Total US tech R&D spending as a percentage of GDP is below where it was for much of the 1960s, according to Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker's analysis of USA Inc.
That’s mostly because government spending on tech research is way down.
Right now, private investment is almost making up for it. That’s nice, but remember: private investment maybe have given us Facebook and Garmin, but public sector investment gave us the Internet and GPS.
It really is kind of amazing that Instagram has shot past two million users in just a few months with only an iPhone app. No Android app, no website, no real third-party support. But starting today, that changes as they’re finally ready to unveil their API. And they already have some pretty nice implementations right off the bat to show what it can do.
Co-founder Kevin Systrom says that it would have been easy enough for them to implement a simple API early on, but they didn’t want to do that (that’s why you may have heard about one developer getting unofficial access shut off). Instead, Instagram decided they wanted to make an API that was both massively scalable and provided a realtime feed of everything going on across the service. Today, they’re unveiling this realtime API for four different elements of Instagram: user photos, tags, locations, and geographies.
Here’s how Instagram describes each:
1) Users of the developer’s application: every time a user of an Instagram-linked application posts a photo, the developer’s application will receive a notification.
2) Tags: An application can track a given tag and receive updates every time a new photo is posted with a given tag.
3) Locations: Every time a new photo is geo-tagged with a specific location, the developer will receive a notification.
4) Geographies: Sometimes individual locations are too specific. For these cases, we suggest subscribing to Geographies. Geographies consist of a latitude and longitude and a radius. This allows developers to subscribe to a given area like Austin or a specific city block of Manhattan.
Once a developer signs up for the API, they can choose which of these to implement. And Instagram has set up a demo site to give an example of what subscribing to certain geographies and getting updates in realtime looks like.
But you can actually see the API in action elsewhere on the web and in apps already. Today, fashion photo sharing service Fancy, food picture sharing service Foodspotting, and cloud storage service Dropbox all have implementations up and running.
A service like Foodspotting taking advantage of Instagram’s API makes a lot of sense. Anyone who uses Instagram will know how many people take pictures of food. And now once they link up to their Foodspotting account, if they simply Instagram a food photo with “#food” or “#foodspotting”, Foodspotting will find it and add it to your feed of food.
The Dropbox integration is interesting because it matches a feature that rival PicPlz has, but was built by an independent developer simply using both the Instagram and Dropbox APIs.
Also launching today is Instagram integration with Momento, the awesome iPhone digital diary app we covered a while back. And coming shortly will be Flipboard and About.me integration as well, Systrom says.
But those are all existing service using the API. A new service, Instagre.at, has also popped up as a great web viewer for Instagram that was built from scratch.
Systrom says that some 2,000 developers have already signed up for access to the API. That should explode starting now. I give it maybe a day until we see the first third-party Android app. One caveat: for now, the API is read-only.
If you’ve ever played a game like Angry Birds on the iPhone and the iPad, you’ve probably been frustrated by the fact that you have to start over each time — your saved games don’t transfer. A new startup called FTW (which stands for “For the Win”, a popular phrase among Intenet users for expressing enthusiasm) wants to change that.
Founder Mark Burstiner, who was demonstrating the service on-stage this morning at the Launch conference in San Francisco, said that his company offers an application programming interface (API) that game developers can connect to. Then saved games are synchronized across the different versions of their games on multiple devices. As an example, Burstiner showed off a Tic Tac Toe game on both an iPhone and an iPad on-stage, where after each move he saved the game and the change was reflected on the other device.
Burstiner acknowledged that this is something that a game developer could add on their own, but he said it would take about 140 hours of work, and besides, the developer should be “building more games rather than more features for the one game.”
The expert judges at the conference had some reservations about the concept, particularly about whether this concept has long-term legs. Burstiner said that “cloud gaming” services like OnLive, where everything happens online and no cross-device syncing is needed, are probably the future. But it will be a long time before that becomes a reality, he said. and even then it still won’t represent the entire industry.
FTW is currently looking for iPhone, iPad, and Nintendo DS game developers to participate in its beta test. The company is still experimenting with business model, but it plans to charge both users and larger developers to use the service (indie developers will have free access).
A new report from eMarketer finds that most adult Americans with Internet access use Facebook at least once a month, and a full 42.3% of the entire American population was using the site as of this month.
By contrast, Twitter‘s penetration rate was much lower, sitting at around 7% of the total population and 9% of the Internet-using population, according to the report.
Late last year, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company saw around 250 million daily users of its 500 million-strong user base. The young exec made the point that Facebook’s products — including Photos, Places, Groups and Messages — are features that people use more frequently than they use other, more established services with similar features because Facebook’s products are inherently social.
One important stat to note, however, is Twitter’s year-over-year growth. Last year around this time, Twitter’s penetration rate was around 7%, and by the end of this year it’s expected to be at 11% for American Internet users, or 16.5% of the population that also uses other social networks. In terms of the overall U.S. population, the numbers are still small, but the growth is steady.
An analyst for the firm said, “eMarketer’s new Twitter usage estimates are lower than our April 2010 forecast. Since then, Twitter has continued to gain traction but at more moderate levels than we had expected.”
What do you think it’ll take for Twitter’s growth to really skyrocket and reach more of the population? Or will this service remain a niche product for the web-using elite? Let us know your opinions below.
Today, social fundraising platform Fundly announced that it had closed a $2 million seed funding round led by a group of Silicon Valley investors. Using AngelList, a marketplace that makes it easy for startups to connect with angels, Fundly assembled a laundry list of reputable investors, including Mitch Kapor and Stephen DeBerry of Kapor Capital, Trevor Kienzle of Correlation Ventures, George Zachary of Charles River Ventures, and Jeff Fluhr of AngelHub.
Fundly, formerly known as BlueSwarm, adds to the $800,000 it raised back in July from a group of individual investors, including Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen. You can read our coverage of the initiation of the first round (and watch TC’s interview with CEO Dave Boyce) here.
Founded in Boston in 2009, Fundly is a SaaS platform that aims to give your political campaign, your university’s alumni office, or your non-profit that extra boost by making your fundraising social. It does this by leveraging your social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn — as well as peer-to-peer interaction — to encourage your donors to become social advocates. As part of this effort, Fundly offers a Facebook app that can be shared among your supporters, for example, allowing donors to compete with their friends to raise money for your cause, work to earn rewards, invite their friends, tell friends about support for cause, and give and receive virtual goods — all without leaving the comfortable confines of Facebook.
According to CEO Dave Boyce, when a friend asks another friend to help raise money for a particular cause, the added trust inherent in that social dimension results in a 10-times higher response rate and 52% higher donation than a cold call or email. Traditionally, fundraising has been the domain of professionals, who target and reach out to high net worth individuals to meet their goals.
The 2008 presidential election, in contrast, provided ample evidence of the huge fundraising opportunities that exist beyond the social elite, even if those donations happen to come in smaller numbers. During her run for governor last year, for example, Meg Whitman raised more than $20 million from thousands of Californians using Fundly’s platform. What’s more, the service was used in more than 50 percent of senatorial races during the past political season and has already been used to raise more than $200 million from hundreds of thousands of individual donors, according to Boyce.
Causes.com, founded by Sean Parker and Joe Green, is a well-established competitor with big-name recognition behind it, but Boyce said that the two sites differ in their target audience. Causes seems to be aimed more at individuals seeking to make a difference (their site says they’ve already attracted 140 million of these individuals) and create awareness around particular issues, whereas Fundly’s customer is the non-profit itself. You can think of Causes.com as Web 2.0 applied to advocacy, while Fundly is a SaaS platform — a product that offers its clients the tools they need to collect data and view detailed reports about their donors.
Since its launch, Fundly has moved beyond political campaigns and is now offering its service to all non-profits. Educational institutions have been among the most recent converts, including Boston College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Communities In Schools, and the Silicon Valley Education Foundation.
Perhaps the biggest selling point for the social fundraising platform is that it doesn’t require you to install any software — nor does it require any costs upfront, you simply pay as you earn money. So, if you’re looking for an easy way to process payments and record pledges online in real-time, or send automated payment reminder and confirmation emails in a socially optimized setting, Fundly may just be what you need to launch your campaign for Town Crier.
If you’ve ever played a game like Angry Birds on the iPhone and the iPad, you’ve probably been frustrated by the fact that you have to start over each time — your saved games don’t transfer. A new startup called 
