Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
baxpace writes “Thanks to all of the recent breakthroughs of Kinect hacks that have emerged, a new animated series is now in development that incorporates many open source middleware and wrappers available to us all in order to create an entire series with motion capture software using the Kinect, OpenNI, Brekel, MotionBuilder and Maya.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
There are many, many newsreaders available for the iPad, but entrepreneur Ali Davar said his startup Zite is launching an iPad magazine with the content that’s most personalized to a reader’s needs an interests.
The obvious reference point here is Flipboard, the popular “social magazine” for the iPad that allows users to browse their social networking content and news in beautiful, magazine-style layout. Zite seems to combine a Flipboard-style reading experience with content personalization technology that has a similar aim to companies like Gravity and My6sense.
Users can automatically create their personalized magazines by connecting either their Twitter or Google Reader accounts to the app. When Davar, who is the company’s founder and chief executive, demonstrated the app for me yesterday, we used my Twitter account, and the app succeeded in examining my tweets and pulling in stories relevant to my interests — although I thought technology was a bit overrepresented in the contents of “my” magazine. I suspect that Zite would have done even better if we had used my Google Reader account (for example, I spend a lot of time reading about politics, but I try to keep political tweets to a minimum). More importantly, the application gets better the more you use it, learning from whether or not you give an article a thumbs up or a thumbs down, as well as more subtle signals like how much time you spend reading each article.
There are other startups looking at user behavior to deliver personalized news, but the ones I mentioned above aren’t delivering that content in the form of a slick iPad magazine. Davar also argued that Zite’s personalization technology compares favorably to the competition’s — he was clearly a little exasperated that I didn’t own an iPad on which to test out Zite in more depth. (Hey, I’m exasperated by my iPad-less state too.) For example, he said that the app isn’t just looking at the topics that readers are interested in, but also the types of content — so it knows whether you prefer long, in-depth features or short news articles.
Zite is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and it’s based on technology developed at the University of British Columbia’s Laboratory for Computational Intelligence. The company is funded, in part, by grants from the Canadian government.
Tags: iPad, personalized news
Companies: Zite
People: Ali Davar
Paid search ads tend to be overlooked
As the US restaurant industry recovers, operators are increasingly employing mobile and social media marketing to meet consumer expectations. Businesses that engage, provide value and reach potential diners where they spend their time will be at a distinct advantage.
Back in November we wrote about Memolane, a new startup that lets you import and visually browse through your tweets, Facebook updates, Flickr photos and the rest of your content littered across the web. Today, after months in an invite-only beta, the service has gone live to the public, and it’s unveiling a handful of key new features just in time for its launch.
For those that haven’t used it, Memolane is a sort of timeline of your online life. After authenticating with any of the 10+ supported third-party services, which include Facebook, TripIt, Foursquare, and more, Memolane will import your content and arrange it in a slick timeline view. It’s pretty cool — you don’t realize just how segmented your online life is until you’ve seen tweets from a recent trip positioned next to the corresponding Flickr photos and Foursquare checkins.
So what’s changed? CEO Eric Lagier says that when we first wrote about the service, it had a pretty simple privacy structure — you’d designate your Memolane as either private (accessible only by you and select friends) or public (anyone could see it). But the startup discovered that people often wanted parts of their service to private, and other parts public. So that’s what Memolane did: you can now designate certain services as being public (your YouTube videos, for example), and others as being private (like your Facebook updates).
Another important addition: content appearing in a Memolane will now include a link to ‘view source’, so you can see the photo or update on the site from which it originated. Lagier says that this is helpful if you ever want to delete a piece of content permanently. Other recent improvements include the addition of Instragram and MySpace support.
Lagier says the company isn’t sharing many numbers yet, other than to say that prior to going live it had served some 50 million ‘memos’ (pieces of content that have been imported into the service). Since launching this afternoon, they’ve doubled that.
