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It's been a given for some time that businesses, including startups, should have a presence on and connection with Facebook . With over 400 million active users, chances are your potential investors and customers are already there. Fan pages have been a simple way to generate interest and engage customers, and Facebook Connect has quickly become a standard in signing up and signing in users. In his keynote at f8 yesterday Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg actually mentioned startups in his opening remarks, stating that they "are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences." Sponsor Whether or not Facebook is a "requirement" for startups, there are some things new businesses should think about based on yesterday's announcements. "Facebook Connect On Steroids" Facebook announced a major overhaul to its API and introduced three new components yesterday: social plugins , the Open Graph protocol , and the Graph API . By using the tags specified in this protocol, any website can now become part of the Facebook ecosystem. If a Facebook user visits your site and Likes your page, you have the ability then to publish information into that user's stream. In addition, implementation of the code on your site will give you access to administrative tools and analytics just like any Facebook fan page owner. As we wrote yesterday , this will take analytics to the next level, providing an incredible amount of demographic data about users who like and link their profiles to your site. However, this information will reside with Facebook, not on your own website, making them a de facto owner of your visitors' social data. Applications & Virtual Currency: Where the Money Is? While many businesses will likely integrate their websites into the expanding Facebook ecosystem, there is likely still room for growth within the platform itself, namely with application development. There are over 550,000 applications on the site, a number that continues to grow - and to encourage return visitors. To coincide with the growth of the application market, particularly in the area of social gaming, Facebook also announced the expansion of its official virtual currency, Credits . Last year Paypal processed over $500 million in virtual goods last year, with social gaming company Zynga becoming Paypal's second largest merchant (following eBay). Clearly Facebook seeks to stake a claim in the virtual currency market. Facebook Credits are currently in beta with over 100 applications, and will roll out to the entire network soon, Zuckerberg said yesterday. Credits will allow users to purchase one currency for all transactions on Facebook, rather than have to enter their credit card information with each purchase. By facilitating online payments, Facebook hopes to increase the percentage of users willing to purchase virtual goods to between 8% and 20% David vs. Goliath? Despite repetition at f8 yesterday that these changes were meant designed "for developers," it remains to be seen how the announcements will play out for developers and for users alike, the latter of whom are notorious for protesting changes to the site. In particular, continued concerns about privacy might not be well received, particulary given Facebook's past history with opening user data. Privacy concerns might not be the only thing that gives some businesses pause about Facebook's direction. Facebook also announced yesterday " instant personalization " yesterday, giving three "preferred partners" - Yelp , Pandora , and CNN - instant and additional access to Facebook profile information when users visit their sites. For startups in these areas, namely restaurant recommendation, music sharing, and news delivery, the "preferred partner" program might make industry in-roads more difficult and could adversely impact user adoption. As the "preferred partner" program expands beyond the three selected for launch, it remains to be seen the effect of being sanctioned - or not - by Facebook. The buzz yesterday was that Facebook had just " seized control of the Internet ." Comments on how you think the f8 announcements might play out for startups welcome! Discuss
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David vs. Goliath? An F8 Overview for Startups
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The current generation of check-in based location apps like Foursquare and Gowalla are more or less focused on the gaming aspects of location-based social networking. CauseWorld for the iPhone and Android, however, wants to use location based check-ins for two things: connect you to the stores around you and allow you to use the points you get for checking in to support a variety of charitable causes . CauseWorld features badges and other virtual rewards, but the main focus of the app is on collecting "karma points" that can then be exchanged for donations to participating charities. Sponsor Shopping and Charity The mission of CauseWorld's parent company Shopkick is to bring the physical and virtual worlds of retail together. Besides just checking in at various stores, CauseWorld's users can also scan products in supermarkets to get extra points. Typically, it's been hard for barcode scanners like RedLaser to get to this data for grocery items, but as Shopkick's CEO Cyriac Roeding tols us yesterday, his company manged to strike a deal with Procter & Gamble and Kraft Foods, which gives Shopkick access to this data. It's easy to see why these companies would be interesting in making the deal with CauseWorld. After all, whenever you scan a product (even if your motivation is to help the world by gathering karma points), you are already holding this product in your hands and Kraft can now give you a mobile coupon for the product that you can use at the check-out counter. That, as Roeding put it, "is the holy grail for retailers" - being able to create a deeper relationship with the consumer right in the store while they are already looking at the product. After just a little bit more than three month on the market, CauseWorld has already seen 400,000 downloads of its mobile app and plans to release a major update in the summer. So far, the company has received around $700,000 in sponsorship money from Citi for its charity program and is giving away about $100,000 per month. Features The app itself is pretty straightforward. You can check in to stores around you and if this is a participating store, the app will also encourage you to check the store out and scan some products. To make sure that you are not just gaming the system, CauseWorld restricts you to 10 check-ins a day and enforces a three minute break between check-ins. Every check-in is worth 5 karma points (some sponsors also offer double points). You can connect the app to Facebook, but the social networking aspects are really not the focus of the app. One problem we noticed, however, is that the app allows to check in even if the store is still almost mile half a mile away from you. This seems to defeat the purpose of really connecting consumers to nearby stores and makes it rather easy to collect points while you are actually still sitting in your living room. Discuss
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CauseWorld: Checking in for Charity
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Tomorrow, GroundWork Open Source Inc. and Eucalyptus Systems will be announcing that they have partnered to deliver monitoring and management of applications running in a Eucalyptus private cloud environment. If your enterprise is running private cloud powered by Eucalyptus, you now can plug your cloud into the GroundWork's monitoring solution. This allows you to join your view of resources from Amazon and other servers in your enterprise with your private cloud solution. Sponsor What is Eucalyptus? We covered Eucalyptus recently in an interview with the company's founder and CTO. The company is a first-mover in helping organizations build private clouds that can achieve parity with Amazon's EC2. The company's enterprise addition will allow you to run an Amazon instance on your VMware infrastructure, effectively joining your virtual infrastructure and the Amazon cloud. "Detailed monitoring and management of private cloud applications can give Eucalyptus users important real-time information to increase productivity and reduce costs," said Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. "Through our partnership with GroundWork Open Source, Eucalyptus open source users and Enterprise Edition customers can now benefit from a proven, open source solution to monitor private clouds as part of their overall network environment." GroundWork's newest solution offers the ability to monitor topology of your private cloud and to plug the results into the monitoring you are doing with other servers and the Amazon public cloud infrastructure. In the briefing we attended with company executives, several things emerged that we're considering. First, it was pointed out that private clouds are "where the action is" for large enterprises. What we heard is that some companies, like pharmaceuticals that GroundWork currently has in its portfolio simply won't be able to move all of their data out to the public cloud yet. But, they do want to get the benefits of cloud computing internally. Second, we learned that one thing GroundWork's offers is a flexible hosting model, where your monitoring infrastructure can be hosted internally, or in the cloud on a managed EC2 instance. Recently, we checked out CloudKick , another cloud monitoring startup that also can monitor servers in the cloud and in the enterprise. The GroundWorks solution that is launching in beta both offers topology view of the private cloud and flexible hosting options that may be attractive to enterprises that plan on keeping most of their assets internal. From what we can see, CloudKick is positioned to companies that are starting on the cloud for scaling purposes, and GroundWork seems positioned towards companies where the center of gravity is inside the data center and now the private cloud. "More and more of our customers are investigating and investing in private cloud usage. Eucalyptus gives incredible power and cost savings to IT teams building out cloud services. Coupled with GroundWork's automatic instance and application monitoring, this partnership provides a robust cloud solution with clear ROI that enterprises can take advantage of quickly," said Peter Jackson, GroundWork Open Source President and CEO. What is GroundWorks private cloud solution? GroundWorks offers the premise that if you are running a private cloud, the monitoring solution needs to be aware of your architecture (topology, software stacks, and servers). Here is a visual representation of how the company envisions cloud aware monitoring: Here is a screenshot of the GroundWorks monitoring solution: Here is a bit more from the companies on the beta program: The GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud for Eucalyptus beta program offers: "GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud usage to cover on-premise, public or private cloud hosted applications and infrastructure Access to Eucalyptus EE, including VMware support to implement private clouds in existing environments The opportunity to provide direct feedback to the engineering and product teams, helping define the future of IT operations in the cloud Engineering and technical assistance for the duration of the beta program. Participants will gain these benefits with the combined GWOS and Eucalyptus Quickly and easily build and monitor private and hybrid clouds with your existing environment and other public clouds Run Amazon Machine Image (AMI) instances on VMware-based hypervisors within your Eucalyptus private cloud Seamlessly manage environments with multiple hypervisors (Xen, KVM, vSphere, ESX™ and ESXi™) under one management console and transition applications without any modifications Manage service performance and availability based on IT monitoring insight trend and usage reports across environments" More information available about the beta program at http://www.gwos.com/products/Enterprise_Cloud_beta.html It is becoming clear that private clouds are increasingly becoming an important part of the enterprise. Eucalyptus has a real opportunity as a first-mover in deploying them with its tools. From experience, we know that where enterprise-class computing exists, monitoring follows. GroundWork and Eucalyptus are working together to make a seamless offering that plugs into the private cloud deployment process in this beta release - and they are asking for feedback from administers interested in the program. Does deploying a private cloud change your view of administration tools and monitoring? Discuss
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Cloud Aware Monitoring: GroundWork and Eucalyptus Offer Private Cloud Beta Program
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"It's not about the value of the task, it's about the value of me not having to do it, or even think about it anymore." That's how Ted Roden describes Fancy Hands , his new side project that provides virtual personal assistants in the cloud for a low monthly fee. Need an appointment made for you? Research done on Fantasy Baseball players you might want to draft onto your team? Roden has hired more than 100 people based in the US and England who can perform almost any quick, legal task for you, within minutes, at any hour day or night. You can send them 15 emails with task requests per month for a $30 fee. An algorithm sorts the tasks and routes each one to the most appropriate person. Sponsor Roden says the people he's hired include retired lawyers, actors waiting with time to spare before going on camera and former employees of competitor ChaCha . He wrote a program to sift through piles of applications and plans on using the company's own service providers to select new hires in the future as well. Roden himself has a day job in the R&D department of the New York Times. He's a creative dynamo whose energy spills out in side projects like the visually compelling social bookmarking service EnjoysThin.gs and an O'Reilly book about building real-time websites , due out this Summer. Previously, he was the 2nd full-time programmer at art-video portal Vimeo . Roden says he built Fancy Hands because he wanted to build something big. He calls it that just because it was the filename for his first bit of code, a tradition across all his projects. He's bootstrapping it himself "and my wife says it's ok," he says. Casting The Tasks Fancy Hands is easy for customers to use. I asked the service to find where in town I could buy a "sweater bag" to run sweaters through the washing machine and got a great response, complete with multiple options online and a personal recommendation, within an hour. I asked for links to reviews of iPad RSS reading applications and the first response I got was terrible. I emailed back complaining and the person on the other end sent me back something even worse. Then Roden noticed and reassigned the request to someone who filled it beautifully. Roden says that for now he's doing the quality control himself and generally well after the tasks have been completed. He's got a complex series of tubes and pulleys rigged up to sort tasks, though. He calls it "the eHarmony of Getting Things Done." Social search Aardvark started out as a lot of manual human effort behind public facing technology, then became a search-sorting algorithmic people-connector that Google bought for millions. Fancy Hands is half human and half-machine, too. It connects your emailed task requests with the right staff members to fill them. In that way it's a little reminiscent of Aardvark , the social search startup that began as a human bucket brigade behind a facade of technology and ended up a complex web of computer science that Google acquired this Winter for millions of dollars . At its core Fancy Hands is people, though. And the people are paid by the task. Roden has created a system that ranks tasks by complexity and rewards assistants with higher pay when they complete harder tasks. Once they reach a particular pay grade, all their tasks become better paying, thus incentivizing them to dive in to harder and harder work. The people behind the scenes are often surprisingly enthusiastic. Roden says that compared to other, similar systems, Fancy Hands is more affordable, competitive on speed and often surprisingly superior in quality of results. At least at launch, the people he's hired seem relatively interested in the project and the work. This afternoon I asked Fancy Hands to make me an appointment with "Bob's Heating System Repair" and gave it my own phone number to call, just to see how it went down. I answered my next inbound call with "hello, Bob's heating repair, this is Bob." And went through a few minutes of appointment conversation before telling the virtual assistant what I was really doing. I think he felt a little bit toyed with, but he was very professional before and after I disclosed my true identity. He said he had interacted just a little bit with Ted and that he was very interested to see what kind of research he would be tasked with doing. He was very cautious about telling me anything specific about what the system was like on his end because "we're a brand new company, just starting." I thought it was charming that one of the 100 people hired to do tasks for a fee felt so closely associated with the business. These Hands Are Fancy People familiar with this kind of "human powered micro-outsourcing" will no doubt be familiar with Amazon's Mechanical Turk. All kinds of businesses bid for Turk users to perform rapid little tasks that require just a touch of human intelligence. Spammers pay Turkers to leave spammy spam around the web, podcasters pay Turkers to transcribe tiny fragments of audio files, businesses like Citysearch and Yelp pay Turkers to confirm changes to local business listings submitted by users. It's a big business, a platform that other businesses are being built on top of. These services can be taken too far, of course. Author Tim Ferriss famously paid a team of assistants to pretend to be him on dating websites. They vetted women for intelligence and appearance before scheduling a day full of short first dates all in a row. That's just dishonest, an interpersonal crime of convenience. There's something both more and less human about what Fancy Hands is doing, though. Its algorithmic task sorting could become very complex but the people on both ends are more invested, too. Roden says his model of $30 for 15 tasks per month makes people stop and ponder whether a task is really one they want to expend part of their monthly subscription on. There's something intriguing about that. For himself, Ted Roden has a simple rule for using the system he built. "If I think about anything twice, I just put it into Fancy Hands," he says. It will be interesting to see how often his customers think about Fancy Hands and whether enough of them will renew their subscriptions to make this a sustainable service. If nothing else, this mix of human and machine is thought provoking, and perhaps prescient, in the way it strategically blends the online and offline worlds. Photo by Justin Ouellette . Discuss
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Fancy Hands: Virtual Assistants, Aardvark Style
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During the iPad announcement , Apple stressed the face that the iPad was not just a fancy media player and web-browsing machine by highlighting the fact that it was porting its iWork office suite to the new tablet. After using Pages - the word processor in the iWork suite - for a while (and writing most of this review with it), it's clear that the iPad has the potential to be a good productivity machine for writers, but Pages on the iPad still falls short in a number of key areas. Sponsor Features Without a doubt, Pages for the iPad is one of the prettiest word processors we have ever used. The tabs and taskbar are clad in a faux leather look and just like its cousins on the desktop, the app puts a lot of emphasis on using images in your texts and making text flow nicely around them. Almost every feature you would expect from a mobile word-processor is available - including a few you wouldn't expect on a mobile device: you can enter tables, charts and shapes anywhere in the text; there are tabs, line breaks and page breaks, a distraction free fullscreen mode for reading (but not editing), as well as the options to change line spacing, create different styles of lists and choose from about 40 different fonts. You can also easily create multi-column layouts. Of course, there is also a spellchecker (just tab on an underlines word and he correct spelling will pop up). Sadly, though, you can't add new words to the dictionary. Problems: Import/Export Falls Short; A Few Missing Features Sadly, though, Pages does fall short in a number of aspects. While you can easily import and export documents (Pages and Word) by email or through iTunes , complex documents don't always survive this move intact. Footnotes and endnotes, for example, are simply deleted, making Pages for the iPad almost useless for a lot of students and academics. Tables of content simply become part of the text, which means that they don't auto-update any more. This would be annoying while editing the text on the iPad, but turns into a nightmare if you want to pass any document that's more complex than a straightforward letter or essay back and forth between the iPad and your desktop. Pages on the iPad also doesn't offer a word count, something most professional writers can't live without. Looking for more news about the iPad? For more of our coverage of the iPad launch, click here . Verdict Assuming you can handle the virtual keyboard - something that takes a bit of practice - or that you use a wireless keyboard, Pages can be a great tool for writing straightforward texts. While it offers great features for handling images, it would've been nice if Apple had paid a little bit more attention to the actual text editor. Discuss
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iWork Pages for the iPad: Good for Casual Writing but Lacks a Few Essential Features
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