News Blog

Dash Navigation is building the GPS gizmo that everyone in the CNET reviews department is waiting for. See this video from 2006. Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, the company is announcing more features for its delayed product.

Dash now plans to ship its GPS product for cars, the Dash Express, in early 2008. Its key differentiator from other GPS units is that it will always be connected to the Internet, which will enable cool features like peer-to-peer (with other Dash devices) traffic reporting, and the capability to program routes on to your device from your Web browser.

Dash Express

(Credit: Dash Navigation)

The new news is that the Dash will have an open platform, so people can build interesting apps for it. The Dash team will demo the platform with its own apps, including one that links into a Zillow API, presumably so you can drive down the street and see on your device just how much the houses you're passing by are worth (see also: Realius).

The product will also read in RSS and KML (Google's geo-markup language) data from the Web to do things like display events from Upcoming, open house data from Craigslist, and landmark and path data from all those geo mashups out there like Platial. For all I know it will also tie into crime databases and flash a warning when you drive into a dangerous neighborhood.

Dash claims its platform represents a "huge business opportunity" for companies that make geo-coded content. That will be true if Dash units become ubiquitous, but the company is competing with Garmin and other well-established consumer brands. Furthermore, future cars themselves will likely be Internet-addressable; Mercedes is already demoing this.

Dash needs to ship its cool gizmo soon.

Your Dash device will have its own dashboard in your computer's browser.

(Credit: Dash Navigation)

Nova Spivack thinks it's high time we make computers smart enough to manage the ocean of scattered information our digital lives create.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Friday, Spivack will officially take Radar Networks, the start-up he co-founded, out of stealth mode and show off Twine, a Web service for managing information, using your social network and the Semantic Web.

With Twine, people collect different pieces of information in a single place and let other people add to that collection. People can e-mail items into Twine, bookmark Web pages, or upload documents. To add tags, people fill in a form.

The software is smart enough to create tags itself after mining through the content, which can be text, audio or video. It also taps into the collective knowledge of Wikipedia to categorize information.

Radar Networks' Twine service for managing Web info and collaborating.

Under the covers, Radar Network's server is using natural language processing and Semantic Web technology to get a better idea of the meaning of a person's collected information.

"This is the user experience side of the Semantic Web," said Spivack. "Our motto is 'people are lazy.' Who wants to spend their time being a librarian?...That's what we made computers for."

The idea behind the Semantic Web is that Web content has embedded data that allows applications to "talk" to each other. With that self-describing information, summed up in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format, software agents can act on information, making life easier for Web users.

Spivack said that the Twine "knowledge networking" service really shines when used for collaboration. People can share information on a certain subject and get notifications when someone in their social network posts something new. The more information Twine gathers, the better it gets at recommendations and understanding a user's preferences.

Radar Networks' plan is to offer a free service that is advertising-supported and to introduce a line of premium services, which would be more geared toward business users.

Also in store are a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that will let outside developers write applications on its platform. Spivack said that Radar Networks intends to follow the same strategy that Salesforce.com has in building its online development platform AppExchange, which provides a foundation for building third-party applications.

The Radar Networks platform is based on Web standards RDF and OWL (Web Ontology Language), which means that information can be transported into another service, says Spivack.

Josh and I are at the Web 2.0 Summit. Ironically, network connectivity is spotty here, but it looks like we can Twitter this conference pretty reliably.

The conference started Wednesday with a series of workshops. Our coverage begins at 3 p.m. with the introduction of the main session by organizers Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle.

Update: It's Thursday, and we're kicking off the conference with a discussion between Steve Ballmer and conference organizer John Battelle.

Click through to the story page for the Twittercast, and reload frequently for the latest updates.

... Read more

Up-and-coming semantic search company Hakia is launching a new social feature next week, called "Meet Others." It will give you the option, from a search results page, to jump to a page on the service where everyone who searches for the topic can communicate.

For some idealized (yet realistic) types of searching, it could be great. For example, suppose you were searching for information on a medical condition. Meet Others could connect you with other people looking for info about the condition, making an ad-hoc support group. On the Meet Others page, you're able to add comments, or connect directly with the people on the page via anonymous e-mail or by Skype or instant messaging.

From a search results page, you can jump into an ad-hoc community around the topic.

It's also a built-in marketplace. People could post items for sale on the Meet Others pages. It's "Google with Craigslist," Hakia president Melek Pulatkonak told me.

You can connect directly with other searchers.

Since Hakia is a semantic search engine, your search queries don't have to be exact to find a related community. "Flu shot" and "flu vaccine" both should get you to the same place.

If you don't want to be part of the ad-hoc community that Hakia will build around every search term, you can just ignore the Meet Others links, and no one will find you.

There's a rating system for posts on the Meet Others pages, so relevant topics should float to the top of the page. I do worry about the pages being gamed or spammed, but I still like the feature. It could be very useful to be able to connect directly with people looking for the same obscure thing you are.

The feature should launch on Hakia next week.

SAN FRANCISCO--Earlier today, Viacom announced plans to put clips from its archive of The Daily Show--some 13,000 clips--on the Web. But speaking later at an industry conference here, the company's CEO said that's just a first step.

"We invented fragmentation in the cable world," CEO Philippe Dauman said at the Web 2.0 Summit. "We are going to do that with a lot of our content going forward."

"We believe in following the consumer. We've always done that in our history," he said.

Maybe so--albeit reluctantly. The Daily Show began in 1999 and it's only now that Viacom's rethinking its strategy. In part, the about-face reflects a desire to blunt the impact of YouTube's stunning viral growth. Advertisers ostensibly would be attracted to searchable databases of Jon Stewart and other Viacom content.

In the meantime, there's still the matter of that $1 billion lawsuit. Viacom earlier this year sued Google over the misappropriation of copyrighted content on YouTube.

And if the two sides were getting any closer toward an out-of-court resolution, Dauman wasn't letting on.

"Google is a very high-quality company with a lot of very smart people. They can do things when they want to. They haven't wanted to until this point."

Dauman did offer a lukewarm nod to the Monday debut of a filtering technology Google announced for its YouTube subsidiary.

"It reflects a positive evolution and I welcome it," he said. "We're not quite there."

Viacom also is part of a collection of high-power media conglomerates that today pledged to adhere to guidelines in a bid to slow digital piracy. The principles urged greater respect for protecting copyrights, as well as the adoption of more effective filtering technologies.

Google was not party to the manifesto. That also provided Dauman with an easy target as he expanded on Viacom's decision to take on Google in the courts.

At the time, Dauman said, he was surprised to receive "a lot" of calls from people "saying it's finally time someone took a stand" against the misappropriation of copyrighted content. Just who was on the other end of the phone line we'll never knew. Ever the corporate diplomat--especially in a public forum--Dauman declined to identify his interlocutors.

"We didn't choose to go that route. We had to protect our business. We took a step reluctantly because we had to."

What could be more Web 2.0-ish than Steve Ballmer making a public pitch to would-be deal makers to pick up the phone?

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Thursday, Microsoft's CEO said his company was on the prowl for acquisitions that made strategic sense.

"Microsoft will continue to invest in buying technology, products and market share," he said. "We'll buy 20 companies a year consistently for the next five years for anywhere between 50 million and 1 billion bucks."

Sitting in front of a standing-room-only audience jammed into the main ballroom at the Palace Hotel, Ballmer also said Microsoft may also include open-source software makers on its shopping list.

"We will buy smaller companies. We will buy smaller companies that make some use of open source software," he said. "We don't want to discourage people who would talk with us just because they do some open source."

While Ballmer was surprisingly frank about Microsoft's expansion plans, he carefully juked his way past a question put to him from conference co-host John Battelle about his company's relationship with Facebook. Last year, Microsoft landed a deal to provide Facebook with search and advertising listings. When Battelle asked "how the financing's going," Ballmer smiled but demurred.

"As Mark (Zuckerberg) said, it's going pretty well, so I guess that's the answer," Ballmer said. "We've got a great partnership with Facebook on the advertising side...we'll see where it takes us."

As the proverbial 800-pound gorilla of the software business, Microsoft is increasingly under fire from old and nascent competitors. The company also remains several steps behind Google in the search business, a predicament that Ballmer suggested is being addressed--albeit with mixed results.

"I'd probably tell you I'm happy with everything and I'd probably tell you everything needs a lot of improvement," he said. "In every area there's a lot of good and in every area there's a lot of room for improvement."

Asked whether Google was a "one-trick pony," Ballmer shifted the focus of the question.

"One of the things that's true about most technology companies is they start in an area, get really good in that area and fill out that core," he said. "We're trying to be a three- and four-trick pony."

The conference, which began on Wednesday and runs through the rest of this week, has become a schmooze-fest where myriad entrepreneurs and investors can swap ideas about the next direction of the Internet business.

Microsoft started an open beta program for its consumer-oriented mashup builder Popfly on Thursday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Popfly is a hosted application that enables people to assemble mashups by dragging and dropping components, rather than writing code. It's built with Microsoft's Silverlight Web browser plug-in.

With Popfly, people assemble mashups by connecting blocks.

(Credit: Microsoft)

When Microsoft released the alpha in May, it had prebuilt "blocks," or connections, to popular Web sites Flickr and MySpace.

Now it integrates with Facebook and people can create gadgets (also called widgets) that run on Windows Vista or Windows Live.

There are a growing number of these do-it-yourself Web authoring tools, including Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo Pipes. Here's a link to a review of three of those.

For business users, IBM has developed QEDWiki and Coghead, and other companies have created hosted application development services.

Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, on stage with his boss of two years, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, finally announced to the world at the Web 2.0 Summit tonight that MySpace will have an open platform "within a couple of months."

After the platform opens to developers, it will open to a subset of users, about two million, to see if the "sandbox" that keeps that platform safe is reliable.

Before we all get MySpace apps, we'll get a catalog of widgets that we can add to your pages. Widgets aren't apps, though.

Of course, there are platforms and there are platforms. It wasn't clear at all how much of the MySpace social database will be exposed to developers, nor what data MySpace will let developers export to non-MySpace pages.

DeWolfe did say, however, that developers will be able to monetize their apps, and that MySpace perhaps will help them sell advertising.

L to R: Chris DeWolfe, Rupert Murdoch, John Battelle

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--If you listened carefully, Wall Street issued a collective groan late today. That's when Facebook's CEO very publicly doused speculation about an imminent initial public offering.

"I'm not saying it's never going to happen," said Mark Zuckerberg. "But it's definitely years out."

Zuckerberg made his comments while speaking with John Battelle to lead off the Web 2.0. Summit which got underway here today.

What with all the hype and frenzy surrounding Facebook, Zuckerberg not surprisingly attracted a spillover audience crowding into the main ballroom of this city's Palace Hotel, an elegant throwback which opened its doors in 1875 (which wasn't all that long after the California Gold Rush ended.)

As co-host of the three-day event, Battelle tried--with some success--to draw Zuckerberg out of his shell during the course of an hour question-and-answer session. But when it came to getting Facebook's founder to comment on the rumors about either a forthcoming sale or IPO, Battelle took a called strike three.

"Well, you have years before that event," Zuckerberg said.