Robert Scoble

Large enterprises, and even smaller organizations in a document intensive industry, often have millions of documents stored on their servers. Finding any sort of meaningful relationship among the documents or gleaning any value from them can seem impossible. Pingar has developed technology to make sense of all this information and allow its owners to put unstructured data to good use. "What we're trying to do is provide technologies that enable those enterprises to begin to understand what content sits within their data sets," explains Peter Wren-Hilton, CEO and Founder of Pingar. "Typically the entity extraction and content analysis components that we have developed really are designed to enable enterprises to be able to identify relationships between documents [and] begin to, for instance, generate automatic meta data. If redaction is a key point, then our entity extraction components allow companies to redact documents through algorithms rather than through the black marker pen. So we've got a range of components that collectively enable enterprises to make more sense from the millions of documents that they have stored away." Generating the meta data is a key difference between Pingar and other enterprise solutions on the market. Most enterprise search engines rely on meta data to help them identify documents; however, users often find a way around entering the meta data when the document is created. Pingar removes the need to humanly tag documents and replaces that task with algorithms. This is just one of many tasks that are automated with Pingar. "It's not just the extraction," says Wren-Hilton, "it's what you can then do with that extracted entity. We then move from entity extraction to content analysis, and with content analysis, we've got redaction, sanitization and summarization. So we're able to take a 40-page .pdf and create a six or seven paragraph executive summary on the fly simply through content analysis." The technology is platform agnostic, so it works with any document management system, and it was released as an API to allow developers to access it. "We were going to go to market at the end of last year, and we actually did a fairly significant pivot when we realized that the amount of technology that we had would make it far better to release it as an API. In March of this year, we released an API with 18 specific components that developers are able to access. There's the standard, free developer sandbox account, so they can start building applications." Currently, Pingar is available in English and Chinese language versions; however, the company has plans to release French, German, Spanish and Arabic versions of the API over the next 6 to 9 months. Other innovations are sure to follow as well. "Although we're commercializing the product," explains Wren-Hilton, "there's still a strong focus on research, and I think one of the areas that will create the most excitement for those people interested in enterprise is the ability to start developing custom taxonomies. A company will be able to build a custom taxonomy using some of our technology. So rather than having to use a digital librarian to physically build a taxonomy, our entity extraction tools will identify the most commonly used terms and phrases and build a taxonomy on the fly." More info: Pingar web site: http://pingar.com/ Pingar blog: http://www.pingar.com/blog/ Pingar profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pingar Pinger on Twitter: http://twitter.com/PingarHQ

One of the many fronts on which device manufacturers battle one another is screen resolution—each gadget maker vying to have the highest quality image display among its competitors. Typically an increase in image quality corresponds to an increase in pixel count. Nanosys, however, has developed a technology that utilizes a completely different method for improving the quality of displays. "With LCDs, which is a very common display technology today, you have a backlight behind a panel," explains Jason Hartlove, President and CEO of Nanosys. "That backlight produces a white light, and that white light comes through the panel where the pixels are located, and those pixels flicker on and off to let the light come through. At each location there's a little filter, and that pixel is either a red-filtered or a green-filtered or a blue-filtered pixel. So you either get a red, green or blue color at each pixel location. Now the quality of the red, green or blue that you get depends directly on the quality of that white light you have in the back. If you lit up that display with a yellow light, and then you turned those pixels on and off, you wouldn't get very good color. If you, on the other hand, put something in the backlight that looked like daylight, you'd get very good color. And so the challenge is how do you make a good white light in the backlight for LCD displays, and that's really what we do." The existing LED technology that produces the backlight has steadily improved over the last 5 to 10 years and has become very, very efficient. The LED, however, is blue, so to make white light from the blue LED source you have to use a phosphor. Nanosys has developed a unique phosphor—the quantum dot phosphor—which, unlike the commonly used yellow, YAG phosphor, is capable of producing any color of fluorescence that a customer requires. "By specifically controlling the synthesis process during which we make these different phosphors," says Hartlove, "we can uniquely control those wavelengths of emission. Now by taking a very good quality of green, and mixing it with a very good quality of red, and a very good quality of blue, we can make a unique red, green, blue backlight system, which effectively is white light. But it's very pure white light specifically designed for the display. So the color saturation that comes out, and your ability to accurately render colors is tremendously improved." Any color device, regardless of size, resolution, whether it's 3D or 2D can use the Nanosys technology. "The real limitation," explains Hartlove, "on the user experience today is that display—that end device. And so your viewable content is pretty good, but your actual ability to view it is pretty bad...Our competency is in these nano materials that have these very unique properties that allow our leading edge customers to bring new capabilities to their devices." More info: Nanosys web site: http://www.nanosysinc.com/ Nanosys profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/nanosys Nanosys on Twitter: http://twitter.com/NanosysInc

Producers of online video content are always looking for ways to get their audience more involved and more engaged beyond just leaving comments. By leveraging the social network, Big Live is providing a solution that fosters real-time discussion among audiences. "Big Live is a synchronous video platform," explains Jonathan Zakin, President, CEO & Co-Founder of Big Live. "It's a social network built around the idea of sharing experience around viewing content that you enjoy with other people. We've looked out there at the other video platforms that have basically a chat room next to a player, and they approach that problem through the player side. We approached it through the social networking side. We built a social network around that, and so as a result, you have a very immersive social experience around this content." Big Live recently released a widget that allows content providers to embed the app into other sites or their own site using an iframe. Users can still view the content anonymously, but you must log in using Facebook Connect in order to socially interact. Once you have logged in, you can see everyone else that is also viewing that content simultaneously, you can roll your mouse over the audience and see the profile of individual audience members, and you can sort the audience members based on several criteria. "You can sort on age, location and gender and whether or not they are Facebook friends of yours," says Zakin. "Once you do that, you can begin to interact with them in real time around that synchronous video experience either through group chat or through a one-on-one chat, so if you find somebody in the crowd that you're interested in talking to, you can take them offline and chat with them that way. We're trying to emulate going to an event, turning to the person next to you and saying, 'Hey, this is very cool.'" More info: Big Live web site: http://www.biglive.com/bl/ Big Live profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/big-live Big Live on Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheBigLive

The phrase 'rapid growth' doesn't quite do justice to the explosion in usage that a new social site called Formspring has enjoyed since it launched just 18 months ago. With over 24 million user accounts and 3.5 million unique visitors every day, it is one of the hottest sites on the Internet. "Basically, it's a social site where friends get to know each other—their personality, their sense of humor and what they're interested in," explains Ade Olonoh, Founder and CEO of Formspring. "My sense was there wasn't really a great way to know more about people in a deeper way. A lot of social tools that are out there are great for understanding what you're doing right now, where you are and things like that versus getting people to tell their story, showing their sense of humor, expressing their personality." One of the reasons Formspring has seen such widespread usage is the way it eliminates the anxiety some of us feel around posting our thoughts online. "For the average person looking at that blank box," says Olonoh, "it's really hard to think up on the spot, 'What should I write about?', 'Who cares what I'm saying?', etc. But with Formspring because everything you post is in response to a question or to comment or something like that, it's a lot more natural and a lot more conversational." Having conversations in a question and answer format also alters the dynamic that exists on many social sites where you get to know someone by waiting to see what they say about themselves. On Formspring, you are asking questions about things that interest you and receiving responses accordingly. "The way I like to think about it," says Olonoh, "is taking a coffee shop conversation...and looking at the back and forth nature of that [conversation] and taking that online. One of core activities on Formspring is you ask different questions. If you think about that coffee shop conversation, most of those conversations start with, 'What are you doing this weekend?', "What do you think about this that happened?'...so that's what we're trying to bring to the web." More info: Formspring web site: http://www.formspring.me/ Formspring profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/formspring Formspring on Twitter: http://twitter.com/formspring

Get a closer look at a few of the over 200 features that make iOS 5 the best update yet for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

The proliferation of devices beyond the desktop or laptop is changing virtually everything in the computing world, and software applications that have been around for years, like Adobe's Photoshop, are having to change right along with it. "There's a very exciting free update coming for everyone who has CS5 or anyone who gets it after the update, and it's going to allow Photoshop to communicate with devices," explains Bryan O'Neil Hughes, Senior Product Manager for Photoshop at Adobe. "Obviously, we have a lot of different devices out there, and suddenly Photoshop will be able to communicate back and forth with all of them. It's platform agnostic, so iOS, Android, RIM, pretty much anything with a Wi-Fi connection can now talk to Photoshop." The update will allow Photoshop to communicate via scripting with virtually any device—camera, phone, tablet—over a local network that is password protected. If there is an interruption in this connection, the communication picks up right where it left off once communication is re-established. The version of Photoshop that users will see on one of these devices, however, is not the full version that one would see on a computer. "We're not taking Photoshop and pushing it onto the tablet," says Hughes. "The tablet doesn't have the hardware chops for that. But what we're doing is leveraging the strengths of the tablet—touch, interaction, a lot of the fun of it—but then picking up where that leaves off with the power and precision and editability and millions of things you can do in Photoshop passing those files over." Adobe has built three apps for the iPad to demonstrate the concept of how devices can work together. The first is called Color Lava, and it allows you to mix colors on the iPad. The second is called Nav, and it shows how you can drive Photoshop from the iPad by exchanging files, calling individual tools and building your own subset of tools. You can also push up to 200 files back and forth from a desktop or laptop to your iPad, which allows for a nice browsing and viewing experience. The third app is called Easel, which is a finger painting application that is unique in that the interface is only present when your five fingers are on the screen. Once you lift them, it disappears. "I think a lot of what you see with these mobile applications is people stuffing a desktop UI onto a small device that doesn't really have that precision," explains Hughes, "and so we really challenged ourselves to think outside the box, and in [regards to Easel] really dismiss the UI and have fun with it, because that's the common thing with all these apps is they're all fun and tactile and interactive. We wanted to really play into that on the mobile device and the iPad especially, and then when you get to Photoshop, you have that precision and power." More info: Adobe web site: http://www.adobe.com/ Photoshop web site: http://www.photoshop.com/ Photoshop on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Photoshop Photoshop profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/photoshop Photoshop on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Photoshop

Before starting Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg created FaceMash, which allowed Harvard students to rate the photos of other students. FaceMash was preceded by sites such as RateMyFace, AmIHot.com and perhaps most famously, Hot or Not. Today, Swayable is taking this side-by-side ratings concept and expanding it well beyond its origins to allow you to express an opinion on virtually anything. "About 50% of my visitors are return [visitors]," explains Lindsey Harper, Founder of Swayable, "and the site's pretty sticky so they're spending time now creating things like 'how should I wear my hair', 'what should I use for a profile picture', 'which shoes should I get at the store'. I'm seeing a lot of people play around with the app. They're having fun creating different types of content, and I'm getting a lot of, so far, pretty good feedback." Swayable is currently available for the iPhone and on the web and will soon be available for Android devices. "With Swayable, you can be out and about with the iPhone app and maybe you see something funny you thought might be fun to share with your friends," says Harper. "Traditionally, you'd take and picture and share it or maybe post it to Facebook. With Swayable, you can actually take a picture of two items and share that in what's a Swayable Voting Unit. I have one-click share on the app so it's literally take a picture, take a picture, [write a] quick description and you just share it out immediately to Facebook, Twitter, SMS and email. You can choose to share it to one person if it's more personal, or you can choose to share it with everybody including the Swayable.com audience, and those votes come back real-time." Harper is a sole founder whose background is in marketing and project management rather than technology, so she took a somewhat unconventional path to getting her app developed and tested. After building a spec document, she posted a series of questions on Mechanical Turk to test the viability of the concept. "What I found from that," says Harper, "was where my minimum viable product was. I found from that feedback what people would use it for...so it helped in validating the concept." Next, she put the development work up for bid on oDesk but soon realized that might not be the best fit for her project. She switched to beyondsoft.com to complete the work. Then Harper went back to Mechanical Turk to hire approximately 250 testers to complete registration, use the site and provide feedback. She constantly monitors user patterns on the site to optimize the experience, and it seems to be working. The number of visitors and page views doubled and tripled respectively the first two months the site was operational, and average page views per visit is increasing 1 to 2 pages per month. "Forth to fifty percent [of users] are bringing their friends," says Harper, "so that growth is just naturally happening because [users] are coming back." More info: Swayable web site: http://www.swayable.com/ Swayable profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/swayable Swayable on Twitter: http://twitter.com/swayable Lindsey Harper on Twitter: http://twitter.com/harperlindsey

Click here http://tiny.cc/37bh1w for Free Guitar Lesson This is me creating a jam track with apple's Garageband app for the ipad and then shredding a guitar solo over it! I am sorry about the bad video quality, but i could not find a way to record ipad's screen in a fast framerate. Anyway i believe you will get the idea. Hope you enjoy!

Photo sharing on the web has been around for years. Sites like Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and Snapfish provide a wealth of options for uploading images and making them available to friends and family. None of these sites, however, allows instant, real-time sharing across multiple devices. Cooliris is making that possible with its new app called LiveShare. "Back in 2006, we started Cooliris with the goal to transform the way people experience media on the web," explains Austin Shoemaker, Co-Founder and CTO of Cooliris. "And that's brought us to a point where we're really excited to show you what we've been working on—a new product called LiveShare that's all about visual communication and enabling people to interact around media in a way that's more natural and really thinking about the context of the message that you're sending." The LiveShare application allows you to create an event and share photo streams related to that event. Anyone you invite to join the event can view the photos instantly as well as contribute their own photos. The app is currently available for the iPhone and iPad as well as any web browser that supports HTML5, but the company has plans to expand to other devices in the future. "It's a cross device, user-centric experience," says Shoemaker. "When you jump into LiveShare, you can do that from your phone, from your tablet or from your web browser, and it's the same experience with the same information and media. However you come in, you've got your personal world right there. If you're on your phone, you're more likely to capture photos and videos, so you could just take pictures and take videos, and those are instantly synced to the cloud. So you go back home, and those photos and videos are available for you to browse, present, and share to groups or social networks. We think this is going to be a great way to really connect all the different parts of your life." LiveShare achieves instant syncing by first syncing a low resolution version of the photo, but it follows that initial sync with the full resolution image. "One of the decisions we made," says Shoemaker, "was we want people to be able to use this as their primary camera, so when you're taking pictures, you're not compromising on quality." You can also share text messages, videos and links from your browser. Links can be viewed right in the app using a minibrowser, or you can jump out to your full browser. And as location is a big part of the context of any event, the app allows you to geotag all of your messages. Images and video are just the beginning for LiveShare. "In the first version, we're only going to support image and video attachments," explains Shoemaker. "In the future, we're going to allow any kind of documents. The idea is if you're sharing say a Photoshop file of a mockup, you should be able to drag and drop that on your group and they should be able to open it on the other side." More info: LiveShare web site: http://www.liveshare.com/ Cooliris web site: http://www.cooliris.com/ Cooliris on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Cooliris Cooliris profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cooliris

More and more companies are using short videos (typically under 90 seconds) that they can post on their web sites to introduce their products or services. Transvideo Studios, along with its in house creative team called Picturelab, has been making videos for 30 years and is behind the videos for many of the most well known tech companies in Silicon Valley. "We've been doing videos for tech companies in Silicon Valley for a really long time, and we've had a studio and sound stage since 1981," explains Rico Andrade, Executive Producer for Transvideo Studios. "One of the things that's been a part of the business has been doing videos that talk about what the company does, and especially with the increase in the number of videos that you see online and the cost of making the videos and hosting them, more and more tech companies started seeing the return in creating a simple video that explains what they do." When Transvideo takes on a new client, it tries to learn everything possible about the company and its product, from value proposition to competitors to target customers. This information helps set the tone for the video and guide the story being told. "We're a full production house," explains David Sabin, Producer and Post Production Supervisor for Transvideo, "so we take it from concept (we do all the writing) to design all the way through to distribution. A project generally starts with a client coming to us, and we learn as much as we can about that particular product—we do our homework and find out what the client needs and come at it from a perspective of what a customer might want out of this as well." From there, Transvideo will submit concepts and style frames, which, after approval from the client, will be used to create story boards for the clients to review in conjunction with the script Transvideo is drafting. Finally, they complete the animation work and start submitting first cuts of the video. Going through the process of settling on a story and creating the video can have benefits for the client apart from the video itself. "Frequently the questions that we ask of our clients help them focus their own marketing," says Sabin, "and I have to say that art directors at these different companies love us, because we bring to them ideas and perspectives that they perhaps haven't thought of before." More info: Transvideo web site: http://transvideo.com/ Transvideo on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Transvideo Transvideo profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/service-provider/transvideo-studios Picturelab web site: http://www.picturelab.tv/ Picturelab on Twitter: http://twitter.com/picturelab Picturelab profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/picturelab