metarand

Appspace: MySpace Opens App Gallery, Zynga Opens API

The world’s largest social network, MySpace, has officially opened its Application Gallery.

Every application gets its own profile, from where its developers can directly interface with those users who friend the app.

Truth Box by Suren Markosian tops the app install leaderboard with over 560,000 installs. The app promises to let you find out the “truth about yourself” and discover what others really think about you.

Not far down the chart at No. 4 is Ace Texas Hold’em Poker with 86,000 installs. This app is part of the Zynga Game Network, which is one of the companies to have embraced the MySpace Developer Platform since it became available in February.

Zynga Game Network is named after CEO Mark Pincus’s favorite pooch – Zinga, whom I had the pleasure of meeting recently over at his favorite San Francisco kennel, ahem…office.

The company has launched a Game Center, an open API that will allow developers to connect into a network of game apps. This will effectively create a channel and enable a network effect or viral loop to grow.

What’s the meta take on these two moves? The appspace is a rapidly evolving environment and brand owners and developers are well advised to watch closely as both the MySpace platform matures and Zynga tests out various mechanisms like their Game Center and Social Bar.

[Disclosure: Randal Leeb-du Toit is an advisor to MySpace's parent company, Fox Interactive Media and Chairman of app developer, Creative Enclave]

Tags: apps, developer platform, Games, metarand, MySpace, open API, Social Media, Truth Box, Zynga

Metarand Unplugged: Andrew Roberts From Ephox Talks Enterprise Content Management

Andrew Roberts, the CEO of San Mateo-based Ephox, talks to us about his experiences in the enterprise content management arena.

Ephox is a provider of authoring software for web content management. The company had its best ever performanace last quarter, growing sales by over 200% on Q1 2007.

Stream the session in Quicktime: session

Tags: andrew roberts, enterprise content management, ephox, Silicon Valley

Video Comments Du Jour On Metarand

I’m really excited to announce that metarand is one of the first sites to have installed the video comments plugin from Seesmic.

This takes commenting on blog posts to a whole new level of engagement. I look forward to seeing many of you on comment threads from here on in.

Seesmic is currently invite-only and pre launch. However, you can simply set your comments to anonymous. {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/fh5dx3aJt8_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”Video Comments Du Jour On Metarand ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/1n8C8f8HGb”}}}

Tags: metarand, Seesmic, video comments, Wordpress

Microsoft Provides Mesh for Apps/Data, But Fails On Interoperability

I’ve covered DataPortability. I’m experimenting with Friendfeed. I share apps across my Macbook Pro and iPhone.

However, I still feel there is a long way to go before we reach true seamless interoperability of data, connections, applications and devices.

And so I am very excited by Microsoft’s preview beta launch of Live Mesh, a feed-centric programming model.

The promise is that:

Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about – available wherever you happen to be.

That is a very noble sentiment. I applaud Ray Ozzie’s vision.

But wait a minute – this only works on devices running Microsoft software. I fully understand that they are only at beta. I also hear their plaintive cry, but we are bringing out Mac and mobile versions later this year.

Fail. They should have built in true interoperability from the get go, across all devices – period. Doing so in stages can only lead to a Here, there, everywhere patchwork.

UPDATE: Former Microsoftie Robert Scoble has gushed his views out. Yes I also like the dialogic RSS capability, by Robert you sum up why its a fail before its even out of the blocks:

Mac support? Coming in the future. Nokia support? Unclear. iPhone support? Ask Steve Jobs (translation: will be very limited due to Apple’s complete control of that platform). Firefox support? Yes! Linux support? What’s that?

[Via TechCrunch]

Tags: DataPortability, iPhone, Live Mesh, Macbook, Microsoft

Geo-Social Networking Your Favorite Places

Canadian entrepreneurs David Krawczyk and Bill McLean have developed an “essential tool for everyday life” – POIfriend. This social networking site allows a user to tag an online map with places of interest and itineraries and share those with anyone.

I could see this being of use in tagging a list of all gas stations that have diesel as I head to a specific destination, or someone like Robert Scoble telling the world where his favorite places are to eat (the Half Moon Bay Brewery would definitely make the grade).

The guys could even go one step further and enable some cool alternate reality gaming – solve the clue to reveal the next place you need to go to on your quest to find the Banana King.

One thing I’m not clear on – why provide this solution as YASN (yet another social network)? Surely it would have greater benefit as a social media app that is widely disseminated across existing social networks and embeddable in blogs and other places?

Tags: Alternate reality gaming, Social Media, Startups, Travel, Web

DrTube One Step Closer With The Doctors Channel

The Doctors Channel is providing medical news vignettes and video analyses of major medical issues to Ozmosis, an online medical discussion forum and knowledge exchange.

Described by CNBC as an “educational YouTube for doctors”, The Doctors Channel videos will be able to be discussed by medical practitioners on “physician only” forums on Ozmosis.

The resultant ability for doctors to share related experiences and learn from each other is a positive move.

Tags: Life Sciences, Medical, Web

Top Bloggers Blindsided By China

The tech blogging community had its self-congratulatory blinkers on today courtesy of a TechCrunch-created list of top bloggers. Not surprisingly, TechCrunch’s loudest voice, Michael Arrington topped the list. In fact 3 of the top 4 on the list were from TechCrunch…surely a highly credible compilation.

In the meantime China took the baton from the USA as the country with the most Internet users. Perhaps the numbers should be discounted to take into account China’s censorship. For example, every 2 censored Internet users equate to 1 free Internet user.

What is interesting to note, though, is that the 220 million users only make up 17% of the population of China. In contrast, America’s 216 million users constitute 71% of the population.

This means that we can expect to see many more users coming online in China in the next few years.

[Photo courtesy of hk_traveller]

Australia Glaringly Absent From World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies

The first thing that struck me when I scanned BusinessWeeks’s list of the 50 most innovative companies in the world was that there was not even one Australian company on the list.

You might think that the list would be US-centric and yes, the number 1 and 2 spots are held by Apple and Google, but third up is Japan’s Toyota with the Tata Group of India in 6th place.
It would also be easy to be dismissive and say that only countries with the right size in population or economy could produce highly innovative companies, but how does this explain Canada’s appearance at number 13, courtesy of Research in Motion.

Nor does the list only include well established economies – Samsung brings South Korea in at number 26.
There is so much potential in Australia that I am almost dumbfounded that we have not been able to put ourselves amongst the Top 50. We were able to rise to the top within the sports arena through sheer focus and hard work – it is high time this translated across into business.

INNOVATION TIMING
As the business cycle enters a period of battening down the hatches, there will be those Australian executives who’ll say that they are glad they didn’t commit to an innovation strategy.
But they’d be dead wrong. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos sums it up, “My view is there’s no bad time to innovate. You should be doing it when times are good and when times are tough – and you want to be doing it around things that your customers care about.”
“Constraints drive innovation.” Amazon, which is number 11 on the list, innovated its now widely emulated affiliates program to compensate for a lack of marketing budget.
The key takeout from his interview: Innovation does not require big budgets, but it does require “thoughtfulness and focus on the customer”.
The time to innovate is now.

[Picture courtesy of netsrot]

Hacking Your First Investment Round

The guys over at Venture Hacks have some good points regarding raising that first round of investment – often called the “friends, family and fools” round.

Key takeouts:
* Leave your ego off the table and don’t fixate on valuation;

* Have a realistic view of how much you need to get to a quality value inflection point (so you can raise more or close a significant revenue generating partnership)

* Lead your own way (don’t be a follower) – this is the message of the video tagged onto the end of their post.

Best one liner: YC has set new lows for seed round valuations. AND set new highs for helping seed stage companies.

[picture courtesy of prologue]

Peersonalize Your Social Networking Experience: Connect Even While Offline

Computer science students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology want you to be able to connect with your social networking friends, play games and share photos and other files even while you are offline.

There are two parts to their solution. The first is called WiPeer and it enables direct computer to computer, peer to peer WiFi communication without the need for a router at distances of up to several hundred metres (900 ft.). As long as your computer has a network card or wireless card you are sweet. Currently the software only works with Windows XP, but the guys are working hard at bringing out Mac and iPhone versions.

The second thing you’ll need if you are planning on connecting on Facebook is their app, Peersonalizer. They plan on rolling this out on MySpace and other OpenSocial sites in due course. Here’s their app blurb:

Bringing the personal effect to social networks.

WiPeer’s Peersonalizer lets you know when your facebook friends, or potential friends, are nearby you. Once you discover each other, you can chat, share files, play multiplayer games, and best of all, talk to each other in person.