VentureBeat

Wikipedia gets $2M from Omidyar Network

Philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network just announced that it’s making a $2 million grant to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that runs online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The investment firm was started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, so the two groups seem like an obvious fit, with their shared do-gooder missions and tech roots. Wikipedia, of course, is extremely popular (the press release cites comScore numbers showing the site receives 300 million unique monthly visitors and is the… Continue Reading

Roundup: Amazon’s ‘ham-fisted’ error, Facebook’s baseball surge and more

Here’s the latest action:

Gay books disappear from Amazon’s sales rankings — What caused the incident now known as “amazonfail”? The online retailer first blamed a glitch, and is now saying a “ham-fisted” cataloging error is at fault. Meanwhile, a hacker claims to be responsible.

With the start of baseball season, teams see a surge in Facebook fans — The Boston Red Sox’s page grew from 1,173 fans to more than 46,000 in under a week.

Banner advertising isn’t dead… Continue Reading

Roundup: Spam bounces back, angel investors balk, Entellium bigwigs go to jail and more

Bebo caught in Irish conflict — The video sharing site has become an unexpected platform for both Irish Catholics and Protestants to hurl insults and violent threats at each other. The BBC has the story.

Downturn puts drag on angels — The Center for Venture Research reports that angel investors put less money into each of their startups in 2008 than in years previous, noting a drop of 26 percent from 2007.

Encarta buckles under Wikipedia’s weight — Microsoft will… Continue Reading

Poor economy killed Wikia Search

Wikipedia has been one of the biggest successes in the history of the Internet. So has Google. So on paper it makes some sense that combining the two would result in a service that would also be hugely popular. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out so well for Wikia Search.

The wiki-style search engine started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is closing down, Webware first reported earlier today. In confirming the news, Wales attempts to deflect the… Continue Reading

Roundup: Tech salary raises in ‘08, Supreme Court knocks down anti-porn law, and more layoffs

Here’s the latest action, depressing as half of it is:

Apple will make an appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2010 (at least in spirit) — The company has already said it will stop attending the Macworld event, so rumors that it will go to CES instead, persist. Apple or no Apple, CES is doing its best to woo the third-party developers and manufacturers with what has been dubbed the iLounge Pavilion for iPod and… Continue Reading

Google calls for debates to spur Knol usage

The buzz around Google Knol, the “Wikipedia killer,” has died since its unveiling in late July. Now, Google is attempting to revive interest in the site by launching Knol debates — op-ed style entries that feature the opinions of opposing experts and allow users to chime in.

While Knol has managed to assemble some good information, it’s been kind of hard to navigate, and since so many users already know, use and love Wikipedia, it’s been… Continue Reading

Google unveils Knol, its accountable take on Wikipedia — with ads

Months in the making, Google has finally unveiled Knol, its Wikipedia rival written by people knowledgeable in certain fields. The idea, as Google puts it, is to move information from people’s heads onto the web.

So what’s the difference between Wikipedia and Knol? The main one is authorship. Whereas Wikipedia entries can be created and edited by anyone with only an IP address being tracked, knols (the individual entries) will have authors with actual names that… Continue Reading

Search Wikia takes a step closer to the promise of ’search meets Wikipedia’

When the guy behind Wikipedia launches a search engine, the world is going to watch. And watch they did when Jimmy Wales unveiled Search Wikia in January — perhaps a little too closely. I say that because while some were expecting to see a “Google-killer“, the site we saw was a bare-bones engine in the very early alpha testing stage.

But now, it’s getting closer.

I got a chance to play with some of the upcoming changes… Continue Reading

Roundup: [Update: Facebook takes dip, maybe?], Crescendo Ventures, and more

Here’s the latest:

1) Another Googler goes to Facebook, to head its developer platform
2) Facebook traffic apparently took a dip last month — [Update: Or didn't. See Om's update, and a big looping conversation about Facebook on Techmeme]
3) Madonna latest in string of musicians to ditch record labels
4) Mozilla preparing mobile web browser, may improve mobile web user experience?
5) Mixx.com launches to let publishers give users relevant content
6) CBS acquires gossip site Dotspotter for $10 million
7)… Continue Reading

Roundup: Veoh sues, MySpace’s tiny profit, Nirvanix, Wikipedia’s color-coding, more

Here’s the latest action:

Veoh Networks files preemptive suit against Universal Music Group — Veoh, the San Diego video start-up we’ve written about, said it filed the suit to assert its rights as a copyright-compliant company after UMG threatened it with litigation.

Geni gets cloned by a German Verwandt, but there’s also Israeli MyHeritage — Verwandt, the German copycat of the family tree social network company Geni, told us last month it had raised financing from Neuhaus Partners, and… Continue Reading

Grand Challenge downtown, Sparter frees your game $, Visto revisited…

Latest round-up in the world of tech:

Defense Department’s Grand Challenge moves downtown — The great annual race of robotic cars, until this year held in the desert, is moving downtown. The DARPA-sponsored event awards the winner $2 million. Unmanned vehicles will attempt to avoid people and buildings instead of boulders and sagebrush, with no remote control or other human interference. (See Merc story here.) The goal is to help the Defense Department fulfill a Congressional mandate:… Continue Reading

TextDigger, Hakia say they can improve search

TextDigger is the latest company seeking that Holy Grail: Improving on Google’s results by understanding the sense of the words you’re looking for.

TextDigger’s search engine is called Digger, and it just launched at the DEMO conference.

First, some context: Digger, of San Jose, joins Powerset, the San Francisco start-up, and Hakia, of New York, and others which are trying to do something similar. Our piece on Powerset sparked debate within the search industry, namely because some… Continue Reading

Valley networker Auren Hoffman’s reputation on the line

Auren Hoffman is one of the Silicon Valley’s most connected people. For a while, he made his living with his Rolodex, hooking people up through his firm Stonebrick.

Last year, he started a company called RapLeaf, designed to keep track of your reputation for reliability as you buy and sell things online. It works across Web sites, and so takes eBay’s reputation system and extends it universally (our story here).

So it is ironic that Hoffman has… Continue Reading

Wikia to launch social search engine — amid a sea of others

Wikia, the San Mateo start-up founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, is working on a search engine that will use the same strategy as Wikipedia’s user-reliant encyclopedia.

The project is secretive, but has a preliminary launch date of the first quarter of 2007, the Times of London reports.

Wales says Google’s flaws have become more apparent:

Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try… Continue Reading

Roundup: SpotDJ for iTunes, reporter embedded in Second Life & more

SpotDJ, an angel-backed start-up in San Francisco, yesterday launched a service that lets people insert “spots” within iTunes music, which can be listened to by other SpotDJ users. The short spots can be descriptions of the song’s artist, a back-story to the song, or a recommendation about a different version.

Here’s how it works: Once you’ve downloaded SpotDJ, you can listen to a song on iTunes, and then hit the “spot this song” button. That lets… Continue Reading