Webware

(Credit: Xobni)

A few months ago, e-mail search app Xobni told us they were creating a version for BlackBerry. At the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday, we got a look at it.

Xobni on the Windows PC is an Outlook add-on that quickly finds e-mail messages and attachments. On BlackBerry, Xobni will integrate with your e-mail account, where it will extract addresses, phone numbers, and social networking details to automatically create a secondary address book for your phone. You'll be able to use Xobni for BlackBerry to quickly find contacts--including those you have not physically added to the native address book yourself. That expanded address book goes for everyone who has ever sent you an e-mail, been cc'd in an e-mail, or even mentioned in a message.

With the premium Xobni Plus Outlook add-on, you can access this secondary address book by typing into the Compose field. Integration isn't quite so tight in BlackBerry. On the Bold, Tour, and new Curve 8900s, you'll access contacts by flicking up on the track pad to get to to the stylized Xobni address book.

Then search by a contact's name, domain name, or by a keyword to speedily find the person you're looking for. As with Xobni on the desktop, you'll be able to send your calendar availability to a contact, get Facebook to supply contacts' Xobni profile picture, and view Twitter feeds and LinkedIn and Hoovers information from the BlackBerry.

In creating its own address book--instead of adding contacts to the native address book--Xobni makes a statement. Unlike Gwabbit, which adds the information from a signature block into a new record, Xobni finds e-mails and phone numbers anywhere in the message. Besides that, Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte believes that inserting contacts into your native address book means "you've already lost the battle." Instead of adding contacts one-by-one, Xobni builds you a social roster behind-the-scenes, and adds social networking plug-ins in the process.

As far as time lines go, Xobni is looking at a closed alpha release sometime in December. Bonforte expects a beta early next year, and the final release a few months after that. The pricing model is still undecided.

Xobni for BlackBerry will first be available on the Bold, Tour, and Curve 8900. Storm users will have to wait a little longer.

SAN FRANCISCO--Google Vice President Marissa Mayer made a surprise announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday: "Social Search," a new Google Labs experiment that will bring in search results from a member's social-network contact circle.

It'll be launching as an opt-in project in the next few weeks. Then, you'll need to have a Google account and set up a Google Profile to fill in information about the social networks that you use. Google first launched Profiles about a year ago.

"What we've done here is inserted, on the bottom of the page, content written by people in your social network," Mayer said, adding that Google hopes this will "really improve the overall relevance, comprehensiveness, and quality" of search results. A search for a local restaurant, for example, could bring up your friends' Yelp reviews for the same establishment. A search for travel destinations could bring up a post from a friend's blog.

This comes on the same day that Google announced that it had entered into an agreement with Twitter to bring real-time "tweets" to search results. That's another product that has yet to actually launch.

"The idea is for...these fast-rising queries, where there's a period of time (when there are) actually tweets about that topic, and the definitive news source hasn't been written yet," Mayer said of the Twitter partnership, declining to disclose its financial terms.

This post was updated at 4:25 p.m. PT.

I spent part of last week in Washington, D.C., at the annual National Educational Computing Conference. The event, which celebrated its 30th anniversary this year, is sponsored by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).

As you'd expect, there were plenty of workshops on the nuts and bolts of using technology in the classroom. But as technology evolves, so does the way it's used by some creative educators.

There were several sessions, for example, on how to use cell phones within the classroom. Considering that some school districts still ban students from bringing cell phones to school, it's great to see that there are enlightened teachers who are instead trying to figure out how to actually use them in the classroom.

Speaking of things that are banned in schools, I attended a session called "Classroom 2.0: What Is Web 2.0's Role in Schools?" This was particularly refreshing considering that many schools don't allow any use of social-networking sites and some districts actually employ filters that completely ban student and teacher access to MySpace, Facebook, and similar interactive sites.

Rather than fight the idea of students using the Web to communicate with each other, the presenters at this event were encouraging it. Chris Lehman, the principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, talked about the use of interactive technology in schools as part of a "collaborative culture" that he says is likely to be with us for a long time.

"Whether it's a wiki or Twitter, the notion of a participatory culture--upstream and downstream--is not going away," he told the audience. A wiki is a Web site that can be updated and edited by any of its participants. Unlike traditional publishing tools, it encourages collaboration.

Panel member Vicki Davis, a teacher from Camilla, Ga., demonstrated what could be the ultimate--one could say subversive--tool for changing the nature of participation in the classroom. During the event, she encouraged the audience to sign into what she calls a "back channel," which is basically a chat session going on while the panelists were speaking. People both in the room and those not attending NECC were able to comment, in real time, about what the panelists were saying via the free Chatzy service.

I've seen similar technology used at numerous conferences, but Davis says she uses it in her high-school classes. What a change from when I grew up, when it was an infraction to pass notes back and forth during class. Back then, students were punished for trying to collaborate. Of course, the technology has to be used appropriately with students staying on topic. But that should be true for any subject-oriented chat or forum. Even adults sometimes get mad at each other for going "off topic."

Such back channels also make it possible for people to say less-than-kind things about the person speaking, which can be either good or bad, depending upon your perspective. I've been to conferences where lots of people have used Twitter to comment on what was said at the podium. At one event I heard laughter after someone tweeted a funny, but cutting remark about the speaker. It seemed like the only person in the room not in on the joke was the speaker himself.

If this technology is used in school, I would hope that the students feel free to make critical comments about the subject matter but practice good online citizenship by refraining from insulting the speaker and each other.

Whether in school, the workplace or personal life, the use of interactive technology can sometimes get a little messy. But the same can be said about almost anything worthwhile. Just as we don't avoid physical education because kids sometimes skin their knees or refrain from art projects because kids can get their hands dirty, we shouldn't let the risks keep us from embracing Web 2.0 technology in school.

This post was adapted from a column in the San Jose Mercury News.

Google thinks it has made a breakthrough in "computer vision."

Google's new landmark search research uses clustering techniques to match similar photos of famous landmarks, such as the Acropolis. (Click for larger image)

(Credit: Google)

Imagine stumbling upon a picture of a beautiful site in Europe filled with ancient ruins, one you didn't recognize at first glance while searching for vacation destinations online. Google has developed a way to let a person provide Google with the URL for that image and search a database of over 40 million geotagged photos to match that image to verified landmarks, giving you a destination for that next trip.

The project is still very much in the research stage, said Jay Yagnik, Google's head of computer vision research. The company plans to present a paper Monday at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference in Miami detailing its work in proving that large, scattered sets of data can be used to make accurate assessments of individual images.

"This is a fundamental advancement in how we look at computer vision," Yagnik said.

To create the "landmark recognition engine," Google took advantage of the 40 million or so images in Picasa and Panoromio that were geotagged with the locations of famous landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower. It also assembled images from travel guide sites such as Wikitravel as a base of landmark photos that had been verified by experts.

With all that data as a backdrop, researchers figured out a way to find the most representative pictures of a landmark using a clustering technique to group images taken from similar perspectives, as well as toss out "noisy" images such as a picture of your family on the street in front of the Eiffel Tower that doesn't really show the landmark.

Then, when given a fresh image to analyze, the system uses pixel-matching techniques to find small patterns within that image and look for similar patterns within verified photos of landmarks. Google said it has been able to return an accurate result 80 percent of the time, not only naming the landmark but allowing it to supply additional information about the place.

Google is by no means certain when, or if, this research will turn into a product. It is excited, however, that it has found a way to use computers to process large sets of data available on the Internet and return accurate information about images; doing this with text, of course, is what has made Google Google.

Ask.com's Tomasz Imielinski discusses semantic search as Microsoft's Scott Prevost and Google's Peter Norvig look on.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News)

SAN JOSE, Calif.--If those chasing Google have anything to say about it, search on the Internet is going to become more about a conversation than an exchange of keywords.

Panelists from the four major search engines--Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com--joined Web search start-ups TrueKnowledge and Hakia at the Semantic Technology Conference to discuss the rise of semantic technology as the engine behind the still nascent Internet search industry. Semantic search, or the idea of divining a user's true intent from how they enter their queries and how Web data is structured, is an unfamiliar concept to the majority of Web surfers who tend to think Internet search is actually pretty good as it is.

It's not, according to Tomasz Imielinski, executive vice president, global search and answers at Ask.com. "Most users don't know how good search can be," he said, drawing an analogy to those who were satisfied with their portable music options until the iPod came along.

The W3C is devoting an entire week to the concept of semantic technology, which involves Web publishers and search engines working together to structure data in a way that can be presented in a more appealing way than the "ten blue links"--a dirty term in the search industry these days--with which most searchers have grown familiar.

Yahoo has been banging this drum for a few years, introducing products like Search Monkey to help Web publishers start organizing their content around semantic standards, said Andrew Tompkins, chief scientist at Yahoo Search. "Today on any major search engine, you'll see structured information about a restaurant," he said, basic things like phone numbers, address, or maybe a link to a map of its location. All of those things require agreement on standards to make it happen.

But semantic search is also about improving the ability of search engines to analyze the meaning of plain text on a page, said Scott Prevost, general manager and director of product at Microsoft's Powerset division. A search engine that knows how to take a query and produce exactly what a person is looking for on the first page of results will prove attractive over time, he said.

The goal of all this work is to make search more intuitive, more like asking a friend or colleague a question, said Riza Berkan, CEO of semantic start-up Hakia. "We believe search is going to move to more conversational techniques," he said.

That's music to Ask.com's ears, of course. The company announced Wednesday that it now has 300 million question and answer pairs in its database that Imielinkski thinks provide context around searches.

But none of this work on semantic technology has done anything to dislodge Google from its position atop the search world, which actually grew a bit stronger over the past month according to ComScore. Google's Peter Norvig acknowledged the benefits of semantic technology and agreed that Yahoo deserves credit for pushing semantic technology along. He drew applause from the several hundred attendees at the panel discussion when he discussed Google's decision to support RDFa semantic standards, announced last month at Searchology.

Still, there's an economic component to this debate that Google isn't quite buying. None of the panelists brought this up Wednesday, but last year Microsoft's Prevost admitted that the desire to make an end-run around Google's dominance of keyword-based search advertising is what has driven semantic technology research, at least to a certain degree. "If people aren't bidding on keywords, and are bidding on concepts, it could completely change the ball game," he said last August at the Search Engine Strategies conference.

To that end, Norvig argued Wednesday that the idea of conversational search is good for people who aren't quite sure what they are looking for, or who don't quite understand a certain topic. But those who do grasp a topic and want a fast answer are much more likely to use keyword searches, he said.

Corrected at 3:49 p.m.: This post originally misstated the title of Ask.com's Tomasz Imielinski. He is executive vice president, global search and answers. Corrected on Friday, 11:35 a.m., clarifying the W3C did not sponsor the conference.

Where are the crowds? The Moscone Center was noticeably quieter this year at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Evan Bartlett)

SAN FRANCISCO--Stepping off an otherwise quiet street and through the door of the downtown restaurant Roe on Thursday night was, at first, like a foray into a secret fantasy world where no market crash or economic recession had ever happened.

It was the launch party for Yola.com, a rebranded Web publishing platform formerly known as SynthaSite, in conjunction with this week's Web 2.0 Expo down the street at the Moscone convention center. There was an open bar, of course: The signature cocktail was a kir royale, a blend of champagne and blackcurrant liqueur, so champagne flutes were the drinkware of choice in the darkened room. The music was loud. Yola's logo was everywhere--projected on the wall, on T-shirts handed out at the door, on stickers scattered across the bar for the taking.

Yet if you surveyed the scene, there were signs of conscious frugality. The guest list was tight and the party was kept small, with only the ground floor of the two-story Roe booked; the open bar eventually ended, and the kir royales stopped flowing. While Yola was a "silver" sponsor of the conference, the event had not been heavily publicized. The same applied to many of the other scattered parties at the convention. If you knew the details, you could slip into a fun and relatively low-key affair that might even have free drinks and snacks. It was all about doing a bit of digging.

With a "doing more with less" theme, change was in the air at the whole Web 2.0 Expo: This edition of the biannual confab, co-presented by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb, felt like the recession had scooped a hole out of it with a spork. Attendance rates were slightly down, and even though conference representatives said more than 8,000 people came, the halls of The Moscone Center were noticeably quieter than in years past. Yet this is still a must-attend for the majority of the industry. Exhibitors from big tech companies like Microsoft and Adobe, courting developer talent to populate their various platforms and services, said that this is the best way to reach the biggest audience.

And here's what that audience was hearing: that with the harrowing financial climate, there is opportunity in casting off centuries' worth of old institutions that now only serve to hamper innovation.

"The current global financial crisis is the Web's fault," author Douglas Rushkoff said in his Wednesday keynote. "It's a good thing, and...it's really the arresting of a 400- to 500-year process from which value has been extracted from people and companies unfairly and unproductively."

"Six hundred thousand jobs were lost last month, and we've got to believe that the Internet has something to do with the massive restructuring, reorganization, and revitalization of what is our future," Meetup founder Scott Heiferman said in a talk on Friday morning. "They say that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, so there is this opportunity for us to turn our backs to the screen, to turn our backs to a centralized 20th-century culture where we are dependent on these bloated banks and insurance companies."

That's so last century
The irony lies in the fact that with so many talks at the expo fixed on the opportunities presented by financial difficulties, and the final death knells of the 20th-century way of doing things, the convention itself was still an old-school trade show. The expo floor was full (though not as full as last year) of colorful booths and talkative PR representatives, the panel lineup still packed with the usual marketing and programming buzzwords--ROI, SEO, PHP, RSS--and the art of the business card swap still paramount.

"There's just not a whole lot that's cool this year," one disappointed attendee told me. Another said he'd found that after last month's South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, there was something stale about the Web 2.0 Expo, even though it was much healthier than many had anticipated. Maybe it's time for a reboot.

You see, if you got past the surface, did a little digging--just like with the after-hours scene--there were some noteworthy talks at Web 2.0 Expo. There was a seminar about just how much you need to know about wine in order to impress business associates, a crash course from Digg's director of business development for old-media types who want to capitalize on the social news craze, and a session about marketing insights from the creator of the Burger King "Whopper Sacrifice" Facebook app. Keynote speakers like John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, and the founders of indie T-shirt sensation Threadless, weren't exactly the sorts of conference highlights you'd expect.

In those talks, the lack of banter about monetization and user engagement was refreshing. The T-shirt clad Threadless guys, for example, didn't really seem to be in their element sitting on couches onstage for a keynote "conversation" in front of an auditorium of laptop-wielding conference-goers in uncomfortable chairs. They were 21st century dot-com heroes in a setting that some of the expo's out-with-the-old speakers would likely have characterized as so last century.

One of the biggest and most promising highlights of the conference was the after-hours Ignite offshoot, the latest in a series of wacky geek-culture seminars presented by O'Reilly and spearheaded by Web 2.0 organizer Brady Forrest. Seven hundred people packed into a nearby nightclub for a set of decidedly unorthodox presentations: a mandated number of PowerPoint slides, set on an automatic timer, so that no one could veer off topic or go over time. Ignite events are held all over the world and have quite a cult following; with presentations like "Mr. Hacker Goes To Washington" and "Demystifying Weird Japanese Toys and Tools," it wasn't your typical Web 2.0 Expo material.

Conference representatives seem to think that the conference format still has life in it. "The expo itself is not going to change. I think the content changes from year to year based on what the trends are like and what the market looks like," TechWeb community manager Janetti Chon told CNET News. "We try to be the conference that appeals to all Web enthusiasts...of course the conference will evolve as the market and industry evolve." She does have a point. Web 2.0 Expo is so big and far-reaching that putting any kind of new spin on it would risk alienating some sector of attendees.

Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, said in his address to the expo on Wednesday that the term "Web 2.0" was "never intended to be a version number." But maybe it should've been. With all this talk, finally, about putting old institutions to rest, maybe the digerati should consider taking the plunge and making our industry gatherings something truly new. If we're going to talk about a fresh start, there are a lot of things that can be done to make our events reflect it.

From what it sounds like, many of us are ready for it.

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Web 2.0 Expo 2009: Downsized, but not out

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SAN FRANCISCO--The wild days of Web 2.0 may have thrown their last sheep. Here's how you can tell that things have gotten serious: at O'Reilly Media and Techweb's Web 2.0 Summit this week, people actually showed up for breakfast.

That's because they probably weren't out as late. The party scene at tech conferences tends to be a bacchanalia--take South by Southwest Interactive, with enough events to make any little black book burst at the seams, or TechCrunch50 a few months ago, where rumor has it that a high-profile dot-commer got so drunk at an afterparty that conference organizers politely asked him to delete some intoxicated Twitter posts.

The buttoned-up Web 2.0 Summit had only one legitimate blowout: the launch party for News Corp.'s MySpace Music. The venue was the city's stately Old Mint, a landmarked Greek Revival building dating back to the 1870s that, true to its name, used to house the manufacturing of money--a harsh irony in these post-boom days.

To be sure, the annual Web 2.0 Summit is intended to be a more highbrow affair in comparison to its more sprawling Web 2.0 Expo sibling. Under the glass chandeliers and marble pillars of the downtown Palace Hotel, an ornate vestige of a bygone San Francisco, the attitude was all business. But with the economy in the tank, and dot-com dreams getting shattered by the day with each layoff announcement, it was probably a little bit more businesslike than usual.

At a Web 2.0 Summit start-up mock-pitch event called Launchpad, organizer John Battelle says the companies onstage would not be fly-by-night start-ups, but rather emerging companies with solid business models and the potential to have a big social impact.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET Networks)

With a "Web meets world" theme, the speakers weren't trendy dot-com entrepreneurs, but rather industry leaders like former Vice President Al Gore and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, as well as celebrities such as cyclist Lance Armstrong and The Omnivore's Dilemma author Michael Pollan. For a start-up mock-pitch event called "Launchpad," conference organizer John Battelle reminded the audience that the companies onstage would not be fly-by-night start-ups, but rather emerging companies with solid business models and the potential to have a big social impact.

But this sort of discussion can get ahead of itself. A conference about changing the world, though its intentions may be wholly pragmatic, can devolve into starry-eyed futurism when the present needs so much attention. This was something that began to rear its head when venture capital veteran John Doerr called the recession "the greatest economic opportunity of our lifetimes" and when Intel CEO Paul Otellini, despite having just said some somber words about the recession and having urged solidarity as we "get through this thing," paraded out a shiny new "smart camera" prototype that elicited plenty of oohs and ahhs upon demonstrating that it could translate Chinese into English.

"I like coming here," Otellini said to the audience. "It's a respite from, sort of, watching the stock market crash every day, and think about what the future is going to hold from us."

He's right; talking about the future, and listening to industry luminaries do so, is important. On the other hand, it can happen at the expense of the present. Trendy "health 2.0" companies are exciting, but the more pressing problem in the United States is that millions of Americans can't afford health care coverage, let alone a 23andMe spit test.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom hails Barack Obama's campaign mastery of social media.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET Networks)

In a panel about how the Web is changing politics, digerati icon Arianna Huffington and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom hailed Barack Obama's campaign's mastery of social media and acknowledged that the new president-elect needs to keep using these powerful tools when he inherits a national mess in January. They were less descriptive, though, regarding how.

Elon Musk, the PayPal co-founder now at the helm of troubled electric-car start-up Tesla Motors, took the stage on Friday afternoon and spoke candidly about his company's issues. After the economic meltdown, Tesla nixed a plan to raise about $100 million because it would've involved "very difficult terms" with investors. (The company raised $40 million instead.) He used a military analogy to describe the carmaker's subsequent layoffs: "(It's the) difference between sort of special forces and regular Army, and if you're going to get through a really tough environment...you need to have a really high level of dedication and talent."

But when Battelle, interviewing Musk onstage, asked if the beleaguered Tesla would actually make money, the serial investor replied, "Yeah, yeah, absolutely!" and said he still believes in Tesla's strategy: release a six-figure sports car, the Roadster, first, then eventually move on to more affordable electric vehicles. "It's important to emphasize that the point of Tesla, the reason I funded it and put so much time into it, is to get to mass-market electric cars," Musk said. "To get there, you need to start with something."

The digital futurism didn't make its way to MySpace's party on Thursday night, with performances by Lionel Richie and paparazzi staple DJ AM. It was a big success: the Old Mint was packed to its gilded walls with Valley notables from VC legend Ron Conway to actor-turned-entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher. But the atmosphere was tinged with an acknowledgment that the Web 2.0 Summit and the MySpace afterparty, dual doses of Old San Francisco and dot-com glory, could be the last such revelry for quite some time.

Layoffs were just the tip of the iceberg. In the tech industry's meet-and-greet culture, the conference and event circuit is the next to get hit hard by the economic slowdown, partygoers predicted. O'Reilly's own Web 2.0 Expo in Tokyo had already been canceled earlier this fall, with an employee citing lack of sponsor interest. John Battelle announced to the audience that next year's Web 2.0 Summit would be held not at the Palace but at a less glitzy Westin hotel down the street.

Some small conferences, particularly those held outside the United States that rely on Valley types to jet across an ocean or two for attendance, were also gossiped about as big question marks. Individuals were remarkably candid about their companies' own chances: "I give myself four, six months," one entrepreneur told me.

Maybe, once the constant talk of saving the world had subsided, the Internet's thinkers were finally willing to focus on what's happening now. Or maybe they're just more honest after a few drinks.

A correction was made at 2:11 p.m. PT: O'Reilly Media co-produces the Web 2.0 Summit with Techweb.

NEW YORK--Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, is known as a futurist, but his keynote address on Thursday morning at the Web 2.0 Expo was heavy on the realism in the wake of sobering news from Wall Street.

Web 2.0 evangelist Tim O'Reilly addresses the crowd at the last Web 2.0 Expo, in April.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)

"(These are) pretty depressing times in a lot of ways," O'Reilly said in an address that first had looked like it would simply be a starry-eyed discussion of enterprise opportunities for Web 2.0. "And you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call 'Web 2.0,' the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I'm not talking about an investment bubble. (It's) a reality bubble."

Global warming. The U.S. losing its edge in science and technology. A growing income gap. "And what are the best and the brightest working on?" O'Reilly asked, displaying a slide of the popular Facebook application SuperPoke, which invites you to, among other things, "throw sheep" at your friends.

"Do you see a problem here?" he posed, showing another slide of the popular iPhone app "iBeer," which simulates chugging a pint. "You have to ask yourself, are we working on the right things?"

He brought up examples like Google.org, the Omidyar Network, and even small companies that have decided to take on social and political challenges rather than the trendy social-network craze of the week. "Business is the engine of innovation," O'Reilly said. "I really believe in markets, and I believe in the power we all have to build great companies that change things."

As for the financial-services industry, O'Reilly implied that in a big sense, firms had it coming. "If you look at what went wrong on Wall Street, this is an industry that, in its heart, parades a lot of value," he said. "Liquidity in markets is critical. But if you look at the last decade...these Wall Street firms captured a lot more value than they were creating."

There's an inherent irony in what O'Reilly said, given the fact that massive conferences like the Web 2.0 Expo are packed with the trendspeak and hype that birthed SuperPoke-like entertainment, and certainly aren't helping the environment by distributing tons of press kits and swag--not to mention flying in hundreds of attendees in a massive spurt of carbon emissions.

To be fair, O'Reilly Media has been printing fewer event programs and encouraging conference goers to recycle, and it has used carpeting made of post-consumer material.

There is clearly a lot that needs to change, and perhaps the tech industry trend of large-scale conferences is part of it. We'll see whether Silicon Valley's leaders and moguls are willing to do what they think is right, rather than what they think is profitable.

But O'Reilly encouraged the audience to start small, and he offered them their first challenge: register to vote.

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