Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake launched a new startup this Spring called Hunch and today announced that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has joined the company's board of directors. Hunch is a social Q&A service that, in effect, says, "people who are like you and who have preferences like yours tend to be happiest with the following answer to that question you're asking." The company reports seeing one million unique visitors last month, and in his own blog post about the announcement, Wales calls the intersection of community and algorithm "the future of the web." "This," he writes, "is what we are going to come to call Web 3.0." Sponsor Hunch relies on users providing information about themselves, something they do by answering a series of fun multiple-choice questions. The company says that 28 million of these "Teach Hunch About You" questions have now been answered, and all kinds of interesting correlations can be drawn as a result. Hunch went so far as to write a 13 page report all about the differences it has observed between the self-perception of Mac owners vs. Windows owners. In another report about the intersection of food choices and political ideologies, the company says it found the following: When it comes to choice of lettuce, everyone likes romaine, but conservatives trend heavily towards iceberg and liberals trend heavily towards arugula. For kitchen styles, conservatives vote for the wooden, country look and liberals lean towards sleek, stainless steel. Conservatives are more likely to drink sugar soda but less likely to drink wine; liberals are more likely to eat vegetarian options and more frequent portions of fruit. These questions and answers are ostensibly not the point of Hunch, though. The point is to help users make decisions about things like what blue jeans to buy or what neighborhood to move into. The site has undergone some recent design changes and it's unclear that the main Q&A is as compelling or interesting as the Teach Hunch About You part. Hunch says it aims to become the "Wikipedia for decision making." The sites are clearly similar: both are user-created and curated collections of knowledge. While that's a laudable goal, I haven't found myself going back to it regularly after our initial review. I'm more of an Aardvark kind of guy when it comes to social Q&A. Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise then that Hunch says Jimmy Wales and I have a lot in common demographically but very little in common in our ways of thinking. Discuss

Visit link:
Wikipedia Co-founder Joins Flickr Co-founder's New Startup

The rapid growth of the mobile web is a force that could be disruptive to Google, a company that built its search engine for a desktop-based world. On the handheld, all bets are off. Anyone with an innovative concept for improving mobile search could gain ground, possibly even overtaking Google as the top search provider for mobile devices. But don't worry - Google hasn't been ignoring this trend. The company has been busy prepping various initiatives designed to get people googling from their mobile phones. From scannable barcodes to an innovative visual search app that lets you perform searches by taking photos, Google is slowly revealing how they plan to dominate search in the real world too. Sponsor Google Does Barcodes (Again) Google hasn't given up on barcode scanning just yet. Although a failed Print Ad program featuring barcodes for newspapers was shut down at the beginning of the year, that hasn't stopped the company from giving barcodes another go. This time, the venue isn't the old-fashioned newspaper, but local businesses. Through Google's Favorite Places program, over 100,000 of the U.S.'s most popular local businesses will receive stickers sporting Google's logo, a scannable barcode and a message reading "we're a favorite place on Google." Business owners can post these decals to their store windows to show off their respectability and popularity - and you can bet many will. Customers scanning the barcode will be taken to that store's "place page" which reveals various details about the business including hours of operation, reviews, photos, directions, phone numbers, brands carried, menus (if a restaurant), and even mobile coupons if available. In addition, users can "star" (rate) the establishment and submit their own review, if desired, turning Google Local Businesses into a Yelp -like user-generated reviews service. While this initiative has a better chance for success in introducing barcode-scanning to the U.S. market than the Print Ad program did, there's still going to be some confusion on the part of consumers as to how to get started. Google notes in their Favorite Places FAQ that many modern smartphones including the iPhone, Blackberry, Droid, and other Android devices offer barcode scanning applications, but no links or suggestions are provided. This leaves consumers with having to figure it out on their own. In addition, feature phone owners whose more basic devices include cameras may also wonder if there is software for their phones, too. In some cases there is , but the less tech-savvy mainstream user base has no way of discovering that without taking the time to do some research on the topic. Perhaps Google should have introduced a cross-platform barcode-scanning application of their own? If they had, it could have definitely helped push the technology adoption forward. It's almost surprising that they haven't yet done so especially considering that their latest search rival, Microsoft, has. With Microsoft Tag , for example, you can create your own barcode-like "Tag images" as well as download mobile Tag-reading software. Mobile Coupons As mentioned above, the Favorite Places' barcodes will link to pages that support mobile coupons, assuming the business chooses to offer them. However, these coupons aren't limited to "favorite" businesses - any business listed on Google Local Search can use this feature. Announced late last month , Google introduced the mobile coupon feature to their Google Local Business Center program which lets any company offer coupons that consumers can access right from their mobile phone. At checkout, the shopper just needs to show the coupon on their mobile's screen to receive the discount. Visual Search via Mobile Photos Google Visual Search is an upcoming technology still in development which was revealed on CNBC's " Inside the Mind of Google " segment on December 3rd. This innovative mobile application aims to provide an even more intuitive way for interacting with the real world via your mobile phone. With Visual Search, users with phones running Google's own mobile operating system "Android" will be able to take a photo of their location and use that to trigger a Google search. In order for this to work, advanced algorithms have to match the photo with those stored in a massive database on the backend. Initially, this service could be used to provide information about various landmarks, businesses, or other notable locales, but really the possibilities are endless. Eventually, the same technology that recognizes landmarks could recognize other objects, too, like products on store shelves, billboard ads, or street intersections. It could even

The newest premium research report from ReadWriteWeb is available for purchase and download now. Titled The Real-Time Web & its Future , the report is based on 50 interviews with engineers and executives building or leveraging real-time web technology. This is about far more than Twitter and Facebook. From a little startup called Nozzl Media delivering real-time public records to newspaper websites, to Aardvark's building a "real-time web of people" using social networks and IM, to the way the Red Cross uses the real-time web to save lives - this report will give you a broad and deep understanding of the state of the real-time web, directions things might go in the future and some of the key personalities advancing these technologies. Sponsor Compared to traditional analyst reports, we believe this product is more affordable, more in-depth and more effectively forward-looking than anything you'll find elsewhere. The report features: In-depth case studies of 10 organizations leveraging real time in a way that illustrates best practices or demonstrates inspiring innovation. Examples include: Warner Bros. Records, The American Red Cross and Superfeedr. Profiles of 20 people you should know and understand in order to understand and participate effectively in this market. People like John Borthwick, Ron Conway, Chris Messina, Monica Keller and Brett Slatkin. Sector overviews of the most heavily populated parts of the real-time web: search, stream readers and text-analysis middleware. Charts, graphs, visualizations and more. You can download the Table of Contents and a sample chapter at no cost, to get a feel for what's included. This report represents the best wisdom from thousands of hours of industry experience, compressed through hundreds of hours of interviews, now available to help you get a jump-start in this big new direction the web is moving in. 84 compact pages of research, all for a mere $300. Below is a matrix of big issues discussed in various parts of the report. We trust you'll find this research an invaluable resource. Purchase The Real-Time Web & its Future here. Discuss

Follow this link:
Now Available: The Real-Time Web & its Future

A subject of interest to us ReadWriteWeb folks this year has been smart grids - a method of delivering electricity to users' homes in a way that has been the cause of many green technologists for some time. Smart grid tech uses digital means to control appliances at users' homes to save energy, cut costs, and increase reliability. However, some experts are beginning to wonder how safe and anonymous this data is and how much end-user privacy could be compromised. Sponsor And as the concept of "anonymized" user data is continuously being poked full of holes by everyone from hackers to academics, we must wonder just how much smart grids "know" about individuals. For example, the energy fluctuations of home appliances are so unique that a smart grid can tell the make and model of a user's refrigerator. A recently released report from the Future of Privacy Foundation states that although more modernized approaches to energy consumption are absolutely necessary, uninformed enthusiasm about smart grid technology might lead to privacy breaches for end users. "The infrastructure that will support the future Smart Grid," the report reads, "will be capable of informing consumers of their day-to-day energy use, even at the appliance level. While this is beneficial and supports valuable efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and reduce consumers' energy bills, it introduces the possibility of collecting detailed information on individual energy consumption use and patterns within the most private of places - our homes. "We must take great care not to sacrifice consumer privacy amidst an atmosphere of unbridled enthusiasm for electricity reform. Information proliferation, lax controls and insufficient oversight of this information could lead to unprecedented invasions of consumer privacy." Another report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology states that, because of the lack of standards and procedures on data collection and storage, "Distributed energy resources and smart meters will reveal information about residential consumers and activities within the house." The Foundation's co-chair, Jules Polonetsky, stated in a Washington Post interview today, "We're a little worried that without some serious planning now, there's going to be quite a challenge in a couple of years when people start realizing that maybe should think about developing some solid data retention policies that address what's going to be done with all of this data." Valid concerns, all, especially for users who would rather keep themselves, their families, and their homes "off the grid," under the radar, and largely unmonitored by corporate and governmental entities. Will user privacy be the factor that undermines cleaner, smarter energy for all? Or will smart grid companies find better ways to protect user data, just as social networks and marketing firms have had to struggle to do? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss

Read more:
Are Smart Grids Undermining User Privacy?