Titanium Developer Forum

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Jon Steinberg who very recently accepted a position an an Executive-In-Residence at Polaris Venture Partners, which backs PublicEarth. Still, this is an interesting product and concept in an interesting space, location, which we will be dealing with during our Realtime CrunchUp event this coming Friday. Other ideas in the vein include GeoAPI and to a lesser extent, SimpleGeo. Previously, Steinberg was a strategic partner development manager for Google’s Small Medium Business team.

The rapid development of interesting web services can be attributed to the ability of each successive builder to create a layer upon what others have built. The existence of APIs and callable web services means that each builder can add value on top. When you combine this with crowd-sourcing, you effectively pour lighter fluid (in a good way) on this layering process. The only remaining element required is a taxonomy to insure that the crowd-sourcing creates content that is structured enough to make sense despite coming from many hands.

PublicEarth, a Polaris portfolio company that is launching today, takes the power of API layering, crowd-sourcing, and taxonomy and focuses it on maps. PublicEarth describes itself as a wiki of places, specializing in collecting all those “long tail” places that most other databases tend to overlook.

Maps is an area where I think there has been relative underdevelopment relative to importance, especially in light of all the emerging mobile, social, local platforms. Everyone I talk to working in this space needs more local data and detail to power their services, as well as, an open crowd-approach to keeping it up to date and granular as possible.

PublicEarth pulls in Google maps, and then applies a customized categorization and set of data fields to each entry. For example, I went to Collegiate School in Manhattan for high school. Rather than just having a one size fits all entry structure that allows for simply “reviews,” PublicEarth applies the fields: colors, grade levels, mascot, and size.

Similarly, for Dog Parks, the site lists whether or not there are benches, pick up bags, and areas for small dogs. Multiply this type of field customization by the seemingly unending quantity of place categories provided by PublicEarth and you have a “wiki for the world.” Notice, also, how on the right side of each place entry is a running log of the changes made by editor users. The site is open and democratic; everything is open for editing and customization by users.

And then these highly customized places can be grouped into sets that you can share across the web. For example, here’s a widget featuring elementary, primary, and extracurricular schools in New York that friends and family I know have attended or taught at. Public Earth is so detailed in its taxonomy that it even has a Culinary School category.

And that use of APIs and layering goes both ways. Public Earth has a detailed API that can be used to both pull content from and push content into the layer. I think being able to push content into Public Earth is of particular importance. There are many stakeholders that want to be able to contribute local map information in individual and bulk fashions to a central wiki-like repository.

Public Earth has already taken feeds from dozens of providers, like CitySearch, Sam’s Club, and SpaFinder, and plans to incorporate many more. So if you want to update information for individual locations, natural attractions, schools, or businesses use the front-end. And if you have a bulk feed of locations you service in some fashion, you can become a content partner to PublicEarth, or just push them through the API.

If you are interested in using the API during this beta period, email the team, email me, or leave a comment on this post and we’ll be sure to get you one. Finally, my big congrats to the PublicEarth team. I think PublicEarth is an important site, and as Mike Hirshland put it “The notion of high value discovery layers over web utilities is a theme in the Polaris portfolio.” What Brizzly is for Twitter, PublicEarth is for Google Maps. You can find my profile and contribution on PublicEarth here.

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Thinking about moving your electronic services to the cloud? LiveOffice, an SaaS provider of email archiving and hosting, makes the leap that much easier with the release of their CloudMerge technology–offering email archiving for most cloud email providers on the market. In addition to supporting cloud based email archiving, LiveOffice is able to archive email which is on-premise, thus creating a unified archive for all of your email. A core belief of LiveOffice is that your email archive should be portable. By hosting your archive on their end, customers are able to migrate from their current provider to a cloud provider without having to deal with the possibility of losing precious information. Additionally, if customers are dissatisfied with their cloud provider down the road, they can migrate to another provider seamlessly–while keeping all their emails–due to the capabilities of LiveOffice’s products.

angry tapir writes “Workers at T-Mobile UK have been selling customer data to brokers who worked for the competition, according to T-Mobile and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office. Criminal charges are being prepared. ‘Many thousands’ of customers’ account details, millions of records, were sold to several brokers for substantial amounts of money, the ICO said. In an announcement (PDF) from the ICO, the agency does not name the operator involved, but T-Mobile acknowledged that it had alerted ICO about the data breach. The BBC reports that after the other mobile operators said they were not the subject of the investigation, T-Mobile confirmed its involvement.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes “A week ago, 60 Minutes had a story (we picked it up too) claiming that hackers had caused power outages in Brazil. While this assertion is now believed to be in error, hackers were inspired by the story actually to do what was claimed. Last Thursday, they broke into ONS, the operator of the grid (Google translation; Portuguese original). DarkReading has specific details on the SQL injection vulnerabilities the hackers probably used.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week we reported on Shakira’s decision to use Ustream and Facebook to live stream the debut of her latest music video, Give It Up To Me — a move that’s a fairly huge departure from the standard MTV route we probably would have seen a few years ago. Ustream has just given us the stats of yesterday’s launch, and it’s clear that it drew quite a crowd: over the course of the ten minute live stream, Shakira’s video had 95,000 unique viewers during the initial broadcast. And over the course of the last 24 hours, the video has seen a total of over 500,000 views.

Ustream says that Shakira video wasn’t its most popular of all time — the streams for Michael Jackson’s memorial service and President Obama’s Inauguration saw much more traffic, with 4.6MM and 3.8MM total streams respectivly. But those streams were both hours long, while Shakira’s stream lasted a mere ten minutes. It’s also important to note that these viewers were likely more engaged than they would be if they were just staring at the tube. By integrating Ustream into Facebook, Shakira was likely able to gain quite a few new Fans on her Facebook account, which means she’s established a long term way to reach out to them.

It’s worth pointing out that Shakira was’t the first artist to stream her video — that title appears to be held by Chamillionaire who debuted his video for Good Morning a few days prior. Given Shakira’s success don’t be surprised if more artists start following suit.

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Before there was an iPhone, Android and App Store, there was Yahoo! Go. Launched in 2006, Yahoo! Go was an application offered news, mail, weather, traffic, and Yahoo! search from a mobile device. Today, Yahoo is announcing that Yahoo! Go will be shutdown on January 12, 2010.

The app seemed to be ahead of it’s time when it launched but now is useless thanks to Yahoo creating prettier, more powerful, personal content-focused apps that specialize in products, such as Flickr, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo released three versions of Yahoo! Go but hasn’t released a new version in the past year. The last iteration of the app included a mobile widget platform and was available on select Nokia and Windows Mobile devices

The reasoning behind shutting down Go is simple, says Yahoo. As Yahoo unrolls individual apps in verticals and boosts its mobile site, Go was becoming obsolete. The team that was working on Go! will now be relocated to working on the mobile site product and various apps. Yahoo recently launched mobile apps for Flickr, and Yahoo Finance.

Earlier this year, Yahoo announced a revamped Yahoo Mobile, and rolled it out in April with a new iPhone app and browser support for more than 300 devices. Now Yahoo!’s mobile homepage is now available across more than 1,900 mobile devices in 32 countries. Yahoo Mobile combines mobile search, your email, IM, and social messaging streams, and personalized Yahoo content such as news, sports, stocks, and RSS feeds, which basically replaces Go.

Below is the email that will be sent to Yahoo Go users tomorrow:

Dear Yahoo! Go user,

Yahoo! Go will be discontinued on January 12, 2010, at 12:00 a.m. PST, so that we may focus on simplifying and enhancing your future mobile Web experiences. After this date, you will no longer be able to use Yahoo! Go 2.0 or 3.0 from your mobile phone.

We encourage you to visit the new mobile homepage from your mobile browser to access an even richer, more personalized Yahoo! experience.

We appreciate your support and thank you for using Yahoo! Mobile services.

For more information and customer support, please visit the help center from your PC.

The Yahoo! Mobile team

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DocuSign, an e-signature service, has raised $2 million from Second Century Ventures. The venture firm is the investment fund of the National Association of Realtors. This brings DocuSign’s total funding up to $30 million.

DocuSign, which was founded in 2003, allows companies to get legally binding signatures quickly over the internet instead of over the fax or mail. DocuSign certifies digital signatures over the web, acting as a intermediary who holds the documents and verifies the identity of the signature. The digital signature business was really opened up during the turn of the century with that passing of the UETA and ESIGN acts, which clarified the legal grounds for electronic signatures nationwide. To date, more than 25 million signature events have been executed using DocuSign and service currently has 2.5 million users.

DocuSign is seeing increased traction of its technology in the commercial and residential real estate spaces. Rather than driving across town to get a signature or forcing their clients to find a fax machine, real estate professionals use DocuSign to execute agreements with buyers and sellers electronically, eliminating the old process of printing, faxing, and waiting for the return fax. In an age where deals are increasingly made remotely, it makes sense for e-signature technology to be adapted in the real estate world. The new funding will be used for further development of DocuSign’s technology for the real estate space. Competitors include EchoSign, and VeriSign.

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MikeChino writes “Sifting through minefields to remove hidden threats is a dangerous, tedious, and expensive process. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently announced that they have engineered a strain of bacteria that glows green in the presence of explosives, making mine detection a snap. The new strain of bacteria can be sprayed onto local affected areas or air-dropped over entire fields of mines. Within a few hours the bacteria strain begins to glow wherever traces of explosive chemicals are present.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most startups have about a billion things to worry about. For many of them, this includes execution of their business model. With online ad networks depressed, increasingly, a number of those companies are starting to explore subscription-based models. But there are a dozen reasons why that can be a pain. Enter Recurly.

Recurly, which is a startup itself, is entering private beta today. The core idea behind the service is simple: To make it simple for startups to be able to offer subscription-based services as an option. They provide an easy-to-use system with a nice user interace and good analytics that lays on top of the dealings that must be done between a payment gateway (such as Authorize.NET) and the startup.

There are a number of other services that offer such functionality but Recurly believes it can differentiate itself in two key ways. First, they do not get paid until you get paid. There are no hidden or monthly fees here. Recurly takes a percentage of each transaction. These total anywhere from 1 to 3 percent depending on volume. But it also doesn’t take the money each time you make a sale, instead it collects the money at the end of each month when the sales are done.

Recurly’s other big selling point is the ability to offer customers a way to easily upgrade or downgrade service plans. What this means is that if an end user decides they want to switch to a lower-tier pricing structure for a service, Recurly can handle that seamlessly. While we may not think that is that big of a deal, it’s a huge headache on the backend for most companies to deal with, according to co-founder Isaac Hall.

And “seamless’ is probably the key word for everything Recurly is trying to do. If you’re a very young startup and don’t even want to deal with APIs, you can come to the site and set up a payment form widget in a few steps, for example. Or maybe your site requires a bit more customization. There are APIs available to you that still hook into Recurly’s system and give you the same kind of data and analytics that you would get with the simple widget.

So who is the main target? Primarily SaaS clients, co-founder Tim Van Loan tells us. He thinks this is a particularly exciting time for them, and really all sites that want to use a “freemium” business model. And realizing the so-called “app economy” is currently exploding, he sees that area in Recurly’s future plans as well.

Of course, as I said, there is plenty of competition. One of the big players is Zuora. But for many young startups, they’re offering is too complex. And more importantly, it’s also expensive. A closer competitor may be CheddarGetter, a startup that launched out of the incubator SproutBox back in August. There are a number of similarities between the two, but the key difference is that while CheddarGetter charges a flat-fee (starting at $39 a month, but goes up as you grow), Recurly opts to use the transaction fees (which also rise as you grow). It’s simply two different ways of doing things. Recurly also says it is more enterprise-focused.

Another thing to watch for is what PayPal is now doing with its own APIs. But again, Hall is sure that the easy upgrade/downgrade type options are something that Recurly can offer that others won’t be able to easily match. Plus, he notes that they work with PayPal as one of the payment gateway options.

Up until now, Recurly has been in a very small closed alpha test with a handful of customers. Today marks the launch of their slightly more open, but still closed beta.

Recurly is also announcing that David Samuel, the co-founder of Freestyle Capital, and founder of Spinner and Crackle, will be joining their board of advisors.

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Today DiTech networks is announcing that it’s releasing a fully automated version of its PhoneTag voicemail-to-text technology that can operate behind a company firewall, making the service available to the many businesses and organizations where privacy and security are important. The service will also be readily available to enterprise customers, as it is fully functional with Mutare’s popular Enabled VoiceMail servers (though businesses will have to pay to active it). The service will also work on older PBX’s.

James Siminoff, DiTech Chief Strategy Officer (and former SimulScribe CEO), says that this is the first fully automated voicemail-to-text service that can operate behind the firewall. Most services, he says, rely on some degree of human transcription for accuracy, which makes them unsuitable for organizations that deal with sensitive information (a competitor called Spinvox has been in hot water for using humans to transcribe text that was supposed to be automated, leading to an uproar over privacy issues). PhoneTag’s fully automated solution is capable of around 85% accuracy, which makes it a viable solution for businesses that don’t want their voice messages routed outside of the company. PhoneTag also offers a human-powered service for users who aren’t handling sensitive information, which can get up to 97% accuracy.

The PhoneTag technology comes from a startup called SimulScribe, which recently signed an exclusive partnership with DiTech worth as much as $17 million.

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