Google’s stock price came close to its 52-week high on the first day of Google I/O today, hitting $915 per share at close. In comparison, Apple today dropped 15 points to close at $428 per share, 277 points off its 52-week high.
This morning, Google stock jumped to $909 per share from its opening price of $895 when Co-Founder Larry Page hit the stage at around 11:45. It is now trading at $916.50 in after-hours trading. One analyst I talked to attributed the increase to Google’s announcement of its “all access” streaming service and the rotation out of hardware makers such as Apple and HP.
The difference between Google and Apple’s share price is a barometer of the tech landscape. Google is a data company. Apple is more about design, creating beautiful devices.
The difference is evident here at Google I/O. Google has built its infrastructure to manage more data than arguably any company in the world. It uses ths data to provide services that it highlighted today in its keynote. This includes its Google Translate APIs and the next generation of its Google Maps. The iPhone will always be elegant. As my colleague Josh Constine points out, the beauty of a device is just not as important, as the entire world becomes a fabric of data objects.
Time for a back-up plan for your Twitter back-up plan. Backupify — the cloud-based backup, search and restore provider for online services — is shutting down its TweetBackup service for Twitter users. The company has posted a note about the closure on its site, as well as — yes — on its Twitter account, noting that new signups are stopping as of today, and that existing users will have 30 days, until June 28, to keep logging into their accounts and back up their data.
After 45 days, it notes, “we will begin purging the data from our Amazon servers.”
On one of the two FAQ pages that Backupify has created to answer some questions about the service, it suggests a couple of alternatives to TweetBackup’s subscribers: for business users, they can opt for Backupify’s own-branded service; for consumers, it suggests going somewhere else altogether, Ditto from Norton Labs, owned by one of Backupify’s strategic investors, Symantec.
We are reaching out to the company to find out more, but it looks like this is indeed part of a larger strategy at the company to reposition itself more closely on its enterprise services and away from lower cost/free consumer offerings.
In fact, this may not be too new of an idea:
“We always intended to have Tweetbackup users join Backupify’s base twitter service,” Backupify’s Jason Ellis notes. And in July 2012, when it announced the $9 million round in which Symantec invested, it noted that the free services (TweetBackup was one) were there mainly for lead-generation for paid apps.
Backupify offers standalone products for Google Apps, Salesforce, and what it collectively refers to as “personal apps,” which include Facebook and Twitter. These it will backup free for a limited amount of data and then charge for more features and more storage space. (Prices for paid services range from $3/month/user for the most basic Google Apps backup through to $50/month for 10 licenses of 1GB each for Salesforce.)
Given that Twitter has now made its own archiving service more widely available now, perhaps the writing was on the wall for whether Backupify would ever be able to translate this into a more profitable service without more investment. Meanwhile, other services like SocialSafe is now offering a free, six-month licenses to TweetBackup refugees.
Collaaj has launched a service designed to make it easy to create videos and send them as messages.
The SaaS tool includes an editor that allows people to make videos from content that could include a demo recording of an app, a drawing, annotations on a presentation or someone sending a video message of themselves to an individual or a group. The data is managed through the Collaaj platform that includes a backend to a store, stream and securely share with other team members. The video can be saved as an MP4 and sent as a link.
Collaaj has different uses than a video-capture product like Camtasia, which is designed for more high-end use cases. For example, it can be used for pre-sales to send product demonstrations, and support teams can use it to build a knowledge base and visual FAQ.
It competes more directly with Webex, GoToMeeting and Microsoft Lync, but those tools might also be complementary, as they lack the asynchronous capabilities that come with Collaaj.
In addition to the iPad app, Collaaj is available on Mac and Windows. Co-founder Kiran Kamity said the client download is a small file similar to Dropbox.
While there’s a perennial debate on the West Coast about whether and when business cards might become irrelevant, they continue to be at the center of business customs in China and Japan.
It’s just basic etiquette when meeting a new contact to offer your card with two hands and a slight bow.
That’s why it’s natural that a Chinese company — not an American one — might be able to dominate this market and behavior globally. LinkedIn’s Cardmunch had scanned 2 million business cards a year after their 2011 acquisition, and hasn’t released stats since.
But Shanghai’s CamCard boasts 10 million monthly active users, with 50 million registered in total. About half of them are outside of China.
The company is part of a new wave of Chinese startups that are either run by very internationalized Chinese founders or foreigners that are able to build and design consumer products and apps with global appeal.
Intsig, the company behind CamCard, originally launched the app back in 2009 and has quietly grown it since.
They use a freemium model that caters to both consumers and enterprises. On the consumer side, there’s a free version of the app. And then there’s a paid version, which costs about $2.99 in the West or $11.99 in Asia. It feels like price discrimination but Intsig justifies it by saying it’s more technically different to do optical character recognition for Chinese and Japanese and because Asian consumers may be willing to pay more for a business card service.
The paid version has a cloud syncing service that lets people save cards across all of their different devices.
On the enterprise side, companies pay for extra security features to make sure their client and business partner lists stay safe. In China, the vast majority of smartphones are Android devices and Chinese consumers are much more concerned about getting viruses.
As for the parent company itself, Intsig has raised roughly $10 million from investors including Matrix Partners in China and other local investors. The company’s CEO Michael Zhen had a long career at Motorola, where he says he picked up the skills and ideas necessary to start his own company.
I’ve seen one other regional competitor, Japan’s Sansan. They’re an older rival that is transitioning to a smartphone-centric world through a card-scanning app called Eight. Before that, they were actually leasing scanners to local Japanese businesses.
Rackspace will open trading this morning on the New York Stock Exchange with a share price that dropped nearly 25% on Thursday. The stock dropped after the company missed its earnings, raising concerns the cloud price wars with giants like Amazon Web Services are taking its toll.
The stock dropped about 12 points, ending trading at 39.36 per share. That puts the share price near its 52-week low of $38.30 per share.
On Wednesday, Rackspace reported 19 cents earnings per share (EPS). Analysts had expected Rackspace to report 20 cents EPS. The company had revenues of $362 million for the quarter. That’s compared to $367 million that analysts had expected.
Rackspace executives cited its across the board drop in cloud pricing that it put into effect in February for the missed earnings. At the time, Rackspace provided a detailed picture of the price decrease, going into detail about its justification for the price drop.
But it was not enough for Rackspace to make a difference in a market that has seen successive price drops by AWS, Windows Azure. Additionally its OpenStack public cloud is growing but not enough to make a difference in the earnings.
Rackspace can not compete on price with AWS. The company does not have the scale to absorb the drop in revenues. More so, it’s evident that Rackspace needs a different way to get ahead. I am hearing experts say that should be a big data play of some sort that can leverage its distributed infrastructure.
Microsoft today announced that it will fold about 100 sales people from Yammer into the Office 365 team this summer. Microsoft also is making a point to focus on identity management and other issues as part of its road to full integration.
The news follows the road map that Microsoft set at its SharePoint Conference last November. In March, Microsoft detailed the transition and how Yammer will co-exist with Office 365 and Sharepoint.
It makes sense that identity is one of the core focus areas for Microsoft. It’s going to be critical to have universal identity in order for these systems to talk to each other and for IT to control access and permissions.
Identity is emerging as a core theme coming from Microsoft. Last month, the company announced the support of Active Directory in Windows Azure. Customers may also use their Microsoft account to log in to Windows Azure.
In the meantime, companies like Box are firing shots across Microsoft’s bow. Today the company bought Crocodoc, an HTML5 service for embedding docs. It’s a clear sign of the aggressive moves that are sure to come as the enterprise social networking space becomes increasingly competitive.
Google is bringing Debian to Google Compute Engine and is making it the default OS for developers using the service. Google will support both Debian 6.0 and 7.0, which was released this week.
There are some pretty clear reasons why Google is making Debian the default OS. First of all, it’s free, said Krishnan Subramanian, a cloud analyst and founder of Rishidot Research. “With Ubuntu and Red Hat, Google has to deal with the vendors who want to make money themselves,” he said. Further, Debian has a large customer base. And it fits with Google’s geeky culture.
In its blog post about the announcement, Google cites improvements in the Debian 7.0 “wheezy” release. It has hardened security, better 32- and 64-bit compatibility, and it addresses community feedback.
Google states that it will evaluate other operating systems that it can enable with Google Compute Engine.
It’s important to note that Google Compute Engine is only available for subscribers to the $400 Gold Support package.
This all looks like a tune up for next week’s Google I/O event where there are expected to be announcements about Google’s cloud computing strategy.
Debian competes with other Linux-based operating systems, such as Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora. According to DistroWatch, Debian ranks fifth in page hits. Mint is in the top spot.
Today, Identified has unveiled its patent-pending, artificial intelligence technology called “SYMAN,” which aims to organize the masses of disparate, incoherent professional data that lives in our social media profiles in order to identify new insights into the job market. Essentially, Identified co-founders Brendan Wallace and Adeyemi Ajao tell us, SYMAN is an attempt to provide a solution to a problem many social media companies have struggled with for years: Unstructured, disorganized and inconsistent data.
In November 2011, Identified emerged out of public beta on a mission to create a better professional job search engine. Built on top of Facebook data, Identified set out to nibble at LinkedIn’s lead in this space by giving both job seekers and companies a better way to connect — and find talent. To do that, the startup offered a product that it promised would become something akin to the “Google Page Rank for people,” assigning a numerical rank (out of 100) to professionals and companies based on their education, career path, social footprint and more — a la Klout.
By the following summer, Identified had attracted three million active users and had imported 10 million profiles from Facebook, which it used to secure a sizable $21 million series B financing round, led by VantagePoint Capital and Capricorn Investment Group, along with participation from Tim Draper, Innovation Endeavors, Chamath Palihapitiya and more. After this early buzz and validation subsided, however, Identified was met with the challenge of having to convince and incentivize the younger generations to claim and fill out their Facebook-derived profiles on its platform — not such an easy task when so many people already have a litany of online profiles to manage.
But doing so is critical for Identified, because without users claiming their profiles and adding more data, an Identified profile isn’t worth much more than any other. Plus, it means the company has fewer data points with which to work when trying to assign an accurate score or effectively tracking a user’s career progress. As such, Identified has spent the last nine months in relative silence, hiring data scientists and designers and building out its team in an attempt to create technology that would set it apart from the field and enable it to begin monetizing.
For the enterprise, startups (or really any company) to make use of social media data in a way that’s actually valuable and contains actionable insight, that unstructured, messy social data needs to be cleaned and structured in a way that makes sense. For example, “dirty data,” as the co-founders call it, makes it difficult to deliver high-quality search or analytics products — part of the reason why Facebook’s GraphSearch hasn’t yet seen substantive adoption from recruiters and partly explains why LinkedIn’s career map didn’t take off, respectively.
By putting social media data in a clean, organized format, companies can more effectively ingest this data to power recruiting, human capital management, CRM, marketing and a host of other enterprise products. To help solve this problem, Identified partnered with a team of former LinkedIn data scientists to develop SYMAN. Inspired by some of the early work that LinkedIn did on its professional dataset, the startup is applying that methodology to a much larger trove of professional data: Facebook.
While one might not think of Facebook as being the go-to site for professional information (especially as many are keen to keep their social and professional profiles separate), with over one billion people on the social network, there’s still an enormous amount of professional data to be gleaned from its profiles. Facebook’s dataset is, as one might expect, more than five-times the size of that of LinkedIn, far less structured and much less complete.
That’s all well and good, but how does it work? Without revealing all the nuts and bolts behind the patent-pending technology, SYMAN’s data architecture enables a machine to draw inferences about the meaning of a particular data entry based on context in much the same way the human brain does. In other words, knowing that someone wrote “Analyst” as their job title on Facebook might not be of much help when making predictions about their ideal professional career. However, by considering complementary and related data, like their education, company and friend, SYMAN can infer that the person is in fact a “Systems Analyst” at Cloudera.
Comparing biographical, professional and educational data against the career path of a “typical” systems analyst, Identified can now predict that Palantir, for example, might be the best (and most logical) next step in the career path for that particular analyst. The data schema and learning algorithms behind SYMAN, Wallace says, are inspired by pioneering neuroscience research proposed by Jeff Hawkins (the founder of Palm and Handspring) and Ray Kurzweil, who recently joined Google to develop a similar technology and apply it to pattern recognition.
Identified has also developed SYMAN to create and inform a new product, which is currently in beta and being tested by 30 or so clients, called Identified Recruit. Just as LinkedIn used its enterprise recruiting tools to begin monetizing its dataset, the startup hopes to use its new product to enable recruiters to more easily and effectively search and identify candidates based on professional information culled from Facebook. In other words, Identified wants to turn Facebook into a candidate database just as LinkedIn has converted its own for similar uses.
The product is currently being used by enterprise health clients, like Kaiser Permanente for example, to find healthcare candidates who traditionally have shied away from building LinkedIn profiles, like nurses and patient care professionals, in particular. To give an example of how its new product is being applied in this context, SYMAN was able to find 562 ways in which nurses self-identify on Facebook (how they say “I’m a nurse,” in other words).
The technology then maps these 562 different terms to 15 unique categories or “15 different types of nurses that recruiters are actually looking for,” Wallace explains, enabling recruiters to find more in one search than they would be able to otherwise, using GraphSearch, for example. At present, Identified has only “cleaned” healthcare data via SYMAN, but going forward, the company intends to apply the technology to other industries, like finance, education and life sciences — to name a few on the near-term roadmap.
Moving forward, the co-founders tell us that they’re also keen on integrating other datasets, applying SYMAN not only to Facebook, but to LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Quora, Github and others. Though this will take some time, one can also see the company using its new tech to develop analytics products for professionals and companies, like, say, products that would them optimize their workforce and view leads, candidates and more in a centralized dashboard.
Also on the roadmap, Wallace says, is the development of an API for a variety of social media sites, which would allow companies to use SYMAN to clean and organize their data, on-demand. Data-cleaning-as-a-service, in other words. The founders also hope that, through its future API, SYMAN could enable companies to monetize their data for enterprise applications in a way they’re currently unable to do, as well as allowing developers and third-parties to build B2B tools, apps and tools on top of SYMAN’s technology.
Of course, in the big picture, the applications for SYMAN are just beginning to take root, so it’s still too early to say just how effective and attractive this kind of technology will be to other companies. But, based on where Identified was a year ago, it certainly feels like a step in the right direction, especially if it means to monetize in any significant way. Sure, it’s easy to talk about what could be, making Identified’s future plans for its technology seem like pie-in-the-sky-type conceptualizing at this point.
However, the startup does seem to have assembled a team of experienced data scientists and engineers, and the recent addition of two new board members from well-known recruiting and human capital companies may be a sign that the startup is at least moving in the right direction. To that point: This quarter, Wallace says, the company officially added Jobvite CEO Dan Finnigan and Max Simkoff, the founder and CEO of Evolv, to its board of directors.
As to what he sees as the potential for SYMAN, Simkoff says that he thinks the technology could solve a problem “that plagues big social data and which no other social or professional network has really been able to solve effectively,” and as such, could “uncover powerful insights and relationships buried deep within the Social Web, which have the potential to change how companies pursue talent, manage their workforce, and understand their competition.”
