Posts tagged Veteran
Burden Of Search UI Innovation Now Falls To Yahoo Veteran Laurie Mann
Feb 19th
Laurie Mann has been promoted to run Yahoo Search. Mann, who is a man, has been senior vice president of engineering operations at Yahoo since 2002. Prior to that Mann spent a number of years at Oracle in various engineering roles. The news was first reported late last night by AllThingsD. Mann…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Digital Health is a Long Distance Race, For Dot-Com Veteran BodyMedia
Aug 1st
One of the top trends in digital health is wearable body sensors. The Nike+ sensor shoe is the Usain Bolt of this market, with its flashy image and impressive results. Startup Fitbit has also gained a lot of traction, with its small clip-on device. But still in the race for gold is a dot-com veteran, BodyMedia. It’s been producing “senseware” since 1999! A recent $12 million funding round suggests that BodyMedia has plenty of legs left.
BodyMedia’s core product is an armband that has four sensors to track movement, temperature, heat and “skin response.” The data is then processed and analyzed by an online “Activity Manager” and a variety of specialist mobile apps, such as a food log. The whole set-up is called BodyMedia FIT and the company terms it an “on-body monitoring system.” Putting it simply though, BodyMedia helps users count calories and lose weight.
Live Long & Prosper (Tip: Patents Help)
When BodyMedia launched in 1999, even at that early stage of the Internet it was a product based on sensors – or “senseware” as it was termed back then. According to a 2000 Wired article: “The company will sell a line of ready-to-wear sensors that link users to a companion Web site. Think of it as Quicken for the health-conscious.”
Over the past 13 years, BodyMedia has raised a total of $49 million – including its most recent round of $12 million in May of this year. At least some of that money is being spent on a patent lawsuit against Basis, a health tracking watch that we previewed last April and is due to launch this year. BodyMedia CEO Christine Robins told MobiHealthNews that “we have spent years and millions of dollars prosecuting our patents.”
Choose Your Form Factor
Regardless of BodyMedia’s store of patents, all of its competitors have similar functionality. They all “sense” things like motion and temperature, enable the user to upload their body data to a website or mobile app, provide an app for food logging, and have social networking features. The main difference between the companies offering these products is the form of the device. BodyMedia uses an armband, Fitbit a device that clips onto your pants, Nike+ a pair of shoes, Basis a watch.
The Fitbit device seems to be the easiest to wear for long periods of time, since you can clip it onto your clothing (although be wary of accidentally putting your device through the washing machine, as this author did after just a couple of weeks of usage – and no it didn’t survive). But ultimately it’s a personal choice about which device best suits your lifestyle. Let us know your thoughts on wearable sensors in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Search Fanatics Hires Industry Veteran Todd Friesen as SVP of Search – PR Web (press release)
Apr 3rd
 PR Web (press release) |
Search Fanatics Hires Industry Veteran Todd Friesen as SVP of Search
PR Web (press release) My excitement at having him on board extends beyond his notoriety in the industry; Todd was one of the first people I really connected with when I entered the SEO field. I'm bringing on a top talent in the industry but also a friend. |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Red Hat Veteran Putting Eucalyptus on the Open Source Path
Nov 17th
Eucalyptus was once “the” open source cloud computing project. It was the core of Ubuntu’s cloud strategy, and more or less the only game in town. Unfortunately, it was not a particularly open project. While most of the code was available under an open source license, it wasn’t developed in the open and failed to develop much of a community. Eucalyptus Systems is hoping Greg DeKoenigsberg can fix that.
Sponsor
DeKoenigsberg officially joined Eucalyptus earlier this month, as the vice president of community. DeKoenigsberg has actually been working with Eucalyptus for some time on a consulting basis. He wrote about it in early October briefly, though it he wasn’t yet a full-time employee.
DeKoenigsberg knows a bit about working with open source communities. He worked with Red Hat from 2001 until May of 2010 to work as CTO for Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). It wasn’t long, though, before DeKoenigsberg decided that education wasn’t quite a perfect fit, and he left in July of this year. By phone, DeKoenigsberg said that “education is fascinating, but the drivers are just different. I think there’s a difference between code and content and I wasn’t feeling that what I was trying to do was going to be successful.”
Building a Contributing Community
So DeKoenigsberg is back on familiar turf, but with a daunting task ahead. Eucalyptus competitor OpenStack has displaced Eucalyptus as the default cloud software for Ubuntu, and is sucking most of the oxygen out of the room when it comes to open source cloud software. More than 150 companies have signed up to work on OpenStack, while Eucalyptus is just getting started in trying to build its open source contributor community. DeKoenigsberg’s old company is pursuing its own home-grown software for cloud infrastructure. Eucalyptus isn’t even mentioned on Fedora’s Cloud SIG page.
What will DeKoenigsberg be doing for Eucalyptus? He says that his job is largely one of community building, making sure that the community has what it needs and is on “solid footing.”
Part of that is that Eucalyptus needs to figure out its code contribution model, and that the engineering team is visible and working in the open. DeKoenigsberg says that Eucalyptus is also working to set up roadmaps and get plans out for those who are interested in contributing. The team has been involved in outside discussions, says DeKoenigsberg, like the Fedora lists — but there were no lists for Eucalyptus, and the engineering team tended to “go dark” when working towards a major release. Which, coincidentally, they’re doing now as they work towards Eucalyptus 3.
Eucalyptus now has a community mailing list for development, started in October. Eucalyptus has also fired up the Eucalyptus Education Channel and has a Fast Start project for getting Eucalyptus up and running quickly for developers and users.
A big part of the job, says DeKoenigsberg will be “take as much of the good work that they’ve done internally, and let people see what we’re doing. That alone is the strongest part of our focus. There’s so much going on that people don’t know about, because they haven’t been able to see the workbench. The goal is to make sure picture people have outside is consistent with the picture inside.”
Community Hurdles
Aside from the inertia and mechanics of allowing contributions to Eucalyptus, the project also has a few other hurdles to community involvement. Specifically, the fact that Eucalyptus is not 100% open source and its copyright assignment policy.
The fact that Eucalyptus is “open core” is not only a philosophical problem, it’s also a logistical one. Right now, DeKoenigsberg says that it’s not “crystal clear” what is and what’s not open source. The goal is to make that completely clear, and DeKoenigsberg says the plan for Eucalyptus 3 is to split the handful of proprietary modules out so that it’s easier for developers to work on the core of Eucalyptus.
Here’s the thing, we came to Linux because we wanted the fight. Cloud is the cool new thing, the great free software fight [...] Linux won. So, you know the next big fight is cloud. Keeping the cloud open.
For example, Windows Guest OS support isn’t in the open source release currently. That’s sort of a major feature to be missing from the open source release and hoping to get buy-in from the larger community. That’s moving to open source in Eucalyptus 3, though. With Eucalyptus 3, some new features and old features will continue to be held back for paying customers, though. For instance, converting VMware images, VMware hypervisor support and SAN adapters for elastic block storage (EBS) and NetApp.
But a bigger problem may be the copyright assignment policy. Copyright assignment tends to be a touchy subject with many developers. DeKoenigsberg says that the copyright assignment may have led to the loss of contributions and “when the time is right, we’ll be sitting down and talking about it in more detail. I haven’t taken a hard position on that, I haven’t had an opportunity to talk to everyone involved. My preference is for a more typical agreement that doesn’t assign copyright.”
The Next Linux?
A fair number of folks from companies like Red Hat and Novell are migrating to jobs with companies like Eucalyptus, Rackspace, or Amazon to work on cloud projects. I asked DeKoenigsberg why that might be. According to DeKoenigsberg, “that’s where the interesting fights are. Here’s the thing, we came to Linux because we wanted the fight. Cloud is the cool new thing, the great free software fight [...] Linux won. So, you know the next big fight is cloud. Keeping the cloud open. It’s just where the opportunities are, you know?”
Building community is not an easy task, and it’s made much more difficult when a company tries to encourage contributors after processes are in place. It’s also difficult around single-vendor projects where one company makes most of the decisions. It will be interesting to see how far Eucalyptus succeeds in getting contributors outside its own walls.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Group Messaging Apps Are Hot: Tech Veteran Built Glassboard Launches Today
Aug 22nd
Private group messaging apps are hot. The Monday after Skype acquired year-old startup GroupMe for a reported $85 million, a team of innovators who lead the ultimately unsuccessful but very important charge to popularize RSS feeds has regrouped to build and launch a new group messaging app called Glassboard.
Glassboard launched in the iTunes, Android and Windows Phone app stores this morning and it’s a good, solid, simple app for communicating across multiple different topical “boards” on your phone. If you’ve got a group of people you want to communicate with for a short or long period of time, from your phone, with commenting, media and location sharing, then Glassboard could be the app for you.
Sponsor
Big Aspirations
The team behind Glassboard includes RSS veterans NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons, FeedDemon creator Nick Bradbury and Newsgator’s VP of Mobile and Data Walker Fenton. When social media was first bursting onto the scene with the self-publishing power of the first blogging platforms, it was RSS innovators like Simmons, Bradbury and Fenton, along with Google Reader leaders Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell (now both at AOL) that really made blogging scale by building the web apps that let millions of people subscribe easily to tens or hundreds of millions of blogs. Sadly, listening meaningfully will never be as popular as babbling about yourself or drooling, so RSS reading applications didn’t explode like subsequent technologies have. They have changed the lives of millions of people, though, and continue to power important work behind the scenes throughout a still-democratizing media world.
These days its Group Messaging that’s hot though, and it’s surely more accessible than RSS. As I wrote when previewing the Glassboard app earlier this Summer:
“It is built with Microsoft Azure as its back-end and will integrate with Microsoft’s forthcoming Office 365. The team is being intentionally ‘agnostic’ about its target market, saying it could be used by families, work teams or companies and their clients. These guys have built some incredible things in the past and it will be very interesting to see what they can bring to one of the biggest potential markets of the day.”
The app is now live and in limited testing, I’ve been impressed with it so far. It reminds me a lot of Beluga, the group messaging client scooped up by Facebook this Spring, except it’s better set up for small groups of people you already know than it is big public group chatter like Beluga is sometimes used for. One of the differentiators is that Glassboard uses the News Feed model to display activity updates from all your different group conversations.
Clearly Skype and Microsoft think that mobile group messaging is going to be an important part of the tech landscape of the future. Glassboard is a solid entrant into that market, led by a very high-caliber team.
Why Group Messaging Matters
As David Card, Research Director at GigaOM Pro, wrote this Spring:
“Synchronous communications (such as mobile group chat) are the latest battleground in the war over unified communications, but no matter how clever and fun those apps are, they’re not the real contenders. Rather, technology platform players like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are fighting to see what company supplies a user’s communications control panel — and a scrappy Skype can’t be ignored either.”
Why are these apps so hot right now? I think it’s in part because they capture the same feeling that one to one SMS and MMS capture, but on a whole new level with multiple people. It’s a paradigm that’s both simple and highly engaging.
Om Malik wrote in February that good group messaging apps could hold the key to Google effectively challenging Facebook in social technology. Their synchronous Interactions are “highly personal, are location-aware and allow the sharing of experiences, whether it’s photographs, video streams or simply smiley faces. Interactions are supposed to mimic the feeling of actually being there. Interactions are about enmeshing the virtual with the physical.”
That described Glassboard well, too; and so far the app looks like a clean, simple, fast way to accomplish those goals that are common among group messaging apps.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Slingshot SEO names tech veteran its CEO – Indianapolis Business Journal
Aug 8th
 PR Web (press release) |
Slingshot SEO names tech veteran its CEO
Indianapolis Business Journal Jay Love, one of central Indiana's most successful information technology entrepreneurs, is returning to Indianapolis to lead Slingshot SEO, a growing search engine optimization firm. Love co-founded software firm eTapestry in Indianapolis in 1997 and … Respected Tech Leader Jay Love Named CEO of Slingshot SEO |
View full post on SEO – Google News
New Performance Based SEO Firm Launched by Industry Veteran – RedOrbit
Jan 14th
 openPR (press release) |
New Performance Based SEO Firm Launched by Industry Veteran
RedOrbit Performance based Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that companies have been demanding for years. Joseph Vlcek, an Internet marketing veteran, … SEO Positive Continues Expansion with Opening of New London Office Ignite Your SEO Engine Small Business News: Harnessing Google for You |
View full post on SEO – Google News
New Performance Based SEO Firm Launched by Industry Veteran – Benzinga
Jan 13th
 TheHostingNews.com (press release) |
New Performance Based SEO Firm Launched by Industry Veteran
Benzinga Performance based Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that companies have been demanding for years. Joseph Vlcek, an Internet marketing veteran, … The SEO Engine Partners with Textbroker to Make Optimizing Website Content … Nationwide Search Engine Optimization – SEO Agency Can social bookmarking and SEO complement each other? |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Learn the Latest SEO Copywriting Techniques From Marketing Veteran Heather … – Online PR News (press release)
Nov 19th
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Learn the Latest SEO Copywriting Techniques From Marketing Veteran Heather …
Online PR News (press release) The SEO Copywriting Success Summit is open to small business owners, freelance writers, in-house copywriters, corporate employees seeking additional … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Technology PR Veteran Melissa Neumann Promoted to Executive Vice President of Eastwick Communications
Feb 14th
Technology PR Veteran Melissa Neumann Promoted to Executive Vice President of Eastwick Communications
Eastwick Lands New Clients in Growing Markets, Search, Cleantech, Digital Entertainment, Mobile and Storage
Read more on Marketwire
