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| LogLogic Acquires Exaprotect To Expand IT Security Management Service Posted: 22 Apr 2009 09:01 AM PDT
LogLogic, a security and log management firm that helps companies sort though log data in their IT systems, has acquired security management company, Exaprotect, for an undisclosed amount. Exaprotect’s software monitors and manages companies’ IT security threats and breaches. LogLogic, a Sequoia and SAP Ventures-backed private company, offers companies a suite of software products that helps IT departments make sense of logs of IT audits, compliance, and threats, other operational data. Customers can also build their own applications and workflow from LogLogic’s log management software. LogLogic has nearly 800 customers. LogLogic is hoping that this acquisition will help the company edge out competitors RSA, IBM and ArcSight for market share in the security management space. Exaprotect brings to the table 200 big-name customers, which include Visa, Turner Broadcasting and Apple. And Exaprotect’s security breach prevention and management technology will be added to LogLogic’s roster of IT management services. LogLogic has received $49.2 million in venture funding from Sequoia Capital, SAP Ventures, Focus Ventures, TeleSoft Partners, Worldview Technology Partners and Invesco Private Capital. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Soonr Updates Its Offering. Brings Up The “Netbook” Buzzword. Posted: 22 Apr 2009 07:58 AM PDT
And this update comes complete with an attempt to leverage two of the hottest things out there: the iPhone and netbooks. Soonr launched its iPhone app back in January, and despite supporting some 800 phones, the company still touts that one as a key part of its business. And netbooks are a slightly newer phenomenon that the company is now mentioning as fitting in to what it’s trying to do. Sure, Soonr works on netbooks, just like it works on other computers. But buzz-worthy products aside, the key idea is that you can access your documents from a huge variety of devices, no matter where you are. And version 3.0 offers some updates. One is called “Projects.” It allows users to better organize specific files together in the cloud. Another new feature is an admin interface so that team leaders can better oversee the collaboration going on. Another lets users send faxes from a mobile device with eFax. There is also support for video playback and a completely revamped UI. But the biggest new feature has to be the search functionality. It promises to work not only on titles of documents on your local machine/phone, but also will search text within documents across the entire network of devices attached to the files in the cloud. For the first time with the 3.0 release, Soonr is offering a premium version of the product itself. Previously, it offered a free version, and premium versions through various partners. But apparently, it’s moving away from the white labeling idea, and trying to make money by selling the product on its own. For the premium version, prices start at $7.95 a month, but users can add a lot of options for higher fees. If you need it, you can get 2 terabytes of cloud storage for your documents. I’m a little wary of the buzzwords, but Soonr has a solid product, that simplifies working with documents in the cloud. This looks to be a nice update to it.
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| NetBase Offers Powerful Semantic Indexing Platform That Reads The Web Posted: 22 Apr 2009 07:16 AM PDT
Regular search engines such as Google and Yahoo use statistics to make sense of the Web. They count links, keywords, and other items on a page to determine its rank in search results. Semantic search engines try to actually understand the meaning of the words found on the Web and other documents to bring back the most relevant results to a query. Microsoft bought Powerset for $100 million to gain semantic search expertise, but so far all it can search is Wikipedia.. Hakia, Textwise, and other startups are also working on semantic search. Now comes NetBase, which brings a slightly different approach that its says can scale to the entire Web. NetBase has been around for a while. Originally called Accelovation, it has raised $9 million in two rounds of venture funding over the past four years, has 30 employees, and counts among its current customers P&G, Caterpillar, 3M, BP, Kraft, BASF, and Goodyear. It is now changing its name and offering its core semantic indexing technology as a platform for other companies to build their own products. Already, scientific publisher Elsevier uses NetBase to power its Illumin8 research tool for searching scientific articles, patents, and Websites. NetBase takes a sophisticated linguistic approach, actually diagramming sentences to determine the relationship between words and phrases. It does particularly well with causal relationships, allowing it to tease out cause and effect from raw text. For instance, in the sentence, “The calcium, potassium and magnesium found in yogurt can help reduce your risk for hypertension often resulting from stress, obesity, and other factors” NetBase can identify that “stress” and “obesity” are causes of hypertension and that “calcium,” “potassium,” “magnesium,” and “yogurt” can be used to counter hypertension. The company has already indexed about 8 billion Web pages and processes 100 billion sentences a month through its semantic parsing. Once it identifies causes, effects, and other relationships, it can serve them up in search results along with top-ranked links. For instance, a health-related search could turn up a guide that includes related symptoms, causes, drugs, and treatments. The technology also lends itself to Q&A types of searches. You could ask, “What companies are developing semantic search technologies?” and it will return a list of companies along with the snippets of mention that company and semantic search. I’ve tried a few demo searches set up to do various things such as provide the pros and cons of a product, the companies in a particular market, or causes and effects of a medical problem. The results were impressive. On the whole, I’d say they were at least 70 percent relevant, compared to the much larger proportion of irrelevant links I get when I do a Google search. But it was slow. NetBase took 5 seconds or more to return results, something it says won’t be as big an issue in a production versions of its technology. NetBase is not building its own search engine, although it plans to create a health-related search engine around PubMed content as a proof of concept Instead, it is targeting large publishers and companies that want to create their won vertical search tools, which combine data on the Web with their own databases of content. This is definitely an enterprise play. Licensing starts at about $100,000 and goes up from there.
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| Twitter OAuth “Temporarily Disabled”, Developers Left Hanging Posted: 22 Apr 2009 06:04 AM PDT
At least, that’s the message the developers themselves seem to be sending out to the startup at an increasing rate. Jesse Stay from SocialToo wrote something about this earlier today on his blog, criticizing the startup over a change it made to its following limit policy without notifying anyone else prior to the tweak actually being implemented. Now we’re getting more and more incoming from developers who have noticed that OAuth, an open authorization protocol that Twitter’s been testing in public beta for about a month now, has been “temporarily disabled”. Naturally, Twitter is abuzz with angry and confused third-party application developers, some of which started reporting the fact that oAuth stopped working as early as three days ago. That means some of them have been unable to let new users sign up for quite a while, and although some are saying that Twitter knows about the problem and is working on a fix, silence from the company seems to be the key trend here. Update: they did respond to a query (again from Jesse Stay) in this group, saying that the problem should be solved in 48 hours. (message from 12 AM, Apr 21) Meanwhile, Twitter’s lead API developer Alex Payne has admitted that the startup is coping with a ‘big support backlog’ and that they’re trying to hire more people to handle the load. (Thanks to Adarsh Dilip for bringing this to our attention) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
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| Taking Advantage Of The DOJ Settlement, Redfin Lists More Data: Tiptoes Into New York Posted: 22 Apr 2009 05:19 AM PDT
The real estate slump is still dragging the economy down, but real estate sites that can help people save money or cut down the time it takes to find a decent home are still hanging on. Today, regional online brokerage Redfin is expanding into parts of New York for the first time, including Westchester, Long Island, and Queens (Manhattan and Brooklyn still remain beyond its reach). And in California, it now covers Sacramento and the Central Valley. These will be added to its existing markets of Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, Baltimore, and the San Francisco Bay Area. More significantly, Redfin is adding up to 200 additional data fields thanks to last year’s settlement between the Department of Justice and the National Association of Realtors, which requires multiple listing services to make data available online and share it more broadly. Anything a real estate broker can tell a client can now be put online. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman is now finding that traditional real estate brokers are more willing to hand over the keys to the kingdom. Depending on the area, Redfin will now list property details such as price history, the sellers’ mortgage history, cumulative days on the market, lot square footage, and will display addresses on a map. Other sites such as Trulia are also taking advantage of these relaxed rules. Unlike Trulia, though, Redfin is not just a real estate search engine. It is also a discount brokerage trying to with agents and partners. Redfin is trying to rewrite the rules of the real estate industry. Instead of taking a percentage of a sale, it charges a flat fee to home sellers of either $5,000 or $7,000. And for buyers, it refunds up to half the brokerage fee. Traditional brokers don’t like this, but in this economy some of them are even partnering with Redfin. The downside to being a brokerage is that Redfin’s site only shows listings for the regions in which it operates. Nevertheless, traffic grew 300 percent last year to 1.6 million unique visitors, according to Kelman. ComScore estimates only 324,000 U.S. visitors in March, 2009, but shows a similar growth rate. (Again, remember that Redfin listings are not national, so compare these numbers to a collection of local brokerage sites).
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| ClusterShot Aims To Become Another iStockphoto Rival Posted: 22 Apr 2009 03:45 AM PDT
Like Adography, the quality bar is intentionally set quite low. Basically, anyone is free to upload images, even amateurs willing to contribute crappy photos of their pets. It’s free of charge, and you can choose for yourself which photos you want to put up for sale at which price point (either fixed or based on offers). The startup takes care of the rest of the process and keeps a 12% administrative fee off any transaction as a commission. Outgoing payments are handled through PayPal so users are required to have an account for registration. ClusterShot gives users the ability to tag and edit photos that are uploaded to the system, but only lets them choose one license, which is a Royalty Free License which warrants the buyer the right to use the image in almost any way it would like. There are three ways users can add photos to their account: by uploading them through an online interface (single files or ZIP), adding an image RSS feed or by linking directly to their Flickr account thanks to the use of a commercial API key. Currently, the web service has signed up about 1,000 users who have uploaded 100 photos each on average. The company claims that sales are starting to pick despite the fact that the service is entirely bootstrapped and little to no attention has been giving to promoting the site so far. ClusterShot is one of the ventures of Canadian web development company silverorange, which counts Digg’s creative director and co-founder of Pownce Daniel Burka among its co-founders and partners.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Core MySpace Executive Team “Definitely Out.” Expect Announcement Soon. Posted: 21 Apr 2009 10:29 PM PDT
MySpace has a dozen or so “execs,” but our guess is that it’s the very senior team that will be terminated: cofounders Chris DeWolfe (CEO), Tom Anderson (President) and Aber Whitcomb (CTO). Removing any more of the team would be much more than a morale blow to the company - it would also bring operations to a screaming halt. Our understanding is that a new CEO has already been recruited and is in the final stages of contract negotiations. An announcement could come as soon as this week or next. We’ll be posting a shortlist of who we believe are the likely candidates for the CEO position shortly. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Posted: 21 Apr 2009 08:56 PM PDT
Imagine if you wanted to update one piece of information on all of them — like I recently had to do with a job change. That’s a lot of work for such a minor tweak. But if you don’t do it across the board, there will be incorrect information about you out there on the web. Information that is always just a search away. Sure, there are calls for profile standards, and even some services that promise to update your information across multiple networks in one fell swoop — but let’s be honest, the only way you’re ever going to get a unified profile, is if one of the aforementioned services gets so big that it becomes the de-facto standard. Facebook is getting closer to that than anyone else with over 250 million users and rising, but Google may have well as have taken a crowbar to its knees today. By adding its own profiles to search results on Google for names, Google has created yet another profile that we need to maintain. While that’s good for Google — Google Profiles have been around for a while, but no one used them — it’s more work for us, and seems to all but ensure that one network will not rule them all. And we can all say that we’re going to drop all networks besides the one we use the most, but we won’t. For most people, the social graph is different on each of them, and there’s some reason to stick around there. If nothing else, it’s more of a pain to remove yourself from a service than it is just not to update your profile anymore. I can’t even begin to imagine how many profiles I have out there that haven’t been updated in a year or more.
And services like Facebook Connect offer the promise of transferring your profile information to other services, but do you think Google is going to use that? I don’t think so. Why would it? It has a competing product it’s trying to push with Google Friend Connect. And it can act as nice at it wants, say the right things in public, and add links to Facebook under your Google Profile result, but do you really think Google wants Facebook winding up as the one profile you maintain? No. And vice versa. And so we remain at a stand still. It’s one of those situations where, while competition may not be a bad thing, it can be a frustrating thing. I wonder how long until we see Yahoo add profiles to its search results? And maybe Microsoft will further its relationship with Facebook to add limited profile information from there to its queries. It’s already a mess, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better — if it ever does. Update: As Google’s Kevin Marks notes in the comments, Google did try to use Facebook data with Friend Connect, before it was blocked almost a year ago. Of course, Friend Connect would basically negate the need for a lot of what Facebook Connect does, so what we have here are competing platforms, and a stand-off — like I said above. [photo: flickr/andrew mason] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| MiVitals Can’t Find Pulse For Online Health Records Posted: 21 Apr 2009 05:29 PM PDT
Online health records is a rapidly growing segment of the health 2.0 world—Google Health, Microsoft’s HealthVault, WebMD, Aetna's SmartSource (via a partnership with Healthline), and Revolution Health (now part of Waterfront Media), are just a few of the many online platforms that let consumers organize their health records online in a secure portal. In a space where you are competing with prestigious medical institutions and platforms backed by the largest tech companies in the world, there’s not much room for the small, bootstrapped startup. Unfortunately, miVitals, an Australia-based startup that provides an online storage platform for consumer health records, will be shutting its doors in mid-May due to lack of funding. miVitals, which was primarily financed by angel investors, is a free service that let you store medical records, manage accounts for your family, schedule appointments, and share this information with your health care professionals. It seems that in the online medical records sector, partnerships with pharmacies, medical professionals, and institutions are key to making the platform efficient and more consumer-friendly. At some point in everyone’s lives, you realize the difficulty (and inefficiency) of getting your records faxed from a health care provider to an insurance company or another doctor. One of the primary virtues of an online database is that it streamlines the sharing process of medical records, and partnerships are key to making this process work. miVitals was lacking in this area; the startup had only developed partnerships with Australia-based medical companies and institutions despite the site’s aim to be an international resource for consumers across the world. Google Health has partnerships with pharmacies (Google Health recently struck a deal with CVS), insurance companies, hospitals and labs to integrate data from medical professionals with consumer information. HealthVault’s online platform has been integrated with several large medical institutions over the country, including The Mayo Clinic, The Cleveland Clinic, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. And Microsoft has been able to sign in insurance companies-last year, Microsoft struck a deal with Kaiser to offer HealthVault’s health record site service to Kaiser’s members. With competition coming from Google, Microsoft, WebMD, and more, it can be tough for a smaller competitor to find footing in the space. And the current economic crisis and lack of available funding isn’t helping. Perhaps the death of miVitals a sign that there isn’t room for small startups in the already crowded online medical records market. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Apple Will Hit A Billion Apps At 1:24:06 AM PST On April 23 (As Of Right Now) Posted: 21 Apr 2009 05:07 PM PDT
And we know the exact time Apple is predicting when it will cross the mark — at least, right now (more below): 1:24:06 AM PST on April 23. Simply go to your system settings and set the date and time to anytime after that mark, and reload the main Apple page. You’ll be greeted by big picture on the landing page reading, “Thanks a billion. Over a billion downloads in just nine months. Only on the App Store.” And actually, if you change to a before the mark Apple has set, you can see the counter advance closer and closer towards the billion mark. Of course, this means that the number is at least somewhat tied (update below) to your computer’s clock rather than an actual billion app sales mark being triggered. Not that it’s all that surprising. After all, with so many apps being sold every second, can you really expect Apple to do anything other than estimate? This would be an issue though if said it was giving away a prize to the person who specifically downloaded the billionth app (it’s not). Update: It looks like Apple is constantly tweaking the exact timing based on the following text file, as commenter Robert notes below. As of right now, the rate of Apps being sold appears to be slowing down, pushing the time out a bit. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
In this day and age, with technology, no one works alone — that’s how 
There’s another online marketplace for buying and selling stock photographs in town, and its name is 
An update to my 
Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Yahoo and now Google. What does these have in common? If you’re reading this blog, you probably have a profile on all of them. And those are just the obvious ones, you probably have a bunch of other profiles on a series of other networks too. The situation has become untenable.
And even if we did drop all our networks but one, another hot new network would rise up and we’d all sign up for it, renewing the cycle. Just look at Twitter. Everyone is now signing up for it, and while it doesn’t have a robust profile right now, it probably will at some point.
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