Riya.com did sound promising. Big-name venture capitalists like Bay Partners and Leapfrog Ventures had invested $19.5 million in the startup and co-founder Burak Gokturk was gifted with the technical know-how: he was a Stanford PhD and an image recognition expert with more than a dozen patents to his name. The facial recognition startup was barely out of alpha testing in 2005 when the acquisition hype began. "The rumors about a Google acquistion (sic) were neither confimed (sic) nor denied by anyone in the know…but there sure is a lot of buzz around this company right now," wrote TechCrunch's Michael Arrington in a blog post following Riya's alcohol-fueled launch party held in his backyard.
Riya promised to automate the process of image search by dispensing with the need for metadata and actually recognizing the faces and objects in a photograph. Computers were already pretty good at tracking down a string of text in 2005, but ask one to look at a photograph and tell you what it sees, and it would look at you with a dumb expression on its face. Google attempted to solve its own image search problem by turning it into a game: players would create text to describe the figures in a photograph and Google’s search engine would sift through these words to project the images on your screen. The founders of Riya (which would subsequently be rebranded Like.com) thought there would be a great demand from people wanting to tag friends and others in pictures, which would make it possible to organize these photo libraries. The company could then amass a database of user-generated images that weren’t covered by copyright protection and eventually sell ads against them.
Riya.com Interface
They were wrong.
The system was overly complicated, a five step process with two branches. And the business plan itself was built on too many assumptions--“and this will happen, and then when that happens, and after that happens, then we’ll make money and it’s really oblique,” remarked co-founder and CEO Munjal Shah in a 2009 talk. (After several requests for an interview, Shah declined to comment for this article.) Riya needed a new strategy just a year after launch.
On April 25th, 2006, just after midnight, Shah was looking at Riya’s stats when he noticed that for every person uploading personal pictures and tagging them, 20 others were using Riya for search. He immediately emailed one of his co-founders, Gokturk, who replied within five minutes. “I wonder what they are searching for?” Gokturk wrote back. “Why are they using our site instead of Google or Yahoo Images?”
It didn’t take long to unravel the mystery. Riya wasn’t a replacement for Flickr or Y! Photos; it had become a search engine for images on the Internet. By their actions, people were indicating that they wanted a search engine for pictures that was smarter than Google’s image search.
Riya quickly rebranded itself as Like.com and attacked a new vertical by turning itself into a visual shopping engine for shoes, handbags, watches and jewelry. This second iteration of the Riya’s technology allowed users to find an image, say of a strappy red shoe, and request Like.com to do a “Likeness search” to find similar items. Users could find variations of products in different colors, shop for clothing similar to what celebrities were wearing, and upload images of their favorite items then scour the web for similar items.
Like.com
With this new spin on Riya, Shah and his team were able to raise an additional $50 million from investors. The company’s annual revenue grew to $20 million generated through a simple, direct process: customers browsed for products, clicked, were diverted to retail sites like Amazon.com and Zappos.com and Like.com pocketed the 5- to 15-percent commission. By 2009, Like.com was selling $100 million in products through leads to merchants.
In 2010, Google showed how much it either liked Like.com -- or was threatened by a competitor -- by acqui-hiring the team that built it for $100 million and eventually shutting down the service. Needless to say, Shah and Gokturk would have never gotten that point if they hadn’t managed to pull off a pretty elegant pivot.
When the founder of paid content, Rafat Ali, started his new venture Skift, he wanted not only to provide news, but data, tools and services, as well. To make this happen, he turned to the folks at PublishThis.
Four Critical Content Elements
Skift, a travel intelligence media company, brings together four elements that have become the hallmark of PublishThis — aggregation, content curation, licensed and original content — all of which aim to add value and a customizable experience for the user.
We met up with PublishThis last week at Content Marketing World and got a glimpse of the what the content curation platform can do.
Create, Curate and Customize Content
During the conference we learned that a majority of content marketing professionals think their biggest challenge is producing enough content. PublishThis helps to diffuse this challenge by offering a plethora of content tools that help publishers keep their users engaged even if they don’t have enough original content to fill their feeds.
The idea is that publishers can supplement their sites with information that’s not only relevant to their audience, but easy to update and customize. The web-based app allows users to customize the content that feeds into their site based on unique keywords, conditions and outlets.
When we think of social media marketing, we emphasize the need to assert your authority by not just talking about what you do, but by incorporating information from other sources, as well. When it comes to content marketing, the same strategy applies. The goal for many sites isn’t just to provide the best original content, but also to serve as a hub for best content from across the web. This way, customers don’t get bored — and they find a reason to come back.
The Future of Content Marketing, Publishing
Currently PublishThis is available through an API or via their app. Soon, however, it will serve as a home base for clients who wish to host their sites with it, giving them the ability to build microsites. Additionally, PublishThis is working to improve the quality of content with a social trending algorithm that measures what is trending or popular in social based on the number of retweets, shares and likes based on your specific topic filters. This helps with content discovery for the curator, and the algorithm can be leveraged on a website topic page to publish automated content that defaults to what is "trending" rather than the more traditional "most recent" category.
Whether or not you agree that curation and aggregation is the future of content marketing, there’s no denying that the way users interact and engage with content is changing the face of web publishing. PublishThis gives content publishers a means for discovering and optimizing content, while giving content creators an opportunity to extend their reach of their words.
SRI International, the brains behind Apple's Siri, has launched a dozen consumer products since its digital assistant got famous. We venture inside SRI's labs to find out why you haven't you heard of any of them.
Years before the Apple-loving world met Siri in 2010, Norman Winarsky was playing with SRI International’s then prototype virtual personal assistant among fellow passengers on board a delayed flight.
“I was sitting on the plane waiting for the flight to take off, and I asked Siri, ‘How long will flight 927 be delayed?’ And Siri came back to me and said the flight would be delayed 15 minutes,” recalls Winarsky, who was the SRI executive on the spin-off company’s board before it was sold to Apple. “The guy next to me looked at me and said ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that … why are you in coach?’”
Spoofs and flaws aside, Siri has helped catapult sales of the iPhone 4S and will likely figure prominently into the appeal of the new iPhone 5. Credit is largely due to former Motorola executive Dag Kittlaus, who came on board as the Siri CEO and spotted the market’s hunger for something like her: Smart phones everywhere? Check. Wide availability of fast mobile Internet? Pretty much. The combination of field-based input, tiny screens and imprecise keyboards? Yep. A tool that took advantage of SRI’s deep expertise in artificial intelligence (gained from decades of work on government projects) paired with strong voice recognition software would prove to be a home run. It was a shining moment for SRI’s innovation model, which insists on identifying the market opportunity for a new invention before making it commercially available.
Winarsky remembers being blown away by how well Siri was integrated into the phone when the 4S came out last year. “[It’s] a spectacular edge that Apple has put forward,” he thought. And the cherry on top was Apple sticking with “Siri,” a name easily identifiable with the almost 70-year old company that launched the project.
The smart people who work at SRI International, an organization that’s been involved in cutting-edge research since the end of World War II, aren’t easily surprised. But they never realized the market potential that Apple saw in Siri. As it turned out, brilliant research-oriented inventors used to working for the Department of Defense don’t always make the best innovators.
And even after the Siri score, SRI didn’t exactly kick off a lightning round of consumer product launches, even though SRI is bubbling over with ideas. Today, few products put forth by the organization’s 2,000 employees make it through the gauntlet of SRI’s commercialization board. And only three or four of those are sold, spun off, or licensed by SRI each year. All told, SRI has birthed about a dozen consumer products since Siri. But have you heard of any of them?
Winarsky is quick to point out that the majority of SRI’s budget comes from competing for, winning, and working on government projects. That’s because from its beginnings as Stanford University’s research arm, SRI was happy and honored to work on solving the world’s big problems--curing cancer, developing unmanned aircraft, evading radar detection, renewable energy, robotics, interfacing with computers--and it was deeply invested in an altruistic, nonprofit business model.
SRI worked a lot on “the kinds of things you don’t solve, you just make progress on,” according to Bill Mark, a leader on the artificial intelligence projects that laid the foundation for Siri. But even before then, it was the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act that allowed SRI to parlay the inventions and intellectual property that came from its work on government-funded projects into private business opportunities. SRI transformed from a think tank and research organization sustained by government assignments to a center of innovation with its own nest egg. And over the last few decades, it’s helped birth a few important inventions and companies: Nuance Communications, one of the early players in voice recognition; Intuitive Surgical, which championed the idea of doctors using robots to make minimally invasive surgeries more precise; and various cancer treatment drugs. But there has not been a steady stream of Siri-like successes coming out of the campus on Ravenswood Ave. in Menlo Park.
In 2008 SRI unveiled robots that used the principles of static electricity to climb walls. Why didn’t they partner with a toy maker, slap a hard plastic shell on them to make them look like a ladybug, and make the robots the “it” Christmas present of 2010, asks Manu Chatterjee, a Silicon Valley-based strategist with experience at HP and Motorola. “That’s a storyteller problem, right there.”
“They’d be hard-pressed to refute the criticism that aside from [those products], they’re not hitting home runs, they’re hitting singles and doubles,” Chatterjee says.
Kittlaus had been the storyteller at Siri. As he said in a Chicago Tribune story earlier this year, “(Research) guys are great at solving technical problems. They're not necessarily great at figuring out what the hell to do with it.”
While there is a trophy case in SRI’s subdued main lobby populated by mementos from successful acronym projects--DARPA, DOD and ARPANET and even a couple Emmy awards for work on the technology used in HDTV-- it seems secondary, like a happy coincidence, the result of smart people doing great work but not trying to get rich. Even today, with iPhone commercials featuring Siri hobnobbing with a cavalcade of stars--and an SRI program that lets employees share in profits from their commercial successes--SRI lacks the buzz of tech-incubated startups that churn out more millionaires than profitable apps.
During a visit to SRI's campus for a daylong demo, the sheer brainpower on display is impressive. Scientists and researchers--only a few wear white lab coats, the rest are dressed business casual--live in a world where watercooler discussions are less likely to include the names of MVPs in last night's San Francisco Giants game and more likely to reference the official names for cancer causing proteins (HER-2, the one that causes breast cancer, is a hot topic). The long hallways in some buildings were compared by one researcher to stalls at a flea market. Another ponders a comparison between the lab and the Island of Misfit Toys but says some projects here are hot, live, and destined for consumers. Plenty are considerably cooler.
Janey Ly, a researcher in SRI’s biosciences division who began the laser-aided cancer screening project called FAST at Xerox’s PARC and moved the program down the road to take advantage of SRI’s deep knowledge in her field, seems unfazed by her long timeline. Even working quickly, she and her colleagues won’t see FAST being used widely for at least five years. It took them almost a year to set up their lab on SRI’s campus, and clinical trials (the FDA requires two, one of which has been completed) can take up to three years.
Grit Denker and Rukman Senanayake, key collaborators on the eye-tracking, gesture-following, display-morphing device called bRIGHT, are talking about 10 years before their project might really be finished.
And Rich Mahoney, SRI’s director of robotics and key proponent of the thousand-dollar robotic hand, marvels at how much progress his industry has made making robots that can safely participate in human environments since he was a PhD candidate in the 1980s. (If you shook hands with a robot working on an automaker’s assembly line then, it might rip your arm off.) “Starting in about 1980, every decade was supposed to be the decade of robotics,” he says. He’s still patiently awaiting its arrival. “I’ll never say this is the decade of robotics.”
There’s a certain amount of audacity required in an organization to believe you have the staff to even tackle these problems, to start from scratch and go through all the R&D growing pains, but there’s no cockiness on display at SRI. Its campus resembles a small liberal arts college while the plans for Apple’s new building evoke the UFO from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Aside from an updated grill/wok station, the cafeteria probably hasn’t changed in 40 years. And Winarsky, now the vice president of SRI Ventures, an organization with a couple thousand great minds at its disposal, is still sitting in coach.
What Siri has done here, however, is spawn a host of opportunities for SRI to leverage its AI resources and win clients for decades to come. Its aggressively pushing forward with apps like TrapIt, a content aggregator for the iPad; Desti, a search engine focused on travel in the San Francisco Bay area; and the web-banking concierge Lola, developed for Spanish bank BBVA-Compass. Winarsky suggests there will be more to come, with businesses looking to gain a competitive edge in their industry asking SRI to develop an app for them.
“One of the challenges we face is trying to bridge the gap between the kind of things we can do, and the problems people have. So having Siri as a point of reference--‘how good would Siri be at solving your problem, what else would you need?’--provides something people are familiar with,” says Mike Freed, an SRI artificial intelligence expert.
But the challenge for SRI and its employees is to maintain the spirit of innovation that swept the campus after Siri’s star turn and push for their projects–some might be world-changing, others might just be fun. Freed, for example, asked during a lunch of fish tacos how some of his nascent projects could make a journalist’s life easier; Mahoney seems committed to being a researcher/entrepreneur and even has a role with a robotics incubator called Redwood Robotics. But what the company might need most are more people like Kittlaus, who could bring storytelling to SRI’s inventions to help turn them into innovations.
Ondango, a third-party provider of Facebook stores, has secured a US$ 500,000 capital investment from a group led by London-based venture capital fund Connect Ventures. The new capital will be used to scale Ondango’s Facebook-shopping platform.
Based in Germany, Ondango provides a platform the company says allows users to set up a Facebook store in minutes, with no technical knowledge. Users pay a monthly fee and Ondango also says no e-commerce experience is needed to run a Facebook store on its platform.
According to Ondango, it will use the new investment to accelerate growth and scale its services for small- and mid-sized businesses. Specific areas where Ondango plans to focus improvement include driving traffic to Facebook stores and overall customer experience.
Not Waiting around for Facebook
A posting on DailyDealMedia credits Ondango for “subscribing to the theory of tapping into what is becoming known as Facebook commerce.” This refers to a Facebook commerce performed without the assistance of apps. While Facebook “flounders around trying to figure out how to best monetize its unofficial 1 billion users,” DailyDealMedia says third party providers like Ondango are trying to tap into its “massive user base.”
Independent data suggests Facebook commerce, whether supported by Facebook itself or a third party, could prove quite lucrative. DailyDealMedia references Booz & Co. estimates that the worldwide market for social commerce will be US$ 9 billion this year and top US$ 30 billion by 2015. As DailyDealMedia understates, “It’s anticipated that Facebook could perhaps amass a rather large slice of that social commerce pie.”
Social Media Has ‘Science Fiction’ Potential
In a recent CMSWire column about the Social Media Intelligence Conference, Matthew O’Connell indirectly supported the notion of Facebook becoming a major direct e-commerce channel by discussing the “science fiction” potential social media has to change our daily existence.
The pervasiveness of social media on the internet is obvious,” wrote O’Connell. “Within a very short time, we'll be (social networking) in our Google Glasses, Facebook Phone, contact lenses (MIT has a patent on these) or brain implants, with less effort and easier access. By integrating this worldwide system of information seamlessly into our reality, we are on the precipice of an entirely new language; one of vision, intuition, transparency. In this world, we are everywhere at once without leaving our homes… The power that companies like Google and Facebook have is nearly unlimited.”
While O’Connell does not discuss social commerce per se in his column, clearly he is describing a world where social networking becomes a pervasive, everyday means of interaction with the world, and we all know how big a role commerce plays in our daily interaction.
Several angel investors, including Andy Goldstein, executive director of the Ludwig MU Entrepreneurship Center, have also participated in this round of financing. More than 400 Facebook shops use the Ondango platform, mainly in the music, sports and lifestyle market segments.
