information in your friends’ profiles (i.e, “Where does Anthony live?” “Which of these is one of Anthony’s favorite movies?”).
This technology gives Smart.fm the potential to be broader than a traditional educational software company, because it doesn’t have to write any content — customers just upload the facts, and the questions are generated automatically. Other users can add new facts to the mix, too.
The company launched its learning service under the name iKnow at the DEMOfall conference in 2008, and says it now has more than 560,000 users in Japan. To make the site better-suited to a U.S. audience, chief executive Andrew Smith Lewis said it has been redesigned to be more fun and accessible. That change, he said, reflects the more serious “hardcore samurai learning spirit” in Japan compared to the United States, where education is a harder sell. For example, now the topics you can learn are called goals instead of lists, and can be gathered into sets. It should also be easier to upload individual facts into the system now too. And the company says you will soon be able to form groups, allowing people with common interests to compare their progress on various goals.
The iPhone app, meanwhile, allows users to log into the service and answer a few questions while they’ve got some free time. So you

Here’s the video we shot on Friday at the Virtual Goods Summit, where we heard how Asia’s virtual goods market is seven times bigger than the U.S., that Facebook developers are worried about its new rules curbing game notifications, and that iPhone developers are excited about launching free-to-play virtual goods business models for their mobile games. You’ll see that there was a lot that went on besides a fight between Offerpal’s Anu Shukla and Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington. Video/Photo producer Alexa Lee.

AT&T, the major U.S. phone operator, will launch a Nokia Symbian phone with a Qualcomm chip in the U.S. market, an industry source close to Nokia has told VentureBeat. It’s just the latest in a wide front of attack the giant Finnish company is making on the U.S market.
For years now, the world’s largest phone maker Nokia has been in cold decline in the U.S. market. Right now, it seems left with a few trial phones and no serious attempt to distribute here. Nokia has a 5 percent market share in the US, well below its 38 percent global share.
Meanwhile, wildly successful new smart mobile phone platforms have launched from the U.S. — including the iPhone and Android — inspiring users with new interfaces and features that now seriously threaten Nokia’s stature as world market leader. These smartphones are showing robust growth, not only in the U.S., but across the world.
Nokia has finally admitted its mistake, and is now aggressively pursuing deals to attempt to at least double its market share in the U.S. over the next year. “Mea culpa, mea culpa, ” Mary McDowell, Nokia’s executive vice president and chief development officer, told me last week. After years of ignoring U.S. carriers, upset at their insistence to exert control over phones and customers, Nokia is working closely with Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to work with them after all. There was a good story in the New York times about this a few days ago.
In the latest sign of that about-face, VentureBeat has heard from sources close to Nokia that the company has agreed even agreed to launch a phone in the U.S. market with AT&T using a Qualcomm chip. While details are slim (the final details are still being negotiated, we here), and the launch date is unknown, this is surprising for a number of reasons. For years, Nokia and the San Diego chip company squabbled over Qualcomm’s ownership of a patent governing the chip that runs on CDMA networks. Nokia and Qualcomm finally declared a truce earlier this

Google’s foray into the world of social search is now live.
As we wrote last week, Google social search pulls in results from your friends alongside conventional results. If you’re thinking about visiting Brazil, a traditional search might turn up hotels, tourism agencies and restaurants. But in social search, blog posts or tweets about the trip from friends might turn up at the bottom of the search results page. It pulls in contacts from Twitter, Friendfeed and Gmail.
Conspicuously absent from the list is your Facebook network.
But really, Google already has it (or at least the public pieces of it). Facebook’s public search listings randomly generate photos of eight random friends. Crawl it enough times and presto! You have a rough social graph. (Even academics from Cambridge University have done it.) Of course, it lacks the richness that Facebook’s social graph data can deliver, because Facebook knows whose profiles you look at frequently, whose posts you comment on and “like”, and whose photos you end up in.
Still, Google has some of that in Gmail if you’re a religious user. For those of us who do use Google’s e-mail service, the company knows our closest and deepest contacts because it has years of lengthy personal e-mails and knows who we write most often. By comparison, Facebook knows our weaker ties, as people have about 130 friends on average and use it for more constant and shallow contact.

It’s unclear why Google isn’t upfront about the Facebook data it has. I’ve asked Facebook a few times if they’re aware of Google’s capabilities but they haven’t commented.
Perhaps it’s because Facebook’s deal with Microsoft to feed public status updates into Bing was non-exclusive. So the door is open to a Google-Facebook public update deal in the near future.
Now think about all of those pieces combined if that deal happens: Facebook’s public status updates and shares, a rough social graph from Facebook’s public search listings, Gmai

The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco is where hundreds of the digerati are gathering this week. Here’s a video of the opening night after party on Tuesday night at the St. Regis Hotel, an event sponsored by Canaan Capital. One of the sponsors was VentureBeat. Blogger Paul Carr provided the running commentary. Video shot and produced by Alexa Lee.Web 2.0 Summit - Canaan Web After Dark Party w/ Paul Carr. Oct. 20, 2009 from Alexa Lee on Vimeo.

When Google showed off a way of navigating Street View in a fully immersive room of flat-panel screens at the I/O conference in May, there was a collective web cry of — uh, awesome!
Informally dubbed the “Holodeck,” the room had a chair in the center and a joystick that let you “drive” around. (See the video below applied to Google Earth.)
But alas, the name “Holodeck” is not meant to be.
Paramount Pictures filed for the trademark back in 1992 when Star Trek: The Next Generation was popular and its characters dipped in and out of virtual worlds through a “Holodeck” on-board the Enterprise.
And that’s not anywhere you’d want to go: Paramount’s parent company Viacom has been embroiled in a longstanding $1 billion lawsuit against Google-owned YouTube. Plus, the film studio just revitalized the franchise over the summer with its latest “Star Trek” movie.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office shows that Paramount’s trademark status is dead at the moment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they couldn’t revive it or that it would be a smart idea to throw salt on old wounds amid a contentious $1 billion anti-piracy dispute.
So Google’s going by the decidedly less cool name of “Liquid Galaxy” for now. Got better ideas? Put ‘em below!

A new phone called Droid is about to hit the market at the end of October, and it will likely have the glitz and power to bury the iPhone.
So I’m canceling my iPhone contract today. I’ll smugly wait out the rest of the month without the iPhone and rely on my second phone, the Blackberry Curve, which is a vastly inferior device to the coming Droid — but at least it can make calls more reliably and send email more efficiently than the iPhone.
Don’t misread me. The iPhone won’t go away. It’s got way too much traction, especially with that generation of users — foremost the twenty somethings — for whom the iPhone was an introduction to the “smartphone.” For them, the iPhone was an awesome upgrade to the iPod. It was a phone that also let you carry iTunes. It has an awesome browser, and thousands of applications to play with. For this generation, the iPhone is pretty cool, even though it is hopelessly clunky for the rest of us wanting to use it for critical tasks. Oh, and then there are the gamers. Dean Takahashi, our gaming expert, tells me I’m crazy for dropping the iPhone, given all the cool games that have been developed for it.
But for me, and millions of others, the Droid is still likely to be the answer if the reports about it are accurate (I haven’t seen the phone, but I’ve talked with someone who has worked directly with it). Droid is a play on the word “Android,” the name given by Google to its mobile phone operating system that it has licensed to manufacturers and carriers to use. Droid is going to be better than previous Android phones for several reasons. The earlier phones running on carrier T-Mobile, called G1, myTouch and most recently, the Cliq, lacked in three key areas: Hardware, user interface, and network power.
All of these are improved with the Droid.
First, the Droid (to be released on Oct. 30 if the secret code has been deciphered correctly) is an alliance with carrier Verizon and manufacturer Motorola. That’s sig

Fear not, Trekkies. Star Trek Online is on schedule for a launch in 2010.
We shot video interviews with Craig Zinkievich, executive producer of Star Trek Online, and Jack Emmert, chief creative officer at Cryptic Studios, at the company’s Los Gatos, Calif.-based headquarters. There, a team of 50 developers is hard at work on making the game, which Cryptic inherited from Perpetual Entertainment (See our companion story that explains it all). The pressure is on them to do the game right.
Cryptic is hard at work on making the massively multiplayer online game, where potentially millions of gamers and Trekkies could gather and play in a persistent Star Trek-themed universe. The game is expected to debut in 2010. We’ve blended both interviews and game play footage in this video. The game play shows how you can be a Star Fleet captain of your own starship and fight enemies in big space battles. And you can also join “away teams” and explore or fight on the ground. Video produced and shot by Alexa Lee @alexalee.
The first video is our main interview piece about the game.
Star Trek - Game Play Details from Alexa Lee on Vimeo.
The next video is a channel to related Star Trek Online video.

Twitter’s announcement that it’s launching a charitable side project and wine label to benefit child literacy in the developing world underscores the company’s deep appreciation for wine. And by that, we mean deep.
From what we hear, Twitter employees are avid wine connoisseurs that are well-versed in vintages and varietals at company parties. In fact, the company’s director of search Doug Cook launched a wine search engine called Able Grape last year as a “labor of love” and writes occasionally for Wine Business Magazine. He wins extra nerd points for leading a search engine optimization talk at a wine bloggers conference this year.
What’s Able Grape? It’s a search engine dedicated to teaching you about wine. It’s not quite Google  – no spartan interface for search results. It’s more for research and learning. You can dig deeper by year, region, grape, producer, tasting notes and on and on. It catalogues 41,000 web sites and 21 million pages. Try looking up Bordeaux vintage reports from 2005, producers of the Domprobst vineyard in Graach, or anything about a 1964 Badia a Coltibuono. (Yes, it gets that specific. Plus it should give you an idea of how narrow and powerful Twitter search could get as the amount of data they collect grows.) So the company’s jaunt into wine-making isn’t all that surprising.
But it’s their first big non-profit campaign. They’re starting Fledgling Wine, which will sell Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and donate $5 from every bottle to San Francisco non-profit Room to Read. The organization is the brainchild of former Microsoft executive John Wood and establishes libraries and promotes literacy in countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia and India. To produce the line, Twitter’s working with DIY winery Crushpad, which is less than a ten minute drive away from Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.
The startup’s wine is $20 a bottle, and it might be pretty decent considering the company culture’s fussiness over

Score!
Any mobile worker knows the keys to a good environment are coffee, power outlets and an absolutely perfect high-speed Internet connection. The problem is that it can take too long to duck in and out of coffee shops to figure out which ones have good wi-fi.
Lookator is a nifty augmented reality-based solution to that. Hold up your phone, and you’ll see scores of wi-fi signals around you with their relative strengths.
The app comes from Loft Developers, a three-person team based in Tel Aviv, Israel that’s self-funded at the moment. The app uses vector-based models that continuously update as the user moves around to figure out the direction and strength of wi-fi access points. They’re planning to add features that show which wi-fi networks are password-protected and that allow users to click-to-connect. The app is built for Google’s Android platform but Loft is working on getting it to the iPhone.
There’s a competing app called WorkSnug, but it relies on user reviews to create a database of good places to work. Lookator finds wi-fi connections directly.
Augmented reality is a growing field that allows apps to superimpose information over the real world in a phone’s viewfinder. We’ve seen some augmented reality apps that are a bit frivolous at this point, but occasionally one will show up that promises to be pretty useful. Lookator could be one of these.

Building a comprehensive 3-D model of the world is definitely not going to be a top-down task. So Google Earth is taking a page from the company’s crowdsourced success with Map Maker and is asking people to help create 3-D versions of buildings around the world.
They’ve kept the program fairly simple. You don’t have to create a building from scratch: instead you make it from photos that already exist within Google Earth and give them a three-dimensional structure.
Once you’re finished, the models go to Google’s 3-D Warehouse and require approval before going live in Google Earth. The company’s launched the project in about 50 cities.
The search giant’s crowdsourced data for maps has become so comprehensive that it’s allowed the company to move away using TeleAtlas and enabled it to expand in developing countries like Vietnam and India, where many roads aren’t even officially documented.

If there’s one area where Google’s Android platform should blow Apple’s iPhone completely out of the water, it’s search.
So Google’s aiming to do just that with the Quick Search Box it released today for Android-based phones. It combines web search with search inside your phone. That means you can look up your personal contacts and do a generic Google search from the same place. It also learns from your prior behavior — if you’ve looked up a specific stock in the past, Android will pre-load the stock in the future as you type in its ticker symbol, and it will automatically refresh the price, too.
If you’re searching for information on the web, you don’t have to load a browser or the requisite app. Apple’s iPhone, in contrast, makes you load the weather app to look up local temperatures.
What’s also unique is that Android’s search pulls up data from inside apps. It doesn’t just look for titles of apps that match your query.
In fact, the designer behind Quick Search Box, Nicholas Jitkoff, is responsible for Quicksilver, a product cherished by Apple fanboys worldwide. Dubbed the “Mac Swiss Army Knife,” Quicksilver made it very fast to find any Mac program, file or folder with a few keystrokes and load it.
Too bad Google scooped him up first.

Although a number of augmented reality applications have trickled into Apple’s app store over the last month, a few are still being held back because they don’t have the right application programming interfaces for manipulating live video.
Augmented reality is a young field that lets you superimpose information or graphics over a live camera feed. Think Terminator vision, but on your phone — markers in your viewfinder tell you all about the buildings all around you.
Until late this summer, developers couldn’t get onto the iPhone because they needed public application programming interfaces to manipulate live video. (Apple hadn’t released the right APIs plus you’re not allowed to use private APIs.) That’s why some of the most cutting edge projects like the Layar and Wikitude browsers were launched on Google’s Android platform first.
Last month, an update to the iPhone operating system finally allowed some types of augmented reality apps. Specifically, ones that used the phone’s compass, accelerometer and GPS will work. With these apps, you can do a screen overlay, which puts data over the live camera feed without interfering with the feed directly. An example is Nearest Tube, which shows nearby subway stops with boxes of superimposed information.
But the prototypes that came out earlier this year that use marker-based augmented reality technology can’t get onto the iPhone. Marker-based AR uses two-dimensional patterns or barcodes in a camera feed to tell the app to insert 3-D images in their place. Apple hasn’t released APIs to handle this kind of work.
“Most of the super-cool conceptual videos and demos out there are completely locked out,” wrote Robert Rice, the chief executive of augmented reality startup Neogence Enterprises. Rice said this will jeopardize the iPhone as a hotbed for augmented reality innovation.
So who has gotten in so far?
France’s Presselite with its Bionic Eye and subway series of apps:

The U.K.’s AcrossAir wit

Google has just released Adsense for mobile phones.
It’s a way for advertisers to places ads beside content that is browsed on smartphones, a move that further reveals the search engine’s strategy for mobile advertising: It wants to target high-end mobile users.
It’s also significant in that it makes development of applications and content for smartphones so much more appealing.
The offering is basically a mobile version of Google’s AdSense product (see video below). The product only displays ads on mobile sites being browsed by high-end mobile phones such as the iPhone, Palm Pre or Android-based phones.
It’s just the latest way Google intends to target to smartphones that have browsers featuring full Web pages (those based on HTML). These sorts of pages are high-quality enough so that user can easily make an ecommerce purchase from start to finish on a mobile phone just as they would on their PC. Most basic phones today have so-called WAP browsers, which don’t allow this, nor allow things like tracking or analytics.
Google has been conspicuously muted in its offerings of mobile advertising for basic phones. It has stood by and let companies like Admob and other start-ups offer ad networks for low-end phones. It’s clearer than ever that Google’s strategy is to go after “high-end” phone users.
It also comes at a time when we’re hearing Google is about to launch a bunch of new Android-based phones by the end of the year, including for circulation in the U.S. Already, Google advertisers could reach iPhone users with search ads and from within iPhone applications. In a phone call a couple of weeks ago, a Google spokesman told us: “People are 50 times more likely to use Google search on the iPhone than on a WAP device.”
Google just blogged about its new product here. And here’s Google’s statement for publishers already using Adsense for content on the web. Publishers simply place a snippet of javascript code on their site. They can also ch

A group of wannabe-superstars from the tech world just released a video called “Bits Don’t Lie” (embedded below), a plea in favor of net neutrality based on the Shakira song “Hips Don’t Lie.”
The amount of musical talent on display is, uh, variable, but it definitely lays out the pro-neutrality argument in a memorable fashion. Sample lyric: “The bandwidth, the freedom, don’t you see, baby, this is so open.”
“Bits Don’t Lie” is the inaugural episode of a new web video show called CultureLick, with the goal of “taking an irreverent look at reverent issues — culture, music, fashion, art, technology, and the course of creativity in all of its forms and incarnations.” It’s hosted by artist/blogger/entrepreneur Drue Kataoka, who you may remember from her startup wedding registry, but the real stars of the first episode are Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg (whose weakness for appearing in music videos is well-documented) and venture capitalist Tim Draper (who has already proven that he’s immune to embarrassment).
As for net neutrality (the principle that internet providers must treat all traffic equally, regardless of the content or users involved), Federal Communications Commission chair Julius Genachowski has said he’s working to get the FCC to formalize its rules for enforcing neutrality.

Palo Alto, Calif. startup Smule doesn’t just develop some of the coolest iPhone applications (including musical app Ocarina) — it has also put together the best contests to promote those apps. Its latest the “I’m on a Boat” competition to promote its “I am T-Pain” iPhone app.
I am T-Pain allows you to transform your voice with Auto-Tune technology, giving your singing or rapping the distinctively mechanical tone heard in songs by hip hop musician T-Pain and others. Now Smule is trying to find the most talented app users (and to promote the app too, of course).
Participants record their performances of “I’m on a Boat” (a song featured in a Saturday Night Live skit guest starring T-Pain) and upload the footage onto YouTube. Then the company uses what it calls “a proprietary T-Pain induced Smulean algorithm which combines views, ratings, suggestion of some musical talent, and lyrical inspiration,” to choose one finalist per week for 10 weeks, then a grand prize winner. Each finalist wins prizes, and the top contestant gets $5,000 and a “Big Ass Chain” (weighing 10 pounds, apparently) to match T-Pain’s.
Smule is also cutting the cost of the app to tie into the promotion, from $2.99 to 99 cents, starting this afternoon and ending on Saturday night. Not that sales haven’t been strong already — I am T-Pain was at the top of the App Store charts the weekend it came out, and Smule says it has sold 300,000 copies, leading to 4.1 million performances.

Ribbit, one of the earliest web-based telephone services (acquired last year by British telecom giant BT), plans to ride Google Wave’s coattails — announcing the integration of several gadgets allowing voice calls, phone conferencing, text messaging and voicemail transcription into the search engine’s new, much-hyped communication platform.
These services, available in the limited beta release going live tomorrow, are meant to introduce voice as a major pillar of net communications, along with email, social networks and instant messaging. Google’s Wave ties all of these modes (and groups of people) together into a single interface. Ribbit has capitalized on this format, letting you easily select which members of your Wave you want to include on a call. In a document that opens up on the right-hand side of the screen, you can add Ribbit’s conference call gadget: A list of everyone invited to the call with icons allowing you to call them with one click and showing their connection status. You can also add text above and below this gadget providing context for the call. Everyone invited to this particular call can view the edits in real time. Once this is set up, the call leader can click one button to call all participants at once. The gadget shows everyone’s phones ringing and then picking up as it happens. These calls can be routed to land lines, mobile phones, your browser, or even other VoIP services like Skype.

For the time being, conference invitees need to provide their own phone numbers, though the company says it is working to integrate people’s contacts and address books to supply these numbers automatically. It is also developing call recording and playback capabilities — even to the extent that it will indicate who on a call said what.
Similar Ribbit gadgets allow users to send text messages to phone numbers directly from their Waves. They can also receive text messages from phones, which will be included in their regular Wave stream along

Fluther, a startup that crowdsources answers for user questions, just raised $600,000 from some of Silicon Valley’s better-known investors.
They include Netscape founder Marc Andreessen of newly-formed venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway (who has invested in dozens of start-ups in Fluther’s space), Dave McClure and Naval Ravikant. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is also an advisor.
Although there are many crowdsourced question-and-answer sites  including Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers and newer variants like Hunch and Aardvark, which digs through your social network for people to answer, Fluther says it’s different because it works in real-time and finds people across its entire network to answer your question.
The site is very intuitive. You type in a question and wait for people to respond. You can see live if someone is crafting a response and they can see your reaction in return as you type it. Fluther says questions on the site average about 14 responses.
Fluther also says it’s very sticky — about half of its returning users come back more than 26 times. If users do come back a second time, there’s a one-third chance they will come back more than 100 times.