The business software behemoth is more than doubling its commitment to the SAP HANA Real Time Fund, going from $155 million to $405 million, to support innovation surrounding real-time applications and big data.

The SAP HANA fund launched in 2012 and primarily makes investments in early stage venture capital funds and startups building off SAP’s technology. HANA, which stands for High-Performance Analytic Appliance, is SAP’s next generation in-memory database. It can store up to 500 terabytes of data and execute at high speeds.

Big data technology is hot right now as large corporations and enterprises look for better ways to store, process, and analyze their data. SAP’s head of database and technology product marketing Amit Sinha told VentureBeat in an interview last year that “innovation in data management has stagnated” and there is a $2 trillion market opportunity for HANA and related database management technologies. HANA is SAP’s answer to the big data trend.

In an effort to stimulate innovation, SAP began the SAP Startup Focus program which is like an accelerator program for enterprise and IT companies that are working on predictive analytics products. Innovation can be tough in large companies and initiatives like Startup Focus and the Real Time Fund are intended to keep SAP ahead of the curve, or at least keeping pace with it. The company has actively been acquiring startups to this end as well.

The increased size of the fund is a reflection of the strong interest of entrepreneurs and VCs in participating in the SAP ecosystem. Elizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson, COO and Managing Director at SAP Ventures, said it is also indicative of a changing venture capital landscape.

“We believe we have a new model for corporate venture the start-up ecosystem is embracing,” she said. “The additional funding allows us to broaden the scope of what the SAP HANA Fund invests in to include all SAP platform technologies, for example, cloud, mobile or analytic technologies as well as HANA.  We will also be able to extend our investment horizon for the SAP HANA Real Time Fund from 3-5 years to 7-10 years. Further, we will hire a business development staff and develop programs and partnership opportunities with the SAP ecosystem that deliver additional business value, like helping companies to grow internationally and exchange insights with industry experts.”

So far the fund has made investments in three startups — Gild, a recruiting solution that helps organizations find developers skilled in big data, FeedZai, a Portuguese startup that provided real-time fraud detection and prevention, and a third unnamed Israeli company. SAP HANA RTF (enough abbreviations for you?) has also committed funds to ten early stage venture capital funds including SV Angel, August Capital, and Data Collective in the Bay Area, and Point Nine and Magma in Berlin and Tel Aviv, respectively.

The fund is managed by SAP Ventures, which also manages a $353 million direct growth fund that invests in growth-stage IT companies. Over the past 15 years, SAP Ventures has invested in more than one hundred companies round the world including LinkedIn, Box, Violin Memory, and Lithium.

Photo Credit: SAP’s president Sanjay Poonen on stage at CloudBeat/Michael O’Connell

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Kaazing enables the “living web,” which it describes as the “dynamic, interactive online world populated by applications that are always on, always connected, and always real time.” With the proliferation of mobile devices and the rise of Bring-Your-Own-Device culture, enterprise organizations have a growing need to build and adapt applications that work effectively across multiple channels.

“Today’s web is a living web, an organism whose evolution and growth is fueled by the deluge of immediate, ever-changing, ever-expanding data we’re constantly feeding into it,” the company said in a white paper. “Ironically, it’s this transformation that poses one of the biggest challenges to the web’s progress. The underlying architecture simply can’t keep up with a living web that’s becoming faster, more instantaneous, more collaborative, and more mobile. The WebSocket protocol was created to tackle the shortcomings of the legacy web and let the living web reach its potential.”

Kaazing’s technology updates existing web architecture to be more dynamic, scaleable, and reliable, it claims. Its WebSocket Gateway provides a persistent network connection that turns a request-and-response communication into a two-way connection. The platform provides immediate data delivery with low latency, lowers costs for hardware, application server oft ware, and network bandwidth usage as well as for development costs and time-to-market, and all this enables desktop-class applications to run in browsers and mobile devices.

To fuel the company’s growth, Kaazing raised $15 million from New Enerprise Associaes and Columbus Technology Partners as well as existing investors. It brings the company’s total capital raised to $39 million. Kaazing was founded in 2007 and is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Read the press release. 

Photo credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Todd Greene is CEO of PubNub.

Mobile, web, and desktop online apps can be split into two categories: “static” or “real-time.”

Static apps represent the bulk of our online usage today: these are solitary, single-user experiences where content changes only when the user clicks a button, requests a new page, or does a “reload.”  New information is presented only when the user asks for it.

Real-time apps are infinitely more engaging.

These apps mimic behaviors we’re used to having in the real world: content is pushed to us “as it happens.”  Real-time applications let you edit docs together, battle your online buddies, find the closest taxi, and see when your friend is typing an “iMessage.” They let musicians perform from home and interact with adoring fans. Real-time apps make sure citizens know about critical safety issues as they happen. And real-time technology enables people to follow friends on a map, chat, share, and collaborate in a more natural, real-world, manner.

World of Warcraft, Facetime, WebEx, ETrade’s MarketCaster, and Facebook’s live “Ticker” may seem completely unrelated, but they all represent real-time apps, connecting users instantly with the real world. Another thing they have in common is that each cost tens of millions to design, build, deploy, and scale!

Real-time technology has always been complicated and expensive. But that’s changing.

Real-time networks emerge

New trends in consumer software are almost always driven by a sudden ubiquitous availability of an enabling technology. In the 90s, the launch of app servers moved websites from glossy brochures to destinations for online banking, travel, and commerce.  A decade later, open source software stacks help kickstart massive social networks operating on a shoestring budget without writing big checks to Oracle and IBM.

Today, a new enabling technology has emerged that’s driving an explosion of real-time apps. “Real-Time Networks” like PubNub, Pusher, and Firebase offer the core building blocks for real-time, globally distributed, and offered on a pay-as-you-go model.   (Full disclosure: I’m the CEO of PubNub, but we’re not alone in pioneering this movement).

The core building blocks of real-time

These real-time networks operate by establishing (and maintaining) a dedicated network socket connection to every device.

Until recently, this was an expensive proposition, roughly analogous to keeping a connected phone line open to all of your users, all the time.  Thanks to the elasticity of the cloud and some innovative technologies, the costs of these dedicated connections has now dropped substantially. 

But the magic happens once you have that connection.  A real-time network offers high-speed delivery of data, targeted to individual devices or broadcast to everyone simultaneously.  Presence-as-a-service provides an easy way to detect (and be notified instantly) when users go on/offline.  Data streams can be stored for future use, and even played back like a DVR for data.  Real-time audience visualization and out-of-the-box encryption comprise more of these core real-time building blocks.

As real-time networks become more commonplace, they are becoming adopted by new MMO games, business collaboration, and telecom companies.  But their availability is also driving completely new kinds of real-time apps. 

Real life enhanced by real-time data

Transportation is one of the earliest areas where we can see real-time technology changing our day-to-day behaviors.  What was once a tedious, horribly unreliable experience, ordering a taxi, is now becoming easy, predictable, and even fun.  Companies like GetTaxi, Sidecar, Uber, Lyft, and others let us order cabs with a single tap, and watch online as the cab approaches our location. 

But it’s not just transportation that’s getting a facelift.

ClassDojo uses real-time technology to give teachers a way to incentivize classroom behavior, using smart phones to provide instant feedback to the student and his/her parents. Soon, mobile apps will show real-time queue length for each restroom or concession booth.

Digital advertising evolves

Brands are using real-time in digital campaigns to drive audience engagement.

Coca-Cola enhanced the American Music Awards red-carpet show by letting online viewers manipulating the video in real-time for their friends’ enjoyment, and powered live voting during the Superbowl. Louis Vuitton created a global, live, online fashion show with online viewer interaction synchronized with the video.  Nike, Honda, Audi, Doritos, and Budwieiser are a few more examples of leading brands invested in their own real-time, user participation campaigns. Real-time in advertising is quickly becoming as popular as CGI was to TV ads in the 90’s.

The emergence of an online audience

Things get really exciting when apps are designed around the “audience experience”, instead of the “user experience.” Companies like TopHatter now offer a true real-time auction e-commerce platform, with avatars representing the bidders and auctioneer, complete with the sound of a gavel ending each auction.  Stageit brings the live concert experience online: audience members make requests, cheer (virtually), and even tip the performer online.

Social TV offerings from Viggle, Yahoo!, Applicaster, and others have taken a similar approach to nationwide TV audiences with online voting, predictive games, and real-time trivia.

Real-time goes mainstream

Real-time networks let app developers focus on their core competencies like better UI, richer experiences, and more creative features, instead of worrying about the massive investment and ongoing maintenance required to deliver real-time services. The cloud made massive storage and processing available to everyone.  Akamai solved the problem of globally scaling websites with content delivery networks.

Now, real-time networks have democratized real-time, you don’t have to be Facebook or Activision to deliver a real-time experience.

The real-time apps we see today are just the beginning — expect radically new possibilities in the way we shop, communicate, travel, work, educate, and experience the world.  The Lego pieces are now all in place; it’s now up to the creative folks to change the way we interact online.

photo credit: Office of Governor Patrick via photopin cc

TubeMogul is a platform where brands can buy video ad opportunities in real-time. Real-time bidding and video advertising have become increasingly popular over the past couple years, and TubeMogul’s technology helps brands get the most out of the buying process.  The platform was “built for branding,” meaning it was designed with marketers’ needs in mind. Advertisers maintain significant control over their campaigns and receive reports about their impact.

This investment was led by Northgate Capital, with participation from existing investor Trinity Ventures and Foundation Capital. The money will be used to hire more people and make technological advancements to the platform.  It brings TubeMogul’s total capital raised to $35 million to date. Read the press release on TubeMogul’s blog.

Koozoo is a platform that crowd-sources live video from public places to create a continuously broadcasting network. Members of the community can post and watch user-generated video feeds from places such as cafes or world landmarks. Whether you want to assess the wait time for coffee or see a real-time view of the beach, Koozoo’s goal is to make “live views of the world’s public spaces easily accessible to one and all.”

“Koozoo will usher in a new era that reads like science fiction today,” said Trevor Darrell, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement. “For example, within a few years I expect Koozoo to let you take a virtual walk down the street in Tokyo or Paris in 3D, live, as you sit comfortably at home in California.”

The platform is currently in closed beta testing in San Francisco and plans to launch in early 2013. It raised a $2.5 million seed round led by New Enterprise Associates and Tugboat Ventures, as well as angel investors, to prepare the platform for mainstream adoption.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

10 messages per second to 1,000,000 live users on single, solitary server rack? That’s impressive by any standard, and that’s what Kaazing and Dell were able to achieve with living, dynamically updating webpages.

“Dell came to Kaazing … and asked if we could drive one message per second to one million users,” Kaazing executive vice president John Donnelly said in a statement. “We did just that and then some, achieving 10 messages per second to the same one million users.”

That’s on a single Dell PowerEdge R620 server rack using dual 3.3GHz quad core Xeon CPUs, 32GB of RAM, plus dual 10Gb Ethernet cards and four 1Gb Ethernet network ports.

Dell says that the system, which used TIBCO Enterprise Message Server, “can now support a higher number of users than ever before at speeds never before possible.”

In the old days, web browsers forced users to refresh entire web pages to update a single element are over. Modern web pages, however, enabled by modern web browsers, now allow dynamic updating of individual components. One such protocol is WebRTC (web real-time communication), but the Kaazing software uses the HTML5 WebSocket standard.

To achieve scalable live page element updating is a somewhat new challenge for web servers.

Live updating can create a great experience for end users, but it can also put a massive demand on web server software and hardware that were previously optimized for sending out complete pages every 15 to 50 seconds, but now are getting dozens of small update requests a second.

So 10 million messages per second is impressive. Also impressive is that the companies delivered them from server to client in an average 3.5 milliseconds each.

One little caveat: If you check out Dell’s online configurator for the PowerEdge R620, you’ll notice no 3.3GHz Xeon processors available. The top of the line orderable CPUS are 2.2GHz.

Update: Dell has updated its product ordering space and the new 3.3GHz processor is now available for order.

Mobli, not to be confused with Mowgli from The Jungle Book, has raised $20 million.

Mobli is a real-time visual media platform where users can share photos and videos from their smartphones. It integrates topical channels and geo-location technology so content is only shared with others who may find it interesting. The app pledges to show users “the world through other people’s eyes.”

It is empathy for the era of social media.

A concert-goer with nosebleed seats could access a video from someone who shelled out for closer seats, and a bride planning a wedding can look at photos of other members on the community for inspiration.

Granted, there are dozens of other, more widely used and established platforms where photos and videos circulate, but that does not seem to stop a team of celebrity investors from throwing in money. According to the statement, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Serena Williams, and Lance Armstrong previously invested in Mobli.

This Series B came almost entirely from Kenges Rakishev, listed by Forbes as one of the 50 most influential people in Kazakhstan.

Which begs the questions, how many influential people are there in Kazakhstan?

It brings Mobli’s total funding to $28 million.

Mobli is based in the urban jungle of New York.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Ultramodern. Sexy. Uncompromising.

No, I am not talking about Angelina Jolie. I am referring to FuzeBox, a real-time video conferencing application. Today, the company is announcing the debut of Ignite 2.0, an updated toolkit that it asserts has model-like qualities, as well as being simple to learn and easy to use.

FuzeBox enables enterprise professionals to conduct high-resolution, real-time meetings where all participants’ screens are synched from anywhere, no matter the device. There is also a suite of tools available, like zoom and laser-pointer, and the ability to include presentations, graphics, videos, audio, and documents in the meeting.

The company strives to recreate real life meetings as closely as possible in a web environment.

The new collection of APIs will enable its customers to integrate FuzeBox services into their existing applications and systems. Integrations include Microsoft LYNC, Box, SAP, and Yammer. Users will be able to seamlessly pull information from these sources and share them during a meeting.

The new toolkit also includes features like a direct billing and chargeback system, deployment without needing to install servers or software, a single log-in, and data analytics to assess the effectiveness of meetings. FuzeBox is releasing an enhanced set of training programs, client services, and technical support as well.

By further enabling all enterprise data to be introduced into real-time video streaming, FuzeBox continues on its mission to fuse the physical and online worlds, at least when it comes to business meetings.

This update comes just six weeks after FuzeBox announced raising $21 million in its first round of financing. The company currently powers 78,000 meetings a day in 122 countries and 10 different languages.

Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to video conference with Angelina Jolie, but who knows what the future will bring?

The makers of the popular PixelJunk games series aren’t your normal bunch of developers.

A typical day at their office in downtown Kyoto includes impromptu audio jams at lunchtime, in between making games like PixelJunk 4 am and PixelJunk SideScroller. They don’t see themselves just as developers — now they’re experimenters and space rockers in a band called The Electric Bends.

This can’t entirely be a surprise to lovers of the PixelJunk games, which have included music titles that have awesome use of sound.

Their first two music albums are available digitally on Bandcamp, iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, Spotify, and Amazon. The first, an eight-track LP titled “real.time,” released on June 5 of this year. The latest, the 9-track “.chroma,” came out on July 27.

The name of the company behind PixelJunk is Q-Games. We chatted with James “Milky” Mielke, fresh from Q Entertainment as Q-Games’ new producer on the PixelJunk series, and Dylan Cuthbert, the studio’s founder, about the band and how it’s strengthened the company creatively.

GamesBeat: First, a little background about yourselves!

Dylan Cuthbert: Hi, I’m Dylan Cuthbert, and I’ve been making video games since I was about 10 years old, beginning on a Sinclair ZX 81. From there, I’ve never looked back and was already designing logos and planning to set up a games company by age 14. It took another 15 years, but I got there eventually and founded Q-Games here in Kyoto in 2001.

James Mielke: I’m the guy everyone calls “Milky” because it’s easy, and I am the newly-relocated-to-Kyoto PixelJunk producer. I formerly worked at the similarly named but quite different Q Entertainment on Child of Eden and Lumines Electronic Symphony. Before that, I just talked about games to anyone who would listen.

GamesBeat: Tell us about your band, The Electric Bends. How would you describe it, how did it begin, and what would you like it to evolve into?

Cuthbert: Eddie [Lee] is a rather excellent guitarist, and he brought his gear into the office to play around with during lunchtime. Bit by bit, other budding musicians around the office decided they wanted to have a play-around, too — namely Jaymin [Kessler], who used to play bass and guitar in a band when he was a teenager, and then Kalin, who had never touched an instrument before in his life and decided he wanted to learn the piano. I heard them practicing Beatles tracks in the corner of the office, and around the time they were having their third session, I grabbed my iPhone with a copy of Nanostudio, a synth emulator, on it and dove in.

The quality isn’t very good because back then, all our instruments were plugged into varying cheap amps and speakers and then recorded via a laptop PC mic. However, as you can hear from our very first jam, we had a lot of potential and were having a lot of fun.

GamesBeat: What instruments or software do you use?

Cuthbert: Initially, it was a very bad audio setup, and after a few jams, I looked around and found the excellent Zoom R24 multitrack recorder, which for the price is quite remarkable. It let us record all our input separately and save them as .wav files, which I could then load up into Cubase — later Ableton Live — to balance, master, and perhaps cut out a few bum notes…although we tend to leave those in because they show we are human and still learning our craft.

At the beginning, it was Jaymin on bass, Eddie on electric guitar, and Kalin and I on synth — namely Nanostudio running on iPads. It was my birthday around that time, so I got myself a Korg Electribe SX for laying down the rhythm track. Now, about six months later, we have expanded our instruments and our band members — namely Paul [Leonard] and Milky on synth and rhythm, respectively. Along the way, we got a Novation Ultranova and also the appropriately named Waldorf Q, both of which are analog modeling synths. We are still saving for a proper electronic drum kit so we can record “real” drums rather than the live programmed Electribe stuff by Milky. That is exceptionally good, mind you, but, well…nothing beats whacking things with sticks, eh?

GamesBeat: “.Chroma” is the new follow-up album to your debut, “real.time.” Can you describe both albums and how they’re different from one another?

Cuthbert: “Real.time” is an album about us as a band playing and experimenting with sound itself, using a lot of analog synth and “shoegazing” to create an almost Pink Floyd-style at times. It’s quite ’70s and psychedelic for the most part, and there are a lot of tracks on there that paint an interstellar canvas as you listen to them — “Spacewreck on Saturn” and “Enter the Unknown,” to name just two.

The “.chroma” album’s sound is a little different and more experimental with melody itself, often using two bass guitars to generate interesting harmonics. I think the quality of the music itself is a little higher in the “.chroma” album, but the shoegazing level of “real.time” is difficult to beat, and some people love that stuff!

Going forward, we’ll be combining the two sounds and also adding in a peppering of more contemporary sound now that we have Milky programming the rhythm track dynamically live.

GamesBeat: There are a lot of references to different colors in the song names on “.chroma.” How did that become the album’s theme?

Cuthbert: We found ourselves exploring emotions more on “.chroma” probably because of the extra harmonies and melodies on that album, and I think emotions are represented by colors really well. As a result, we found we were naturally naming the tracks with colors, and then when we looked at the track listing, we realized it was full of color and emotion. From there to the album name was an easy jump.

GamesBeat: The first album, “real.time,” is more space-oriented. Again, what made you choose that theme?

Cuthbert: Because we did so much shoegazing during that period, the “spacey-ness” in the naming came about naturally. Most of the tracks apart from “Woven,” which is a very warm and emotional track, are kind of cold and science fiction-like…reflecting the nature of outer space.

GamesBeat: How have both albums grown and changed from one to the other? Did you get to improve on anything specifically with “.chroma,” and do you have goals for the next album?

Cuthbert: The goals for the next album are to mix the two sounds we created before and at the same time add something a little contemporary. You can hear hints of this in this recent track we uploaded, “Broken God,” which is starkly minimal and a lot of fun to listen to. We obviously don’t want to go “techno” as such because we want to preserve our “live” method of recording, but occasionally using modern beats and rhythms is fun, especially now that we have Milky pushing things from that side. It’s also a lot of fun finding ways to combine traditional instruments — bass, guitar, et cetera — with modern sounds.

GamesBeat: How long did it take to complete each album?

Cuthbert: We jam every single lunchtime, producing a huge amount of tracks to play with. Most of which are uploaded to Soundcloud. Surprisingly to us, we found we produced fairly listenable jams almost every lunchtime — sometimes even two or three, which means it can only take a couple of weeks to prepare an album if everything goes right. However, right now it feels like the average time is about a month per album as we like to make sure the very best tracks are on the album.

GamesBeat: How has the group changed the overall atmosphere at Q-Games? Is it similar or different from the kinds of workplace dynamics you’ve experienced before?

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Based in Brazil, Realtime has developed technology that enables the Internet to update instantaneously and continuously. Rather than a request-and-response protocol, Realtime is powered by  Open Real Time Connectivity. With ORTC,  applications can update directly from the server to the connected user without manually refreshing the page.

By being able to observe user activity while it is actually occurring, the people behind the app can gain greater insight into how people engage with their product and capitalize on of-the-moment opportunities.

CEo Andre Parreira believes Realtime could usher in the next era of the Internet, creating a web that is completely fluid and dynamic.

“Our vision of the new web and the modern Internet is that it will be built on top of real-time messaging,” he said. “We could be the real-time web standard, and there is unlimited scaleability. There is a worldwide opportunity to create this product and this industry”

Realtime is built on top of the server and can be easily integrated into applications of all sizes. It accommodates a wide range of web and mobile languages and can be implemented simply by adding a small amount of code to a web page.

The company also provides unique tool sets, so each sector can leverage the technology to best serve its goals. ”There will be a huge push for our technology because businesses will want to know where the eyeballs of the users are on the website,” Parreira said. “Clicks are not enough. Real-time messaging will create platforms to help companies round the world deliver their products to the customers and get more value.”

For example, online retailers can push incentives for their products while customers are in the midst of shopping, and advertisers can track how long people are in front of their ads.

Since its beta release, Realtime has reached 120 million users worldwide, which translates into delivering 750,000 messages per second. With this investment, Realtime intends to create a need on the market for the product. While the technology is powerful, it is not yet the norm, and thus marketing and scaling will be key for sustainable growth.

Brazil’s tech scene is flourishing, and Parreira said there was great excitement and national pride about Brazilian investment in a Brazilian company. BRZTech Holding, the São Paulo-based technology investment that led this round, is just three months old

Realtime started in Portugal in 1997 under the name Internet Business Technologies. It has offices in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, London, Madrid, Lisbon, and most recently, offices in Santa Monica and New York.

Betaworks is showing off a preview of its forthcoming Digg v.1 redesign today, which looks much cleaner and less convoluted that the current version.

Originally launched in 2004, Digg was the first of the big community news sharing social networks, which allowed users to vote on community submitted URLs, with the best stuff rising to the top for increased presence. The site began its fall from grace in 2010 with the launch of revamped (and somewhat contradictory) news gathering system that allowed web publications greater control over what was submitted. The changes led to decreased user activity and, in turn, less traffic to web publishers. More recently Digg was sold to Betaworks, which later announced it would be building a brand new, stripped down version of the site from scratch.

Today the new owners published a blog post about how the new Digg will function and what people can expect.

“The experience must be fast and thin,” Betaworks wrote. “Let users go, and they will come back to you. We optimize for return visits, not page views per visit.”

This particular comment from the Betaworks team pretty much hits the nail on the head in terms of what was wrong with the old version of the site. Digg’s previous owners concentrated on changes to the site that would build relationships with publishers — promising them high traffic gains, analytics, promoted story ad opportunities, etc. These changes degraded the overall Digg user experience and then assumed that people wouldn’t look elsewhere (meaning other social media channels like Twitter and Facebook) to find their news/web content.

The new Digg v.1 basically tosses out any feature that doesn’t directly enhance the user experience.

The team is getting rid of the “Diggbar,” a frame that displayed a navigation bar at the top of any website that was submitted to Digg. The point of this feature was to keep users engaged on Digg, which was constantly sending users outside of the site to view content. In practice, it caused much pain for users and often prevented them from seeing submitted content easily. Additionally, Betaworks is getting rid of the “Newsrooms” feature, which was far more useful for publishers than core Digg users.

The Betaworks team is also simplifying and renaming the news streams.

The “newswires” stream, which consists of new user submissions that flow in real-time, will once again be called the “upcoming” stream. And ripping  a page out of Reddit’s book, the new Digg v.1 correctly distinguishes between the most popular stories (stories with the most votes/site activity), and “Top Stories” aka Reddit’s “What’s Hot” tab. The popular stories stream consists of what people say they like the most, while the “Top Stories” stream will now be an actual representation of that sentiment that goes beyond Digg. The old Digg treated these two streams as one constant stream (aka Digg’s front page).

“Today, we vote on Facebook with every share and on Twitter with every tweet, and conversations take place across loads of different sites, apps, and networks,” Betaworks wrote in the blog post. “So how do we surface ‘what the Internet is talking about,’ when the Internet is talking beyond the walls of Digg.com? We tear down the walls.”

The “Top Stories” stream of content will act as a sort of real-time news gathering aggregator that heavily relies on Bitly’s Realtime short URL search engine technology, as VentureBeat head honcho Matt Marshall wrote about Saturday. I’m assuming activity from Digg users will be the basis for the “Top Stories”  aggregation algorithm, but tweeting, retweeting, liking, stumbling, etc. will also have a big impact. (As a side note, this should also help ensure the “Top Stories” stream isn’t easily gamed by spammers.)

One thing that will be absent at the time of launch is a working comment system. Betaworks said that conversation is already happening on other social networks and to “do it right,” Digg’s comment system needs to take that into account. I can’t say I disagree with the logic, especially since comments on Digg are rare these days.

As for the overall “Rethink Digg” preview, Betaworks makes a compelling case for long-time, inactive Digg users (myself included) to check out the new site when it launches.

Check out some shots of the new Digg v.1 from Betaworks below, and let us know your thoughts in the comment section.

I got a look at the new version of Chartbeat yesterday, the popular realtime analytics tool, and was encouraged to see a new suite of tools that focused on ways to engage and respond to readers so they return again and again.

“We know the pageview sucks,” said Chartbeat’s Alex Carusillo. “Sure everyone likes to see big numbers, but you can’t predict a pickup by Drudge Report that will send a huge wave of one time readers. We think it makes more sense to focus on the readers who are deeply engaged and driving other readers to your site.”

The big change is a new field in the dashboard that tracks the average amount of time readers are spending with each story. You can take a look at an example from investor Fred Wilson’s blog AVC below (he doesn’t mind sharing his numbers).

Watching the numbers from VentureBeat yesterday, I saw certain stories that weren’t getting the most traffic, but were keeping readers on the site for two or three times VentureBeat’s average.

“This is very different from the engagement you see in Google Analytics,” Lauryn Bennett, Chartbeat’s head of brand. “They are looking at when someone enters a page and when they exit. But is that person actually paying attention to your site, or did they just forget and leave open a tab in their browser.” Chartbeat looks every few seconds to see if the visitor is clicking around to measure engagement.

Chartbeat has already released a specialized product, Newsbeat, for publishers. Right now the team is testing out similar products for e-commerce and gaming companies. And the new version of Chartbeat is going to break out analytics for visitors arriving through mobile sites and apps as well. “You need to understand how your audience is engaging with you, no matter what platform they are using,” Carusillo said.

And, as if Chartbeat didn’t already monkey with my ego on a daily basis, the team has built-in a new tool that tracks the performance of your site against its peer group, in our case other tech blogs. You can see the average for direct traffic, search and social across similar sites and where you rank by comparison.

“We want to help companies do more than just track their performance minute to minute. We’re trying to real-time expose data in a new way so companies can make informed decisions about where it makes the most sense to invest for the long-term,” Bennett said.

Image via Flickr user rosmary

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Location-based check-in service Foursquare and local deals site Groupon are partnering up to offer real-time daily deals, Foursquare confirmed today. Several deals have already gone live in Chicago (like the one pictured above), and deals all over the U.S. and Canada should be live by Sunday.

“Foursquare’s goal is to help people connect in the real world, discover new places, and save money through specials,” a Foursquare spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. “We’re excited that Groupon’s daily deals and real-time deals will now be included in our platform.”

Groupon’s deals will be accessible through the “Explore” tab in Foursquare’s mobile app. Groupon is now Foursquare’s sixth daily deals partner. Foursquare partnered with LivingSocial, BuyWithMe, Gilt City, AT&T Interactive, and Zozi a few weeks back. Foursquare also announced a partnership last month with American Express for instant deals when you link your AmEx card to your account and check-in at a participating store.

Groupon’s mobile service, Groupon Now, has only rolled out to a few cities, so the Foursquare deal will give the company access to Foursquare’s more than 10 million users.

Groupon and Foursquare will split profits on deals.

The move to add Groupon into the mix of Foursquare partners is important for both companies because they need to find more ways to monetize.

Groupon filed for a $750 million IPO back on June 2 but is currently losing a lot of cash. Before it goes public, the company will want to show how its business can be profitable, and real-time local deals are one way to push it in the right direction.

Last we heard on Foursquare, the company had closed a $50 million round, with a valuation of at least $600 million. Its aggressive strategy of partnering with daily deals companies will likely help it start bringing in much more revenue.

What do you think of the Groupon and Foursquare deal?

Last week, startup Wowd announced its team was “moving on.” Many read this announcement as one of the darker stories of the entrepreneurial world: the kind of failure that entails giving investors their money back, open-sourcing the code and returning to corporate life.

In this case, however, this young company was just one of a string of real-time search engines, once a sexy and competitive field, to pivot to another sector or close shop entirely.

“From the business side,” said OneRiot CEO Tobias Peggs, who was one of the entrepreneurs working in this field, “assuming you have world class engineers to build the product (which we did), you still need great business development and a lot of money to make a go of it. And even then, it’s hard.”

Yesteryear’s crop of seemingly healthy and promising real-time search companies first sprang up to fill a very real need. In 2008, a socially connected web of real-time communication was exploding, and users needed a way to parse and search that information. In response, highly innovative companies such as Summize, OneRiot, Collecta, Wowd, Ellerdale, Crowdeye and a few others began presenting a range of options for making sense of real-time data.

Gerry Campbell, who served as an advisor and investor for Summize and, later, CEO of Collecta, spoke to VentureBeat, saying, “The Twitter firehose as a dataset sparked people, then people wanted the Foursquare firehose for geodata, the Digg firehose for links. But it was Twitter driving it, and people wanted to see more than a stream.”

Summize was acquired by Twitter; its product lives on as Twitter’s search feature. (And insofar as people need real-time search, Twitter’s own Summize-based search tool works pretty well.) However, this company had one of very few success stories in the real-time search category.

In December 2009, Google announced a partnership with Twitter that would allow it to enter the real-time search space. Google’s real-time search features meant more than just stiff competition for the startups in the category; it was a death knell.

“If you back up three years ago,” said Campbell, “a search index was deemed pretty fresh if it was surfacing things daily. There was no social data flowing in, and the expectation for timely content was not there. Then Google went off on their own and indexed everything faster.”

And it wasn’t just Google getting into bed with Twitter. As OneRiot CEO Tobias Peggs told VentureBeat, all the major search players were hopping on the bandwagon, putting even more pressure on the startups in that space.

“Around that time,” Peggs recalled, “Yahoo did the search deal with Bing, which brought an abrupt end to our own fledgling partnership. By then, both Google and Bing had licensed the Twitter firehose and were busy building their own flavors of realtime search, so the opportunity to partner or distribute there was limited.

“Basically, it was going to be tough to build scale without one of those three in our camp, so we had to pivot.”

As a result of all the interest and experimentation from the three major corporate search engines, the real-time search space began to fall apart. OneRiot pivoted toward the end of 2010 and is now an ad network of sorts. Collecta had plenty of runway (it had raised a significant round of funding mid-2010) when its team realized the search angle wasn’t working. Rather than pivoting, the Collecta team simply shuttered the web app in January 2011.

And Wowd, which had an interesting, people-powered and distributed approach at its launch in 2009, first pivoted to a news-filtering service early in 2010. When that approach didn’t work, the company closed its doors, dismissed its team, and distributed its assets. The startup had raised a total of $5 million from DFJ, KPG and Stanford University. Seven of its engineers are headed to Facebook, and a few others are working on a mobile social search app.

Ironically, even Google’s real-time search features were shut down a couple weeks ago, when the company’s agreement with Twitter expired and the search giant’s latest social experiment, Google+, was launching. The company said it planned to relaunch real-time search after a reconfiguration that would incorporate Google+ results.

Still, the concept of real-time search is more than just a ripple in the larger tech startup deadpool.

Campbell said, “Here’s the reason the industry never happened: it turns out that social discovery scratched that itch well enough. But I think in a couple years, really timely information is going to make a comeback.”

And even now, real-time technology isn’t dead as much as it is — to most end users, anyhow — invisible.

“It’s everywhere,” said Peggs. “But now it’s a feature of fully fledged search, rather than a standalone product, which is what users want.”

Both Peggs and Campbell said they see a future for interesting uses of real-time tech in common social platforms such as Flipboard and StumbleUpon.

“I think real-time tech is part of things [as opposed to the whole],” said Campbell. “But real-time search on its own needs a context.”

And as the social web continues to infiltrate online commerce and advertising, the context for real-time technology is readily apparent.

As Peggs pointed out, “If you think about what we did in realtime search, we found the content that was resonating with users on the social web right now, did some sophisticated processing of that data, and surfaced up a single piece of content… We had a terrific team and really smart technology, so we thought, ‘How can we deploy both into a new field, fast?’ Here we are, 12 months later, as the leading socially targeted mobile advertising company. It was a good decision to pivot.”

Finally, Campbell observed that even as real-time becomes a feature rather than a stand-alone product in itself, technologies are evolving to handle low-latency, concurrent events.

“We created everything in XMPP because it was the fastest language to index with,” he said. “But other languages are far more prepared for timely events. Nothing still is quite as fast as true real-time. That capability is still not available, but things feel fast enough.”

Any time a startup tackles a huge, low-level, complicated technology problem — one that involves top-shelf (read: expensive) engineers and massive amounts of R&D time — it runs a larger risk than other startups with a simple consumer problem and an obvious business model. An overpowered mammoth like Google could step into the field and effectively quash any hopes of funding, acquisition or graceful exit. Or a faster technology could emerge and accomplish the same tasks with a lot less brainpower — that’s the very nature of tech, after all.

Inevitably, huge ambitions will often lead to pivots and retreats. In the case of real-time search, we saw plenty of both. But the losses of individual companies (and the individuals who built them) has not been a net loss for the wider industry. The so-called death of real-time is merely its transition into ubiquity.

Sadly for most of the optimistic real-time search entrepreneurs of 2008, that transition didn’t pan out into business success.

Image courtesy of chidorian.

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The User Streams tool will be free to everyone and will complement MixPanel’s premium real-time analytics services that help companies understand how users interact with web applications.

With most real-time analytics tools you get information about tens of thousands of users all interacting with a web site at the same time, but you don’t have an understanding of what was common that made something successful, MixPanel cofounder Suhail Doshi told VentureBeat. User Streams differs from competitors like Chartbeat and Reinvigorate because it can analyze data on a micro level, he said.

While the tool can be useful for anyone wishing to gather data on specific user behavior, it’ll be particularly useful for user interface and user experience designers.

Individuals are identified using IP addresses or information from third-party services and automatically tags each person with aliases like “Crimson Alpha”,  “Maroon Beta”, etc. to make it easier to digest. However, publishers can change a stream’s name to whatever they like. That data is stored for a 45-day period and only uses information that’s publicly displayed or made available with consent of the user.

Founded in 2009, MixPanel has raised a total of $1.75 million to build its analytics services. The startup, which has customers that include Quora, Bebo, Slide and Posterous, tracks data for 2,000 sites, according to Doshi.

Check out some additional screenshots of the User Streams tool below.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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The Dutch startup uses co-browsing technology to share the screen between multiple shoppers who can put together different pieces and discuss their choices. The idea is to simulate online the real-world experience of a group of women shopping together.

The consumer web site offers items from 50 online shops in the US, UK, Germany and France, including French Connection, My Wardrobe, Karen Millen, Mango and other well-known European high-street brands. Users can invite friends to a shopping session via Facebook or a URL.

The target market is women aged 15-45. Personally, I can’t see many 30 something women finding the time or inclination to organize a live shopping session, but it could be a hit with teenage girls.

Co-shopping might work best as a feature in existing online shopping portals, rather than as the focus of a new one. Accordingly, ShopWithYourFriends offers a B2B, white-label version for online clothing retailers. Retailers can integrate ShopWithYourFriends into their website by embedding a small piece of code.

The parent company of ShopWithYourFriends is ChatVenture, which is based in Utrecht in the Netherlands, has eight employees and is privately funded. The company was founded in 2008.

Speaking to attendees of the Sports Marketing 2.0 Summit yesterday, Hoffman at first said that sports leagues, teams, and players would have access to the analytics tool, the web analytics company WebTrends reports. He later told WebTrends’ Justin Kistner that the tool is expected to start rolling out by the end of the year. Hoffman didn’t mention the dashboard’s availability for non-sports industry users, but we can assume that it will be available for all users.

The tool will use algorithms similar to Twitter’s “resonance” concept — which the company is using to determine the usefulness of promoted tweets — and will be able to show users how their tweets are spreading, as well as how influential their friends are, all as it happens in real-time. It’s being developed by the team behind Trendly, which Twitter acquired in June.

Analytics was one of many potential business models Twitter has been eying, so I’m surprised the company is prepared to offer it for free. In 2009, Twitter-cofounder Biz Stone said the company was in the first phase of rolling out commercial accounts with detailed analytics. “We want to build statistics or analytics that let users know — ‘How am I doing on Twitter?’” he said at the time.

There’s still the potential for Twitter to offer even more detailed analytics for commercial accounts at a price. But now that the tool will be freely available for all users, there’s less reason for businesses to pony up for it.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Rep centers around a real-time feed that shows businesses what users are doing across major sites like Yelp, Google Places, and Superpages. It also helps businesses to better take advantage of those sites by making sure their listings are all claimed properly, and it will monitor other potential issues as well.

The Rep feed also integrates social networking. There’s built-in support for Twitter and Facebook updates, and it can also monitor Foursquare check-ins and tips as well.

In short, Rep is aiming to be a one-stop location to keep track of your local business’s reputation across the web. It also supports Yext’s Call product, which transcribes phone calls for businesses.  Yext announced that Rep will be an open platform for other companies to develop for, so it shouldn’t be too difficult for a new service to make itself available on Rep.

In our coverage from last year, Yext mentioned that it was earning $20 million a year. The company has raised $28.5 million in funding thus far.