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ShopWithYourFriends brings you real-time, social shopping

Group buying may be all the rage via companies like Groupon but ShopWithYourFriends, which launches today, adds a new twist to social shopping by enabling group shopping sessions online.

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.

ShopWithYourFriends screenshotCo-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.

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Businesses turn to college kids for social media lessons

Consumer ResearchLast year, Sprint gave students in a marketing class at Emerson College 10 smartphones with unlimited wireless access. In return, Sprint received free marketing work for their budding 4G network in Boston from students who blogged and tweeted, and more importantly were able to record firsthand how social media could be effectively used at the company.

Unbeknownst to many, companies have increasingly turned to universities for research on social media. This isn’t highly unusual, as traditionally manufacturers have given financial support to universities conducting research relevant to their companies. In the past though, support has been given to “hard” sciences, for example to the research of pharmaceutical drugs. Companies had never partnered with universities to better understand social media.

However, this appears to be changing. Programs at Northwestern, Emerson, Arizona State, and the University of Florida have been partnering with businesses to specifically research how social media can be used effectively. “It’s allowing for a new kind of research that just wasn’t even possible a few years ago,” says associate professor Dmitri Williams, the Wall Street Journal reports. In a world where social media continues to be a buzz word, businesses are looking for every advantage they can get.

As an example of how social media is being examined, the Wall Street Journal reported that at one class at Arizona State University, the students divided into teams to generate buzz around FoxSportsArizona.com. Fox Sports Net, a group of regional sports channels, will be working with 10 schools as part of a program it calls Creative University.

Despite the successful results from the companies thus far, is it a good idea for companies to conduct social media research at the university level?

Although there are advantages, as seen above, there are hidden costs as well. The time needed to establish a partnership with a program and the commitment the company gives to a university and its students; these may not always be financially related, but they are important nonetheless. Even with this commitment, in return the company would receive students who spend a limited amount of time per week on the project and who have multiple sources competing for their attention. As creative as students can be, they are not working 9AM to 5PM on these projects.

The lack of time and attention is particular true in the examples above, where businesses partnered with undergraduate programs. Traditionally, companies that have lent financial support to “hard” sciences have supported graduate programs, namely PhD students, and these students, in addition to having more time to spend, are under strict supervision. A PhD student, it could be argued, is more similar in their commitment to a project to a full-time employee than to an undergraduate student.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and perhaps the costs, hidden or explicit, of conducting social media research at the undergraduate level outweigh the benefits.

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Zite delivers personalized news to your iPad

ziteThere 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.

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Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles (video)

One of the best technology demos at the Game Developers Conference last week came from Epic Games, which created an incredible-looking futuristic fight scene that pushed the boundaries of 3D graphics.

Nvidia executives also showed off the technology today at their analyst meeting and we’ve captured video of it below. The 3D graphics represents a new peak in realistic graphics and it represents Epic’s proposal for what the next-generation of console games — whenever they come — should look like.

“This next-generation technology preview is what we would like to see from the next-generation of gaming hardware,” said Alan Willard of Epic Games, which is the well-known game developer that has created games such as Unreal Tournament, Bulletstorm and Gears of War.

The cinematic video shows graphics that are running in the Unreal Engine in real-time. It is real-time computer graphics, not a video of pre-fabricated computer graphics.

The scene depicted resembles the futuristic, gritty city in the film Blade Runner. You can see cool effects in the glowing blow torch, the smoke rising from the cigarette, the detailed facial hair and wrinkles, and the morphing of the man’s skin. The guy takes out a bunch of cops beating up an old woman. As he does so, the screen freezes to slow motion and you can see all of the details that would otherwise be a blur.

Willard said that one of the effects is called bouquet depth of field, where you see a bright spot that is out of focus and then it is replaced with another image. You can also see reflections on all surfaces, such as the water on the streets reflecting light from the street lamps. Those reflections do not show through objects that are blocking it from view.

When the light hits a human face, you can see an effect called sub-surface scattering, when light penetrates through the layers of skin and makes skin glow as the light bounces around inside the skin. You can see the water trickling down the man’s face. The man’s jacket tail sways and moves as he does, thanks to an Nvidia clothing rendering technology.

The demo ran on a PC with an Intel Core i9 microprocessor with three Nvidia GeForce 580 GTX graphics cards connected through SLI technology. The demo took about three months for 12 programmers and artists to build.

Epic Games’ vice president Mark Rein said that the demo is considered ideal for next-generation console technology. But no console maker has yet acknowledged that it is building anything to replace the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3, or the Microsoft Xbox 360. See the video below.

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Intergi launches Playwire to help anyone make money from video ads

Video game ad network Intergi Entertainment is launching its Playwire video publishing platform today to make it easy for any web site to make money from online video advertising. The Playwire video platform makes it easy to stream online videos, share them, and then make money from video ads.

Deerfield, Fla.-based Intergi finds advertisers for more than 300 game publishers that post their titles on the web. Those publishers have more than 64 million users a month. Intergi specializes in tailored and integrated ad campaigns. That means it can find lots of ads to plug into videos. With Playwire, Intergi is creating a platform that simplifies the process of making money with online video ads for the under-served “long tail” of the market, or small-demand items that add up to a lot over time.

Many people who publish video on the internet never make money from video ads. But Intergi hopes to change that. Playwire uses a free Bolt open source video player that can deliver high-definition video. Playwire supports more than 100 video formats and can stream video to mobile devices. It also has a built-in ad server. Playwire also includes everything else people need to publish videos online: encoding, hosting, content management, analytics, syndication, and monetization. Publishers pay for this infrastructure only as they make money.

Jayson Dubin, chief executive of Intergi Entertainment, says that advertisers shouldn’t ignore the long tail of content publishers who can reach a lot more people now thanks to the internet. “No one has ever really tried to reach this customer base,” Dubin said.

Playwire’s launch partners include Adap.tv, Adobe, Amazon web services, AOL, BrightRoll, Google, Specific Media, Tidal TV and Tremor Media/ScanScout.

Other video platforms often require video publishers to sign up for contracts, where the videos have to get minimum views to make any money. That has stopped a lot of small businesses from signing up. Playwire’s “pay as you go” business model allows publishers to get up and running quickly without paying upfront money. Publishers only pay for the storage they use each month and the more they use, the less they pay.

Rivals include Ooyala, Brightcove, YouTube, Kaltura and others. Dubin said Playwire is starting out small, with 500 beta testers now. Within a year, he will be happy if there are 5,000 to 10,000 publishers using the service. Intergi was founded in 2007 and has 20 employees. The company is self-funded.

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