StudioGPU replaces computer animation render farms with $5,000 PC — I’ve seen the demo with my own unbelieving eyes. A single graphics accelerator card on a standard Intel-powered PC can now render in seconds what used to take a roomful of servers all day. Hollywood-based StudioGPU, a privately-funded startup, has released MachStudio Pro, a software tool that lets computer animators design and render scenes nearly in real-time. StudioGPU’s demo setup fits on a restaurant table and leaves room for dessert, yet a StudioGPU employee showed me how he could modify the lighting and other parameters on the same demo video found on the company’s homepage, with no visibile delay between tweaking the knob and, say, watching the room brighten enough to see one character’s face in the complicated lighting shown here.

CNN “source” in Tehran turns out to be some guy on Twitter – An editor at Gawker found that quotes attributed to a “source,” which was made to read like some reporter’s traditional personal contact on the ground in Tehran, were actually pulled off Twitter. A CNN spokesman called it a regrettable mistake.

Michael Jackson traffic charts continue to amaze — Hitwise has plotted traffic to TMZ and news sites on last week’s saddest day for pop culture. Jacko, as music journalists noted over the years, always hoped for a hit even bigger than Thriller. Last Thursday, he got it.

 

Facebook modeling competition saves young women from moving to Los Angeles only to be tragically disappointed – Sonnet Models is a newly-launched British startup whose announced plan is to create a Facebook-based modeling agency. “For example,” Sonnet’s launch announcement says, “a scout from an LA-based agency may be looking for new face to meet a client’s request - a female who is at least 5′11″, aged 16-18, living in California and considered beautiful and elegant by men aged 25-35, living in New York, who are interested in technology and fashion. This may seem like an impossible task.” Actually, it sounds like a great idea for a dating service. The company is kicking off by hosting a modeling contest that promises an introduction to the upper end of the industry for a few winners. 

Joost, the failed YouTube rival, replaces CEO – Mike Volpi (pictured) is out, and former SVP of engineering Matt Zelesko has taken his place. AllThingsD reports that Joost has abandoned its plans to become a YouTube-like video portal, and will instead focus on selling a white label video hosting service. The video shakeout is here.

Palm Pre sales fall short of iPhone-Killer status – Barrons reports that Palm sold an estimated 300,000 Pres in June. Does that sound like a lot? Apple sold a million iPhone 3G S superphones in one weekend.

 

Hyperion Therapeutics raised $60 million in its third round of venture funding. Bay City Capital and Panorama Capital - both new investors - led this round and put Daniel Perez, M.D. and Gaurav Aggarwal, M.D., respectively, on Hyperion's board of directors.

Cybercrime is rapidly spreading on Facebook as fraudsters prey on users who think the world's top social networking site is a safe haven on the Internet.

This guest post is written by Mary Hodder, the founder Dabble. Prior to Dabble, Hodder consulted for a number of startups, did research at Technorati and wrote her masters thesis at Berkeley focusing on live web search looking at blog data.

Real time search is nothing new. It is a problem we’ve been working on for at least ten years, and we likely will still be trying to solve it ten years from now. It’s a really hard problem which we used to call “live web search,” which was coined by Allen Searls (Doc’s son) and refers to the web that is alive, with time as an element, in all factors including search.

The name change to “real time search” seems a way to refocus attention toward the issue of time as an important element of filters. We are still presented with the same set of problems we’ve had at least the past ten years. None of the companies that Erick Schonfeld pointed to the other day seem to be doing anything differently from the live web search / discovery companies that came before. The new ones all seem to be fumbling around at the beginning of the problem, and in fact seem to be doing “recent search,” not really real time search. While I’m sure they’ve worked really hard on their systems, they are no closer than the older live web search systems got with the problem. All the new ones give a reverse chron view, with most mixing Twitter with something: blog data, other microblog data, photos, creating some kind of top list of recent trends. Some have context, like a count of activity over a period of time, or how long a trend has gone on or a histogram (Crowdeye) which both Technorati and Sphere experimented with in the early years. Or they show how many links there are to something or the number of tweets. All seem susceptible to spam and other activities degrading to the user experience and none seem to really provide the context and quality filters that one would like to see if this were to really work. All seem to suffer from needing to learn the lessons we already learned in blog search and topic discovery.

Publicly available publishing systems starting in 1999 took the value of time and incorporated it into what was being published (think Pyra which is now Blogger, Moveable Type, Wordpress and Flickr, among the many) as well as search and discovery systems for those published bits like Technorati, Sphere, Rojo, Blogpulse, Feedster, Pubsub and others, to walk down memory lane . . . (btw, for disclosure purposes I should state that I worked for Technorati in 2004 for 10 months, and consulted or advised most all the others in one form or another).

I started working on this problem in 1999, at UC Berkeley, and eventually did my master’s thesis on live web data search and topic discovery at SIMS (or the iSchool as it’s now known). From 2000 to 2004, people at SIMS would say to me, “What are you doing with blogs and data, it’s just weird. Why does it matter?” But the element of time was the captivating piece that was missing for me from regular search. It’s the element that makes something news, as well as the element that can group items together in a short period to show a focus of attention and activity that often legacy news outlets miss (until more recently when they decided that live web activity was interesting).

At Burning Man in 2005, under a shade structure during a hot, quiet afternoon, I remember having a four or five hour conversation with Barney Pell (who would later found Powerset) about the Live Web and Live Web Search, how to do it, what it meant, how to understand and present time to the user, how much was discovery and how much was search, how structured was the data you could get and how reliant on the time could you be with the data, what meaning you could make from that data, etc. Sergey Brin was sitting and listening, and finally, after a couple of hours, he asked me, “What is the live web and what is live web search?” Since Barney and I had already been doing a deep dive, I assumed Sergey knew what we were talking about, so it surprised me, but I explained why I thought time was a huge missing element of regular search, and that this was the type of search I worked on. Barney and I continued for a couple more hours. And it got cooler so it was time to go admire the art and that was the end of that. But I have wondered over the years where Google is with the live web and when they might do something with time. Twitter seems to be prodding them.

In 2006, “The Living Web” Newsweek cover story by Steven Levy and Brad Stone poked at this issue for the first time in a national forum.

When I look at the latest crop of search startups, I think: Why are we doing it all the same way again? Reinventing the wheel? Is anyone doing anything original either with data or interface? Is anyone building on what we’ve learned before about the backend or UI’s?

Frankly, our filters suck.. and I suppose that if a name change gets us to think anew about better filters, well, I should rejoice. I’m partly to blame for the bad filters we have to date because in having worked on this problem, I’ve contributed to some of the various live web or real time or whatever the word of the moment is to describe trying to solve this problem. We are very good at publishing our thoughts and visions, with time stamps, but not very good at the filtering side of things. The old method of information search and discovery was to open the paper or magazine, turn the pages with editorially filtered and placed information, and when you were finished, you said, “Okay, I’m informed” (whether you really were or not). But the media got complacent, missed stories and with the ease of blog publishing and sites like Flickr for photos, we could replace paper and supplement our information needs with the whole web. The only problem is, it’s the whole freaking web. An avalanche. We feel anxiety on the web from the lack of filter and editorial grace that one or two printed news sources used to give us.

I did a study in 2002, which I repeated in 2004 and again last year in 2008. I asked users to track their online information intake for one week. There were only 30 people in each study, chosen randomly from Craiglist ads, but what I found across each group of 30 was that the average time spent online with news and information sites was 1.25 hours in 2002, 1.85 hours in 2004 and 2.45 hours in 2008. These people are not in Silicon Valley, but they do all have broadband at home and live in the US. Every one of them reported some level anxiety over the amount of data they felt they needed to take in in order to feel informed. They often dealt with it by increasing the time they took to stay informed. They didn’t know that better filters might actually reduce their anxiety.

As Erick noted, the tension to solve this problem is between memory and consciousness; or as Bob Wyman and Salim Ismail called it at Pubsub: retrospective verses prospective search. And it is part of the issue. But there is more.

Discovery does mean you have to introduce time as an element. The user cannot be expected to know what is bubbling up, or the specific phrases that will name the latest thing.

Some people will say “michael jackson” and some will say “MJ” and some will say “king of pop.” And Michael Jackson as a topic is actually pretty easy. I remember once doing usability tests for a live web search and discovery system in 2003, where we asked users to search on Google News and various live web systems for an incident in Australia where a “giant sea creature” was found. But since all the media covering it originated in Australia, and they’d all called it a “massive squid,” and all the follow-on American sources including bloggers had copied the Aussie language, there were no recent hits for “massive sea creature.” Testers had to think creatively about how to get to the info they knew was there, and yet it was a semantic leap. One search tester actually cried as she refused to give up, she was so determined to find the result in any of the live web systems we were testing. We begged her to stop; it was painful. Good discovery could have helped.

Another key element of discovery and live web search is getting structured data, because spidering, which Google uses to get data from the web for it’s regular retrospective web search, makes understanding time with a published work more difficult. It’s hard to work with time if you only know for sure when you spidered the page. Twitter on the other hand has structured data because everything is published in their silo so the sites they provide their complete stream to get it in a structured format. They know the time of each tweet. Not to mention the data is available through API’s. This is the most efficient way to draw out meaning for search because you know for sure about the context of each piece of data, with time as one of the pivots, for search and discovery.

You also need to get the data model right for the backend search data base, in order to get meaning and link metrics. And you need to understand the different corpuses of data to know what things mean to users (not engineers), and figure out the spam and bad actor problems. There is the original context the data had and there is the UI which is so difficult when trying to make time understandable for many users. In fact some think that communicating the time element to regular users is so hard that making time focused search is really an “advanced search” problem.

If designed poorly, the system can contribute to the unnatural production of skewed data by users. If the system involves some sort of filter for authority or popularity, they are subject to power law effects (Technorati calls their metric “authority” but inbound link counts from blogs are not authority, they’re just a measure of popularity). What’s a power law effect? It’s when a system drives activity to reinforce unnaturally the behavior that caused something to be there in the first place. For example, if one of the metrics of a filter counts the number of people clicking on a top search, then the more clicks, the longer the item will stay at the top of the list of searches, even if naturally it would have fallen off the list earlier. Conversely if a metric for a filter involves a spontaneous act, driven by imagination, like writing a tweet, then exposing those items at the top of the filter might be less likely to drive up activity. However, if you show the results to the users, upon seeing a popular topic, they might begin tweeting about that topic without having thought of it before seeing the popular topic. In other words, by revealing the metrics you focus on, you can push users to change their behavior. By driving behavior, power-law distributions keep things with some power at the top because they are at the top or can drive them higher. It becomes a loop. And because no distinction is made between the quality or strength of a unit or what that unit might mean to a group of users in a topic area, straight number counts just aren’t very smart.

For example, if we made a system that counted Om Malik’s inbound links and called it authority, no matter the topic, I think Om would agree that even he wouldn’t have great authority and insight on the subjects of say, modern dance or metal working, if he happened to mention those words in a blog post. But on broadband issues, he is most definitely an authority. But Technorati, OneRiot, and other services that take a metric count and apply it for all topics, all circumstances, all search result matches, without context, randomize the quality of the information the user sees. They may provide a filter across the whole web, but they don’t give us any real help in judging what is useful or not. It’s why topic communities are helpful, and once you find a good editorial filter, driven by the human touch, you glom onto it for dear life because it’s such a time and energy saver.

I’m under no illusions that we’re remotely close to solving Live Web or Real Time search or even recent search. We are not. Nor are we near solving discovery. But I hope we will. Sooner rather than later. Because I need it now. The opportunity is huge. It means really building algorithmically the editorial filters we have today in the form of people, while balancing the mobs’ activities. Solve that and the prize will be big.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Bob Borchers, who led Apple’s marketing efforts for the iPod and then the iPhone over the past five years (and even appeared in iPhone videos), recently made the leap to venture capital, becoming a general partner at Opus Capital. Yesterday, I had a chance to talk to Borchers and hear more about the startups he wants to invest in.

Of course, I had to ask him about the move to Opus, since the shift from being a marketing director to VC isn’t that intuitive. But Borchers didn’t share any juicy stories about an acrimonious split — instead, he said that after helping to build an ecosystem of products around the iPod, then seeing an ecosystem of applications and developers start to explode around the iPhone, he was so excited about the opportunities in mobile that he wanted to start investing.

So what are these opportunities? Borchers said many of them lie “between mobile and a few industries.” As an example, he pointed to demonstrations at recent Apple events showing off the capabilities of the iPhone in the medical industry, like accessing real-time patient monitoring data on the phone so a doctor can check in on patients even when they’re not in the room, and a glucose monitor that delivers readings to the iPhone.

“Having a single great application is probably a necessary condition, but it’s not a sufficient condition,” he added — in other words, startups have to have a plan to build a company and a line of products, otherwise they’re one-hit wonders.

Not that you have to be application-focused, either. There’s also a big opportunity for “horizontal plays” that support the applications, he said.

“I think there are opportunities in the services space as well as the hardware space as well as the application space,” Borchers said. “If you look at push notification on the iPhone, there’s this huge clamor, a huge intent to use it by all of these thousands of developers. But very few have grasped the fact that you have to have a server … Your backend has to be able to think about that.”

(Hmm, sounds like those Push.io guys who offer infrastructure and backend services for iPhone app developers are on to something.)

Given Borchers’ background, does that mean he’s going to be all about the iPhone in his investments? Not exactly, he said — after all, there’s a huge smartphone market beyond the iPhone.

“The bigger opportunities are those that can go across these platforms,” he said. “At the same time, I feel like if you don’t have a strategy that addresses the iPhone and some of these other halo devices, you’ll have a hard time getting the visibility in the marketplace you want to have.”

© star5112 2Point6Billion (a blog that looks at economic issues in China and India) has a write up online on the upcoming China Cleantech Business Forum. The July 8th forum will be Asia's first cleantech business conference. Cleantech is a growing industry focus for venture capital and development funds:Despite the current credit crisis, overall fundraising for cleantech has remained steady in 2008, with 29 funds raising a total of US$6 billion worldwide. The majority of these cleantech projects have gone to venture capitalists funds with infrastructure funds also ...

The big story a couple months ago was how cleantech investing had fallen off a cliff in the first quarter — signaling what many feared would be a prolonged negative trend in the sector. But it looks like things have started to turn around, with new data showing that $1.2 billion has already been sunk into green technology across 85 deals since the beginning of the second quarter.

To give you some context, the first quarter this year saw only 59 deals, amounting to $836 million. So while the space isn’t exactly roaring back to life, the rebound bodes well for the rest of the year as the downturn continues to ease.

Solar power commanded the most, bringing in $330 million in investments, but wasn’t as far of a front runner as it has been in the past. The second quarter saw more support for automotive applications, for example (a little above $202 million), and a sizable chunk ($195 million) went to biofuels and cleaner coal innovations. Surprisingly, batteries came in fourth with $181.5 million — but that is sure to grow with all the emphasis placed on the area by the administration and powerful car companies. Oddly, the report breaking down this data released by Greentech Media, combined wind and geothermal sources of energy, a space that only garnered $22.2 million even though wind is usually spotlit as the number two renewable energy source behind solar.

So what turned things around? Many analysts thought cleantech investing would take a year or more to grow back. But it looks like the federal stimulus package, with its generous allocations for green technology, has worked its magic before any money is even handed out. Many companies, across all categories, have employed a clever “wait and see” strategy with investors, swearing up and down that business will explode as soon as the stimulus funds jumpstart lagging production schedules and capital expenditure projects. And it looks like VC firms agree. It’s rare for a firm’s portfolio companies to get a major cash infusion that doesn’t dilute their holdings — it must seem like an opportunity that is too good to pass up.

That being said, investing has not come in the same shape and size that it has in the past. Early-stage startups have benefited significantly in the last quarter, mostly because investors are trying to get them in shape to qualify for government support. Similarly, late-stage companies have had an easier time finding financing, arguing that government funds could push them to profitability and even to public offerings. That leaves mid-size startups, which have still had a trying time finding backers, according to Greentech’s analysis. On top of that, the average amount given to any of these companies has gone down — with no firm giving $100 million or more to solar or biofuel operations, even though those are the two areas where large sums are needed the most for factories and the like. These companies will still need to wait for September’s government cash drop to realize larger-scale progress.

Regardless, it looks like the sun has come out for cleantech after a rather gloomy six months. Back in April, when the situation looked the most dire, we reported that Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, predicted that cleantech would top venture capital within five years. We got some skeptical feedback from readers who clearly agreed with the market’s mayday attitude. But if things continue on this upward trajectory, Heesen might not be far off.

Here’s a full breakdown of the $1.2 billion by sector:

Bet you didn’t see this one coming. Back in 2007 we wrote about a service called Dial Directions which lets you call a special phone number and verbally ask for directions, which are immediately sent to you via SMS. Today comes news that the company has been acquired by Sakhr Software, a development house specializing in Arabic natural language processing (NLP). And with their powers combined, they’re building a real-time voice translation service that will allow users to translate phrases from their mobile phones on the fly.

It’s a better fit than it sounds. Dial Directions has spent the last few years building mobile applications (it has an app for the iPhone on the App Store), and has also built out the technology required to efficently transfer voice input to servers, where it can then be processed (this server-side processing is also used by Google Voice Search and a number of other apps). Once it makes it to the cloud, this speech will be routed through Sakhr’s software, which is capable of translating English to Arabic and vice-versa. Translated audio and text are then sent back to the mobile phone, all within a matter of seconds.

The companies have jointly produced a beta version of the application for the iPhone and BlackBerry, which you can see in the video below. The application is currently in testing with select enterprise customers, with plans to release a consumer version around the end of the summer.

Sakhr’s customers include the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the technology makes its way out to defense personnel. A Dial Directions spokesperson says that most translation devices in the field abroad rely on a set library of phrases, and says that the new Sakhr translation software should be more flexible. That said, it sounds like this will come with one significant drawback — if your phone can’t reach the network, the software won’t work.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Dial Directions intends to keep its service running for now, though it may not be indefinitely.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

BioSante Pharmaceuticals Inc. will buy troubled South San Francisco business Cell Genesys Inc.

China’s new crackdown on the fast-growing virtual goods industry has many possible outcomes, both good and bad for game publishers.

Those publishers make most of their money through virtual goods transactions. China has more than 298 million Internet users and its online games industry is one of the fastest growing parts of the worldwide game business.

Yesterday, China’s Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Commerce issued new rules that prohibit virtual currency from being spent on real world goods and services. The rules state, “The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services.”

The rule change was interpreted as a ban on gold farming, which is the use of laborers who earn lots of virtual gold in a game and then sell it for real money to people who don’t want to spend a lot of tedious time “leveling up” or gaining powers for their virtual characters. If the gold farmers are eliminated, game publishers will be happy because it eliminates a nuisance for gamers who are annoyed by the unfairness of gold farming, which allows gamers to skip over tasks that others have to undertake.

Both U.S. and Chinese game publishers could benefit from China’s crackdown on abuses of virtual goods. It could make gamers more willing to play games that aren’t plagued with gold farmers. On the other hand, if the crackdown discourages people from buying virtual goods, game publishers could see the value of the virtual goods decline, and with it see a drop in popularity and profitability of their games.

That could be risky, since the Chinese market is a test bed for new ideas in new business models such as games that are free-to-play and monetize through virtual goods. You can play a game for free, but a more powerful sword might cost you 25 cents.

In China, virtual goods is like the goose laying the golden eggs. The demand for games hasn’t been hurt in the recession, in part because the Chinese game operators make the bulk of their money through virtual currency transactions, which are so small that people don’t think twice of making them. Online game revenues are expected to grow 38 percent to $3.8 billion this year, according to market researcher Niko Partners.

The government said virtual money trade topped several billion yuan after growing at a rate of 20 percent a year. The most popular Chinese online currency is the “QQ coin” issued by Tencent, which has at least 220 million registered users. Tencent said it would support the new rules.

The government said it was concerned that virtual goods have become an avenue for gambling and illicit trade — from money laundering to online theft or fraud. Lisa Cosmas Hanson, an analyst at Niko Partners, said that the new rules aren’t exactly a direct ban on gold farming. But they could have that effect, since the law is meant to eliminate for-profit gaming, which includes gold farming.

She believes that the government is fearful that it can’t reap tax revenue from the unknown earnings associated with virtual-to-real transactions. But she notes that the problem of under-reporting taxable income is endemic through all of China.

But making the practice of trading virtual goods for real money is easy to make illegal, but hard to enforce. The gold farmers may not be affected, Cosmas Hanson said, because of a technicality. Most of China’s gold farmers, who operate in sweatshops with dozens of fellow farmers, operate on servers on foreign soil. The government can only control what goes on with domestic servers, she said.

Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza, director of the film Second Skin (a documentary about living in virtual worlds which debuts in theaters Aug. 7 and on DVD on Aug. 25), filmed a gold farming business in the city of Sanya in the province of Hainan, China.  He agreed that the gold farmers use overseas servers to disguise their activities so that the rule enforcers at game publishers such as Activision Blizzard can’t find and ban them.

Pineiro Escoriaza said that the gold farmers he saw worked in shifts around the clock to earn gold in games that their supervisors sold for real money. He said that it’s possible that 100,000 people are making a living from gold farming. Some of those are in tough conditions, where people work around the clock for minimum wage.

The government does seem concerned about protecting minors, who are now banned from purchasing virtual goods. A variety of laws are aimed at curbing addiction to computer games and protecting youths. But the government didn’t seem concerned that gold farm operators are exploiting their laborers. Nor did it seem concerned that it could wipe out the jobs of 100,000 workers if it is really serious about its crackdown.

The government may also be concerned that the online currency could become more important than the real-world currency, which would mean that the government would lose control of important parts of the economy.

“Personally, I think it is a control issue,” said Sean Kane, an attorney who specializes in virtual worlds at Drakeford & Kane. “China wants to clamp down on a market that is basically unregulated.”