One hour ago, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How do I know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told me. Nozzl Media today unveiled a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records like restaurant health inspections, building reports and public safety emergency responses. It's like a little robot reporter and the company plans on offering it as a mobile app in the future as well. Nozzl raises questions, though, about what constitutes news and whether or not human reporters are expendable in the news process. Sponsor Nozzl was founded by a team of ex-newspaper reporters and engineers. They got out when it was clear the newspaper industry was in trouble, but now they aim to give something back by bringing together the real-time, programmatic possibilities of the web with the reporting of the newspapers. Reporters have for decades written programming scripts that repeat database queries over and over again to extract public data for bulk analysis. The Nozzl team has taken that to the next level and combined it with new social media. The company put up a demo page for Portland, Oregon news that anyone can look at today. The public records streams are the big value-add and are fully customizable per newspaper. Visitors can then type live filter terms into the box at the bottom of the widget to zero in on topics of interest to them. That's the nozzle in Nozzl Media. User Experience is Hard For Robots Unfortunately, there are two big issues here. First, the flow of Tweets is overwhelming and undifferentiated. On the demonstration site you see almost nothing else unless you can think of something to filter for. If automated Twitter feeds hold value for local news, they will probably require some smart pre-proccessing before being presented to the reading public. There have always been people who like to listen to police radio scanners. Myself, I like to read restaurant health inspection reports, building permit applications and liquor license applications. If Nozzl had some categories I could choose between, that would be very helpful. The second, and more interesting, problem is that the public records that are extracted are exciting in theory but relatively unreadable in practice. The truth is, Nozzl didn't exactly tell me that there was an unconscious person reported at Nike HQ today - it told me with code from a form that there was an UNCONS/UNRESPONSIVE report at 1 SW Bowerman Drive, in Portland. A little Mad-Libs style transformation of forms into human-readable sentences and some pre-fetching of names associated with addresses could go a long way. Run the name associated with that address through a News search engine and tell me if its an entity that's been reported on in the past - if so then it's probably high-priority news to push live again. The company needs to put these machine-readable pages it displays into coherent English sentences, or find some other solution. Don't Forget the Humans Ambulances to Nike's Headquarters to help someone unconscious today? That sounds like it could be news. Even if the technology presented the information this clearly - it may take a human eye to pick this out of a list of automatically captured ambulance reports. Having a human available to pick up a phone, call Nike HQ and ask who was found unconscious there this afternoon would add another element of value to this data - but that's not what Nozzl is looking to do. The company is serving up raw data to news consumers. In the end, human reporters and raw robot feeds sound like a great combination. That appears to be what Nozzl is aiming to create by offering its widgets to established news organizations. The company says that a mobile application could be in its future, too. That's something I'm very excited about. Be it a widget or a mobile app, Nozzl's robot reporters need more polish before they are ready to win back the hearts of fast-leaving newspaper readers. As a picture of the future, though - Nozzl is very inspiring. Interested in what companies like Nozzl Media mean for the future of the web? Check out our profile of Nozzl and ten other case study companies in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future . Discuss

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Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters

While maybe not the most visually compelling product, Healthful Apps represents an interesting new trend for 2010. Created by Apps for All , the product recommends customer-reviewed iPhone health applications in a variety of categories including autism, relaxation and memory. Although the company's first effort is focused on health, the larger industry-wide question remains - will this year's branded iPhone app be a recommendation app? Sponsor Last year ReadWriteWeb covered Appsfire as one service that allows users to bookmark and share their favorite iPhone apps. While it's certainly a useful tool, recommendations are made by individuals rather than influential groups. As seen with Healthful Apps, there's opportunity to extend these recommendation-based applications to special-interest and location-based communities. Imagine investment communities trading and reviewing stock and news apps, or Oprah Winfrey's community recommending shopping and reading apps, or New Yorkers sharing transportation and amenity apps. The personalization of applications by politics, lifestyle, locale and community may prove more useful in making app recommendations than any automated Genius system that Apple could hope to cook up. Additionally, because providers can monetize recommendations through paid app referral fees, it's entirely possible that influential communities can earn money simply by weighing in with their app preferences. It's honestly so meta that it hurts, but if social media has taught us anything, it's that community influencers are tastemakers. If this is in fact the future, then my question to you is this - Which communities would you take recommendations from, and would you pay for the app? Discuss

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Will Recommendation Apps be the New iPhone App Hotness?

It's been a month since PayPal released its global payment APIs and the company is already primed to make some new announcements at today's Le Web Conference. ReadWriteWeb caught up with VP of Product Development Osama Bedier for an early look at the company's latest announcements. Sponsor We've already seen some 3rd party apps at the Innovate Conference last month, what's in store for Le Web? We're announcing a few new partnerships including one on Philips' Net TV. As of Q1 users will see inline payment on their televisions. Others include Greendizer for seamless bill pay and invoicing, GetGiving for one touch charity donations and Training Course Booker for fast course purchasing. The IPTV integration is an interesting one and Philips doesn't seem like an obvious partner. What other types of partnerships do you have in store for us? Honestly, we're not only looking to partner with the big brands, PayPal also wants to enable innovation from the little guy. We know we'll reach success when developers exceed our expectations. We're looking to them to decide how it plays out. Without taking credit for other developers' work, there are some great areas to innovate in voice authorization, real-time mobile applications, shipping, consumer apps and coupons. What does the future of PayPal look like? We're launching an app store where consumers can check out new and convenient payment forms and merchants can purchase specific solutions. How is this connected to Le Web's theme of the real-time web? We're looking to provide real time payment options and support. As a global leader you've got every opportunity to dictate industry pricing on apps and merchant services. What is the percentage you're going to take off merchant purchases from the app store?" We're not sure of that yet. What we do know is that it's going to be fair. We don't want to take our cue from some of the other closed platforms. We're offering visibility, easy integration of payment and smooth transactions. We're not trying to be Apple, we want as much cross device, cross platform transactions as possible. We make our money off the transactions, not the applications. If the future of PayPal is about seamless app integration, then doesn't that mean that in a perfect world PayPal is virtually indistinguishable from the app? Not exactly. We offer developers security authorization. Consumers want to know that their money is safe. There are lots of other providers, but developers choose us because our brand offers a sense of security. We're leveraging the success of our payment brand and the developers are responding. For more info on Le Web, check out Social Media Club House Discuss

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PayPal Partnering with Philips for NetTV Monetization

In an interview with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington at LeWeb today, Google's Marissa Mayer discussed some of the new product that Google announced over the last year, including the recent integration of real-time news streams into the default search pages, Google Music Search and Google Wave. Talking about the future of search, Mayer expects that people will soon do searches by talking to their phones, or through services like the newly announced Google Goggles . Sponsor Going Beyond Text While Mayer expects the search market to continue to grow, she also thinks that a lot of additional growth can come from introducing new ways of searching the web. Translation and personalization are also a major issue for Google. Asked about SearchWiki - which Arrington considers a failure - Mayer said that Google wants to morph the user experience a bit, but didn't go into any details. Regarding the Google Goggles and Google's current dependency on text to power its search, Mayer noted that the application looks at more than just location data and image recognition algorithms. Speech recognition, however, is still easier to do for Google than image recognition. Mobile Search Talking about mobile searches, Mayer said that the number of mobile searches doubled last year. Mobile searches make up slightly more than 5% of all of the search queries that Google processes. Chrome and the ChromeOS With regards to Chrome, Mayer noted that Google wants to focus on the user experience with features like the new tab page. She described the ChromeOS as an anti-operating system. In total, Google sees "tens of millions of Chrome users," though characteristically, Mayer did not go into any details. Google and the News Media Google wants to increase users' engagement with news. According to Mayer, if we were to reinvent the news today, it would look very different from what we know today. She cited Google Living Stories as an experiment that tries to reinvent the news for the 21st century. Currently, readers tend to come to articles from Google and only read one article. To increase engagement, Mayer wants to create more personalized services. In addition, she also thinks that newspapers can do a better job at keeping users on their sites. Why, for example, do most sites not offer links to related articles? The Future of News Mayer's vision of the future of news is a personalized stream of news that is portable. The personalization would take into account stories that your friends read, location and a knowledge of the topics a user is interested in. Asked about Rupert Murdoch, Mayer noted that Google partnered with MySpace to aggregate real-time status updates from MySpace users. She hopes that Murdoch will not pull all of his content out of Google. Surprisingly, Mayer didn't completely deny that Google would be willing to pay publishers for their content. Music Search Mayer said that she was happy with Google Music as a start, especially because it includes song lyrics. Mayer sidestepped any discussion about the future of Google's Music search feature. Google and Social Networks Asked about Google Social Search, Mayer noted that search can help social networks by helping users to find experts in their circle of friends. Mayer noted that users are more likely to trust their friends when it comes to certain queries (snow conditions, for example). The perfect search engine would also be able to crawl private updates that a user is credentialed to see. Mayer also noted that Google might be able to help to create an authority ranking system for real-time updates from services like Twitter and Facebook. Google Wave Arrington asked Mayer if users need to be trained better to understand Wave or if Google plans to tweak the experience. Permanent URLs are one of the features that Google plans to add. The fact that Google Wave doesn't have critical mass yet is also hindering the experience. Some teams at Google are currently using Wave for their internal communication. Mayer did not make any announcement regarding the future of Wave. Discuss

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Marissa Mayer Talks About Wave, Music Search and the Future of News

At the annual LeWeb conference today, Loic LeMeur interviewed Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey about about Square , the mobile payment system that launched as a limited beta in November. While the demo didn't quite work as expected - the Square dongle wasn't able to read Loic's credit card at first - we did learn a few more details about Square. Among other thing, Dorsey plans to launch an API in the future that will allow Square to connect to other financial systems and bookkeeping software. In addition, Dorsey announced that he plans to make the payment dongle available for free. Sponsor According to Dorsey, finance is one of two industries that is ready for a disruption. The other industry is healthcare, though Dorsey doesn't expect that we will see any major technological disruptions in this businesses within the next two years. One of the original ideas for Square was to use the iPhone camera to take a picture of a credit card and then use OCR software to read the data. As Square wants to be able to offer its service on multiple platform, however, the team decided to use a dongle that plugs into and audio jack. The team is currently working on the private beta and also working on building up its security team. As we noted last week, there are still some questions about the viability of this business, though Dorsey is obviously quite upbeat about the future of its new venture. Discuss

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Jack Dorsey Talks Square at LeWeb: Wants Dongle to be Available for Free

Outside.in is a hyper-local news aggregator and when they say hyper-local they mean it - the site captures news, blog posts and other resources right down to the neighborhood level. The company announced tonight that it's raised a nice round of funding, $7 million from CNN, the super-hip VC at Union Square Ventures , real-time savvy VC shop Betaworks and several other organizations. Both of the aforementioned are existing investors re-investing. Tonight the Outside.in site told me about a new real-estate valuation report for the neighborhood I just bought a house in, a city permit request by a local college planing to subdivide a big residential lot on the beautiful old street I walk my dogs on and some cool jobs in the neighborhood. What more could I ask for? Long term viability and an expanded staff for a service like this? That sounds great. Sponsor Outside.in says that its headlines will soon be run on CNN's website, much like MSNBC has said it will run hyper-local news from the related site it acquired this year, EveryBlock . EveryBlock tends to discover a lot more information than Outside.in does. Its public records discovery is especially good. It's a lot of fun to read health department inspection reports from neighborhood restaurants (in a perverse sort of way) and that's not something Outside.in unearths. EveryBlock has to date been limited to a handful of big cities around the US, though. Outside.in has no such limitation. Things not to love about Outside.in include a garish new advertising-filled page layout (just subscribe by RSS feed) and a heart-breaking iPhone app. That app discovers your location and brings up area news - lots of fun to use when house-hunting in different neighborhoods. Not so much fun when it fails to work, which is more often than not in my experience. If you want a good local news iPhone app, check out Fwix . I'm eagerly awaiting the launch of Nozzl Media , a related service we profiled in our report The Real-Time Web and Its Future . These kinds of data parsing services, tied to real-life experiences like geographic location, are becoming an important value add now that more and more data is coming online. Everyone wants to discover the future of news - these kinds of services could well be an important part of it. Note: Outside In is also the name of a 40 year old youth social services agency that also deserves respect, speaking of local. Discuss

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I Love Outside.in & It Just Got CNN Backing

Google held a major search product event today and among many incredible new products and features displayed was real-time search. Fresh search results pushed live to the search results page, with a pause button above that section of the page. Results are coming in from freshly published web pages, Tweets, MySpace updates and shockingly, Facebook public profiles. Check out the demo video below. Sponsor Want to see real-time results for any query right now? Go to http://google.com/trends and click on any of the hot topics on that page. Replace the search query in that page's URL with a new search term and if real time results are available, you'll be able to see them. This looks a lot like what Collecta offers with its XMPP API. This option should be baked into Google.com's main search results pages soon. The company also says that technologies like personalization and localization will be baked into real-time search in the future. Discuss

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Google Real-Time Search Live Now (Video, Links)