As we reported earlier, 22 teams of European entrepreneurs gathered at Seedcamp in London last week to compete for a chance to win serious investment in their startups. ReadWriteWeb has been following these and other entrepreneurs on our ReadWriteStart channel, so you can get good background there on some of the teams selected to compete.

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Seedcamp, however, is far from a simple dragon's den-style pitch and panel investment company. The week-long camp included many hours of training sessions and mentoring from some impressive industry names: Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and a slew of other big-time companies and individuals. Alongside training and pitching, the teams also scheduled opportunities to mingle with venture capitalists and potential industry complementors. In the end, five of the teams received €50,000 each and will remain in London for three months for more training. But this single week is the tip of a Seedcamp networking iceberg.

Similar to Y Combinator, Seedcamp focuses on the beginning phase of a company's growth, and it feels more like a "foster" organization than a traditional investment group. After speaking with CEO Reshma Sohoni (previously of 3i), we learned a bit more about the vision and context in which they work.

Sohoni explained that Seedcamp has two parts: a seed fund and a platform of support, which work together to get the most interesting companies past the initial hurdles. Seedcamp focuses on opening doors and translating a startup's ideas into a marketable product. Its platform model leads on from a very Web-savvy approach to business.

"We've taken the best of what's happened in the past 10 to 15 years in terms of the Web for finding great new investment opportunities and supporting them through a much more federated (not so much top-down) structure of working," says Sohoni.

Seedcamp aims to put people in contact with a strong support network, so that after the €50,000 is spent and their three months of additional support have expired, the startups should be in very capable—and well-matched—hands.

An example of this "platform" mentality could be seen in the series of panels throughout the main event. The panel discussions provide a venue for attendees to question people who have "made it." It seemed like a good opportunity to learn from the mistakes and successes of startups that are no longer new.

At the technical panel, for example, the audience posed questions about scaling applications and servers to some of the biggest names in scaling history: Blaine Cook (who built Twitter), Vijay Pandu (who worked at Google), and Matt Biddulph, CTO of Dopplr. This is a seriously cool idea, because it gives everyone a chance to ask about specifics: "What servers do you use?" "How can I stop X from happening?" Questions, in other words, that might take a long time to find answers to otherwise. The panel also presented little gems of advice, such as, "Don't test too closely, sometimes. You'll just get stuck in making red flags green and miss the bigger problems."

Seedcamp sees itself as a startup, too, with a very active approach to business, and it has seen some significant changes to participating teams this year. For one thing, more teams are coming from further away, and one of the winning five (Talasim) came all the way from Jordan! This is an impressive step for an initiative that has always seen itself as pan-European. "In previous years, most of the applicants were coming from the UK, and most then only from London," said one observer. "That's changing."

The quality of applications is also improving year after year, no doubt because of how startups are moving from conception to competitor so quickly. Many of Seedcamp's impressive advisery groups (which mentor the next generations of 'Campers) were themselves successful applicants.

The proof of any initiative is its success, and the success of Seedcamp will be found in the number and quality of startups it helps over the next few years. Tracking the next bunch of industry disruptors, and seeing which ones have come through the program, will be interesting. If the past few years are any indication, we should see quite a few!

This bit of advice from Blaine Cook on the technical panel seems an appropriate note to end on:

"If you're not obsessed with your own product, you need to change what you're doing. Keep changing it until you care about it. Then work on scaling."

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Google Wave is one of the most-hyped new product launches in recent memory, but now that thousands of lucky people are getting to try it out - early reactions are mixed. If the hard-core geeks aren't sure if they like it, that could spell serious trouble for mainstream adoption.

Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and Louis Gray are three tech blogger geeks that love to use new tools and all got to test Google's new real-time communication platform Wave today. It's possible that when the rush is over the Wave experience will seem less overwhelming, but the kinds of initial reactions these three had aren't good.

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We've covered Wave extensively in the weeks leading up to today, Frederic Lardinois has been covering this beat and wrote up his initial impressions earlier this summer. We must confess though that few members of our team have received an invite to the live app. They are slowly trickling in, through "nominations" and delayed invites, but I thought I'd share some other writers' initial reactions below, followed by some general observations about the challenges of a real-time communication experience.

For a good introduction to Google Wave, see enthusiast hacker Gina Trapani's Wave Highlight Reel.

Steve Rubel summarizes his thoughts like this:
I have had a Google Wave sandbox account since late July. It's slick to be sure. However, what I keep asking myself is this: what problem does it solve? In many ways it's overly complex. In fact it's too complex for the era of the Attention Crash where all of us, especially knowledge workers, are crying for simplicity.

Robert Scoble is not a fan:
I just got my Google Wave invite. No, I'm already out, so I can't send one to you, sorry. But this service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity.

See, the first thing you notice is that you can see people chatting live in Google Wave. That's really cool if you are working on something together, like a spreadsheet or a Word document.

But it's a productivity sink if you are trying to just communicate with other people. It also ignores the productivity gains that we've gotten from RSS feeds, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

Louis Gray has a long, detailed review that concludes like this:
I would bet that after the initial surge of curiosity, normal conversations and information exchange will eventually take over, so this initial spike may be an exception rather than the new rule. But if you're diving into this new technology, expect do be exerting a lot of energy to stay on top of it, because messaging just got accelerated.

Have you had a chance to try Wave yet? We have high hopes for the Real-Time Web in general, but in the many conversations we've been having with other companies in this broad market one concern has loomed large: user experience. Wave is an ambitious effort and is technically impressive, but user experience, strategic content filtering and concurrent/complimentary use of static information display are all important as well.

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With almost half a million broadcasters, popular lifecasting service Justin.TV could probably create a section for clown fightclubs and still have thousands of video voyeurs clamoring to entertain us. The company just launched its first in what is likely to be a long list of sub-sites. Gaming.justin.tv is a sub-site that offers viewers info, events and videos specific to the gaming community. The company is already working on followup sites with music and social channel queued up for the future.

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It's hard to believe that a young man and his hat camera could build an empire like Justin.TV. In just three years the company has gone from a four-person gritty apartment startup, to a service with more than 21 million unique monthly visitors. The site currently serves the equivalent of 16,946 standard DVDs per hour in video content and ReadWriteWeb featured it as one of the top 5 video sites in the world. With the new channel sub-sites, this empire is about to expand even further.

In a blog post the company writes,"Justin.tv sub-sites will have their own promoted content and could include custom features as well...Now that there's a dedicated gaming area, we're free to build new features just for gamers that may not have been possible before."

Last month ReadWriteWeb covered Wikia's profit announcement. Wikia acknowledged that corporate sponsorships on sites like the World of Warcraft and Halo communities were particularly lucrative. Justin.TV is likely to see even more advertiser interest. Video production often requires much more time than the average wiki contribution, and viral video makers are perhaps some of the most sought after customers due to their far-reaching networks. If corporations can get to a sub-site's influencers and gain favorable reviews, then the outreach could generate huge sales growth. Furthermore, given the fact that the Justin.TV's traffic more than doubles Wikia's, it will be hard for advertisers to resist the lure of these fan communities. To check out the first sub-site, visit gaming.justin.tv.

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Google Wave has arrived. The real-time communication platform has been one of the hottest and most anticipated products in the tech and social media space for months. Soon around 100,000 people will be messaging each other in one of Google’s most ambitious projects to date.

So what if you’re one of the lucky ones to get an invite, or just want to understand exactly how this new tool works? While we cover the basics in our Google Wave Guide and have explored its game-changing features, we haven’t really written about exactly how to use Google Wave and how to navigate it.

So that’s exactly what we did. While not comprehensive, our guide on getting started with Google Wave will help you quickly learn the interface and important keyboard commands that will open up the full potential of Wave. Don’t forget to check out our extensive Google Wave coverage when you’re done for more tips and insight.

General Interface

The Google Wave interface is divided essentially into four boxes: Navigation, Contacts, Inbox, and your current Wave. Here’s a rundown of each of these core pieces of Wave:

Navigation: This is not your standard left-hand navigation bar. Yes, it has similarities to Gmail, but navigating Wave is definitely a new experience. Each of the items essentially filters your inbox for waves that fit what you’re looking for. “Active” refers to waves that have new activity, “History” checks for old, archived waves, and “Settings” lets you manage things like your extensions. You can also add custom searches (i.e. waves that discuss your company) and add folders. Adding a wave to a folder is as simple as drag-and-drop.

Contacts: Your contacts are more prominent in Wave. That’s because you drag and drop them to add them to waves, rather than type in an email address or a username. You can search through your contacts and manage them via your Google account. It’s still a bit buggy – Wave will tell you some people don’t have accounts when they do – but overall it’s smooth.

Inbox: The inbox in the middle of the Google Wave interface doesn’t work like an email inbox. The key to navigating the inbox are search and search commands. It’s the easiest way to filter different waves. We have a list of key search commands below.

Wave Box: This is the box on the right hand of Wave. This is where conversations happen. Add participants, discuss what you’d like, and add multimedia through Google Wave gadgets and extensions (for more on Wave Extensions, check out Google Wave Extensions: An Inside Look).

This is the pure overview of the interface. However, if you want to learn more about the features and the terminology, we suggest checking out Google Wave: A Complete Guide. Google also created a quick YouTube video tutorial of Wave, courtesy of Wave’s mascot, Dr. Wave:

Starting a Conversation

Getting a conversation started in Google Wave is rather easy – it’s understanding all of the available conversation features that’s difficult. Let’s explore a few steps to get started with a new wave:

1. Click on the “New Wave” link. This will start a new conversation.

2. Drag and drop friends you’d like to have join your wave from your contacts box into the top of the wave.

3. Start typing.

Remember, Wave is different than email. You can reply to messages as threaded conversations and, more importantly, you can edit the text of anyone in the conversation. These options become available when you click on the downward facing arrow at the top of any message (a blip) within a wave.

Also note the top bar, with “Reply,” “Playback,” “Archive,” “Mute,” “Spam,” and “Read.” While most of these are self-explanatory, the feature you should be using liberally is “playback.” If you join a wave in progress, always start by playing back the wave to see how the conversation transpired.

Wave Search Commands

A big part of navigating through your Wave inbox are the search commands. They help you find public waves, your archived messages, or just waves related to work. Here are some of the most important commands to keep in mind:

is:read and is:unread: This will help you find all of the waves you have or have not read. is:active is the same as is:unread currently.

is:mute and is:unmute: The same type of deal – This helps you find conversations you may have muted or unmuted.

title:(keyword): This command helps you find waves with a specific word in their titles.

caption:(keyword): This helps you find waves with a keyword in the captions of attached images and files.

from:(address): This command will help you find waves from specific people. On the same token, from:me finds waves from you. to:(address) finds waves where it’s just you and the person you’re searching for.

past:(date), previous:(date), after:(date), and before:(date): These four commands help you search for waves in time periods, based on days, weeks, months, and years. Use “d” for day, “w” for week, “m” for month, and “y” for year. So, if you want to find something from before 3 months ago, you’d type “before:3m”. Yes, it’s complicated.

has: The has command will search for whether a wave has an attachment, a document, an image, or even a gadget (has:gadget).

There are actually a lot more commands. To read them all, we suggested checking out Google Wave’s advanced search terms list.

Wave Navigation

There are an abundance of keyboard shortcuts that make using Google Wave a more streamlined experience. Thanks to a list first created by Google’s Greg Dalesandre in the development version of Google Wave, we can bring you a full list of keyboard shortcuts, which we’ll update periodically.

First, here are the commands for Wave Navigation:

Up/Down Arrows: As you might expect, use the arrows to navigate messages.

Tab/Shift-tab: Same functionality as the Up/Down arrows (outside of edit mode).

Home/End: Moves you to the first or last message.

Space: Go to next unread message (note: it doesn’t have to be within the same wave).

Left/Right Arrows: Switch focus between digest panel and wave panel.

Page Up/Down: Currently doesn’t work properly due to a bug.

Ctrl-Space: Marks all messages as read.

Messages in Wave

Enter: Replies to messages. Your reply will appear just below the selected message. If it’s the first reply, it will not be indented (but otherwise it will be).

Ctrl-R: The same as enter.

Shift-Enter: Replies to messages at the end of a thread. Replies of this nature appear at the bottom with the same indentation in almost all cases.

Highlight Text + Enter: Creates an inline reply. Your reply will be indented inside the current message.

Ctrl-E: Edit a message.

Ctrl-Enter (while editing): Inserts an inline reply at the caret.

Text Editing

None of these commands will really come as a shock, but they’re still good to know.

Ctrl-B: Bolds text.

Ctrl-I: Italicizes text.

Ctrl-G: Adjust the color.

Ctrl-L: Currently links to another wave if you hightlight the text and put in the URL or Wave ID, but the keyboard shortcut will be changing soon according to Google.

Ctrl-C: Copies text.

Ctrl-X: Cuts text.

Ctrl-V: Pastes text.

Structural Formatting

Once again, not too many surprises here:

Ctrl-#>: Changes the current line to a different-sized heading – 1 is biggest, 4 is smallest.

Ctrl-5: Adds bullets.

Ctrl-6: Normalizes text/removes bullets and headings. Does not remove italics, bold, or text edits.

Ctrl-7: Left alignment.

Ctrl-8: Right alignment.

Much, Much More to Come

Google Wave is far from a complete product. They will add new features, tweak the interface, and change entire chunks of it based on user feedback and the data they gather from this initial release. Because of that, we will continue to add to this guide and tweak it. It’s also why we suggest staying tuned to our Google Wave coverage for the many updates that are coming.

More Google Wave Resources from Mashable

- Google Wave: A Complete Guide

- Testing Google Wave: This Thing is Tidal

- The Top 6 Game-Changing Features of Google Wave

- Google Wave: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web

- Google Wave Extensions: An Inside Look

- Could Google Wave Redefine Email and Web Communication?

Reviews: Gmail, Google, Google Wave, YouTube

Tags: Google, Google Wave

If you're a hiring manager, marketer or journalist, you know how important it is to have leads. Those of us who've been on the hunt for good sources and staff have often resorted to bookmarking portfolios and saving them for a later date. Today, LinkedIn announced Profile Organizer- a service that offers premium users a chance to bookmark and annotate the profiles that interest them most.

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With Profile Organizer, bookmarking is simple. Users save contacts with one click and are given the option to create category files for their contacts. If you want to separate the product managers from the designers or the engineers from the HR staff, you can. Users are given the chance to name their contact folders by occupation, location or other relevant labels. From here you can also choose to add contact information and notes. The information is only visible to you so you can be as descriptive as you like. If you don't already have a tool like Salesforce, the notes section is a great place to jot down a contact's interests and hobbies. If you're the type of person who needs more to jog your memory, it's also a great place to record the details of your last conversation.

The Profile Organizer is available to regular LinkedIn users for a 30-day trial. Business members can access the service but are given a limit of 5 contact folders. Meanwhile, Business Pro and Pro members can create as many as 25 contact folders. To test the new product visit Linkedin.com/organizer.

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Google has launched a new version of its Toolbar for Firefox that lets you translate any webpage with the click of a button without leaving the page. Google will also add web-site suggestions and sponsored links to the toolbar as you type in any query.

The new toolbar is synced with Firefox version 3.5’s Private Browsing mode so that the tool bar will not record your searchbox history while you are in this mode. It will also turn off PageRank, Web History and Sidewiki.

Last week, Google announced their new web annotation system, Sidewiki, that will be included in the new version of Toolbar for Firefox. Sidewiki allows users to leave a comment on an entire page or a selected piece of text, and share the URL via email, Twitter or Facebook. Users can read and vote comments up or down, which creates a user ranking for each individual that will determine where their comments fall on the Sidewiki. The higher the ranking, the higher comments appear. So now you can make comments on pages that aren’t published in your own language.

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When Facebook attacks, it’s not pretty. We were just remarking on how new ways of spreading malware were plaguing social media, and now the second Facebook-related scam in the past week appears to be spreading.

Have a look at the picture below, and if you see a profile similar to what you see in the screenshot, do not click on the video link. If you do, you’ll see a similar “malware warning” to that pictured at right. If you keep following the prompts, of course, you’ll then actually be infected as the program pretending to warn you about malware installs its own malware payload.

This time the spyware appears to have the ability to create fake Facebook accounts and endow the profiles with these fake links. It’s troubling because it means the hackers have figured out a way to endrun around the captcha system that usually ensures the account creator is a real human.

Until Facebook has a chance to deactivate these rogue accounts, use caution when encountering any profile that looks similar to the above screenshot. Let us know in the comments if you’ve seen any of these fishy profiles in your travels around Facebook today.

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: facebook, malware, spyware, warning

A little over a month ago, Twitter announced that it would be attaching locations to tweets in an effort to become a stronger geolocation tool. The company said that it would attach a latitude and a longitude to a user’s tweets, if they opted into the geolocation feature. But nobody knew when the feature would go live.

It seems that the microblogging company is now ready to roll out its location-based feature. According to Twitter’s Raffi Krikorian, Twitter has begun to implement geolocation in apps. This is the first step before a site-wide rollout.

In his post on the Twitter Development Talk, Raffi explains some of the steps in the process of enabling Twitter apps with the new geolocation API. While important, the bigger revelation is that they’ve deployed the feature for internal testing (thus, only a select group of apps, like Tweetie 2, will have the feature for now). Soon though, they’ll activate the feature for everyone.

Geolocation is a logical step for Twitter’s mobile and on-the-go users. As we highlighted in TWITTER LOCAL: 5 Twitter Geolocation Features We Want, new features such as trending places and notifications for when friends are nearby should soon be possible with this new location-based push.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: geolocation, twitter

As we first reported last night, Twitter appeared to have turned on at least part of its new Geolocation API. Today, the company has confirmed the roll out on its API Announcement Google Group page.

As Twitter API team member Raffi Krikorian writes today, “as some of you may have already noticed, we’ve started going through the first steps to get the geolocation API out our door.” Last night, a portion of the Geoloction API got turned on and it slightly borked the new, still unreleased version of Tweetie. Basically, it looks like it turned on geolocation coordinates for all tweets, even if they weren’t meant to be enabled. This gave every tweet a coordinate of 0,0, which put them in middle of the ocean off the coast of Africa.

Tweetie developer Loren Brichter quickly realized what the issue was and corrected it. Other third-party developers we talked to noticed similar things. As such, Krikorian explains a bit more about how the Geolocation API will work today. As he writes:

if you start to pull status objects through the API, you’ll notice that, for the majority of them, there is an empty <geo/> tag and for the user objects there is a <geo_enabled> tag that is set to false.

And he continues:

for clarification: the <geo_enabled> will always be in a user object reflecting whether the user has opted-into the geolocation API.  there will also always be a <geo> tag in the status object regardless of whether there is a location attached to the tweet or not.  if there is no location, then the tag will be empty.  if there is a location (as above [here]), then the tag will be populated.

So it would appear that some of these apps weren’t taking the <geo_enabled> tag into account, and it may have been automatically setting it to ‘true’ which would then populate the <geo> tag with the 0,0 coordinates, since there was no actual geolocation data to share.

But, to be clear, the <geo> tag will always be there whether <geo_enabled> is set to ‘true’ or ‘false’, but if it’s ‘false’, it won’t be store any data and will self-close, I’m told.

Krikorian suggests that there have been some slight last-minute tweaks to the Geolocation API and that these are still in internal testing, but that they will be turning it on for a general audience “soon.”

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Howard Lerman can be a little intense. After the CEO of Yext finished his demo at this year’s Techcrunch50 (embedded below) he left one judge “speechless,” and during rehearsals Michael took him aside and asked him, “Are you on drugs?” He wasn’t. Lerman just has the heightened dopamine levels of an entrepreneur. And he hadn’t slept for 45 days because he was pushing his New York City startup to relaunch on an entirely new technology platform for TechCrunch50

Over the past three years, Lerman and his co-founders (who all went to the same high school together in Virginia), have built a local advertising business under everyone’s nose that is on track to generate $20 million in revenues this year.Yext is going after the huge, entrenched Yellow Pages business with online ads for local businesses that result in phone calls instead of clicks.

At TechCrunch50, which was the company’s public debut, Yext relaunched with a whole new product, going from plain vanilla pay-per-call ads to pay-per-action ads where the action is a relevant call that actually drives new business. Each ad has a unique trackable number that goes through Yext’s system, where it is recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Yext customers get their own inbox for calls which is like a Google Voice for businesses. There is a transcript for each call, the phone number of the person who called, and a full audio file that can be played back. When a business signs up, Yext places ads for them across the Web in local directories such as Yellowpages.com, SuperPages.com, Local.com, 1-800-Free-411, 4Info, Topix, RepairPal, and more. It turns those ads into phone calls.

Yext uses speech-to-text recognition licensed from IBM and fine-tuned with its own algorithms for each business category it targets. Co-founder Brent Metz used to be an engineer in IBM’s speech science labs, and his name appears on many IBM patents. Only when certain key words related to the actual services offered by the business are mentioned in a call (”spinal decompression,” “oil change,” “install countertops”) does Yext charge for it. Wrong numbers, marketing calls, or calls from beyond a pre-determined geographic area are put in a junk folder and Yext doesn’t charge for those.

This means Yext needs to be really good at both driving relevant calls to local businesses and identifying them. “You’ve got to be transparent,” says Lerman. “We take all the risk, then we pull our pants down and show them what they get.” Lerman is so confident of his technology that at TechCrunch50, he switched all 20,000 local businesses already using Yext over to the pay-per-action system. It is a big, gutsy bet.

The minute he stepped off the stage, Lerman was inundated with emails and business cards from seemingly every venture capitalist and M&A officer in the room. He tried to ignore them and soak in the rest of the conference, but some of them were from people any startup CEO would be foolish to ignore. He took a few meetings with the most serious VCs, and ended up closing a $25 million B round, led by Institutional Venture Partners (which is also an investor in Twitter). The money just hit Yext’s bank account a few hours ago. “Anyone who doesn’t launch at TechCrunch50 is crazy,” says Lerman.

IVP partner Dennis Phelps will be joining Yext’s board. Sutter Hill Ventures, which had put in $3.5 million in an A round in June, 2008, also participated in this latest funding.

Yext is currently only in 12 local categories, including auto repair, chiropractors, gyms, vets, and yoga. There are 2,300 Yellow Pages categories. Lerman is going to take the $25 million and aggressively expand into those categories, hiring sales people to go after each one. He already has 75 employees.

Lerman is also extremely excited about getting Yext numbers into mobile apps. He thinks he can build an AdSense for mobile phones. “What do you think is the perfect action for mobile?”he asks. “It is a phone call, not a click.” App developers who sign up here can freely import Yext numbers into their apps by business type and category. So a travel app could bring up nearby auto garages or window repair shops for stranded travelers and get a cut of any call revenue they generate. Lerman has a lot of ideas like that.

Here is the demo from TC50 that got him $25 million:

Photo credit: TechCrunch/Chanaye Thomas.

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Earlier this year we profiled Pachube, (pronounced "PATCH-bay"), a service which stores and shares real-time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments. The uses for Pachube are only beginning to be discovered in 2009, but for example it could in future power automation of lighting and alarm systems in your home.

The Internet of Things is one of ReadWriteWeb's top 5 trends of 2009; and Pachube is a leading startup in this space. I spoke to Pachube founder Usman Haque recently, to find out about their new notifications feature. In this two-part post, we will explain the new feature and explore where Pachube is headed.

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In its announcement, Pachube calls the new notifications feature "triggers," although it also calls them "webhooks." As the term 'trigger' suggests, it is a feature that causes a specific action in external applications or devices. The company explains that triggers will enable Pachube datastreams to "plug into and provoke (i.e. trigger) remote actuators, devices, scripts, buildings, etc."

The new feature is significant because up till now, Pachube had mostly been a "pull" service. Developers could freely send data to the Pachube system, but in order to get it out they had to repeatedly poll (i.e. "pull") the system to discover changes.

Now with triggers, applications built on top of Pachube can immediately act on data and send out new data to remote devices, actuators and buildings. The company states that this is "what a "patchbay" should be!"

Pachube claims that the notification feature will "take Pachube to a whole new level." It gives the following scenario as one example use of triggers:

"You might build an alarm system: put a trigger on a datastream that measures temperature in your home and, when the temperature exceeds a certain amount, have it send you an SMS, switch on a alarm light in your office and switch off the heating system in your home."

In effect, triggers make Pachube a much more powerful system. Previously Pachube had been mostly a storage device, where Internet of Things data could be uploaded. Now Pachube developers will be able to push data in real-time back to real world devices, which significantly increases its potential functionality. Plus of course this is yet another example of the Real-Time Web in action!

Usman Haque also told us that Pachube has been predominantly a developer tool up to now, with a lot of experimentation happening. That will still be the case for the foreseeable future, as Internet of Things is far from being a mainstream activity.

In Part 2 of this post on ReadWriteWeb, we will explore the full ramifications of the notification feature and update you on Pachube's plans for the future.

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Today, AVG, makers of antivirus program LinkScanner, noticed a disturbing rash of nearly identical Facebook profiles aimed at infecting users' computers with spyware.

AVG's research chief Roger Thompson said that LinkScanner users had reported "rogue spyware attacks" from a large number of these profiles. He postulated that the fake profiles were created automatically, which would indicate that someone, somehow has figured out a way around the ReCaptchas used to protect Facebook from bot-created content.

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"I'm sure Facebook will deactivate all these accounts as quickly as they find them, but it can't be an easy thing for them to find." he wrote.

Here are a few screenshots Thompson posted. Please note that all the fake profiles he reported showed the same main image:

According to statements made by Facebook spokesman Simon Axten to CNet, the link was reportedly blacklisted by web browsers and Facebook was blocking the URL. Interestingly,
Axten disagreed with Thompson's assertion that the profiles were automated and the Captchas had been conpromised.

"We're looking into how these accounts were created, but it's very likely that the sign-up process was manual or that the person behind the attack farmed out the Captchas to be solved by humans for a price," he said.

Facebook is working to shut down the profiles. Users are cautioned to keep their distance from any profile containing the image of the woman shown above.

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The business social network LinkedIn is not just a way to connect with your business contacts. For a lot of recruiters, salespeople, and other professionals, it’s a great business database for finding potential leads and new employees. Organizing the people and information you find though … well, you’re better off with a customer relationship management (CRM) tool like Salesforce.

LinkedIn took another step into Salesforce’s turf though with its launch of Profile Organizer, a new CRM-like tool that allows you to save profiles, organize contacts into folders, and add your personal notes on each.

The interface is very simple overall. On any profiles you visit, a new option to add people to your organizer will appear. Clicking it will add them to a new area of your contacts section where you can see these profiles, sort them into folders, add your own thoughts about them, and categorize them.

The tool makes perfect sense, especially for LinkedIn’s heavy users. Perhaps that’s why this feature’s reserved for the social network’s premium users. However, the company is offering 30 day free trials of Profile Organizer so that you can play around with the tool yourself.

Profile Manager probably doesn’t pose a major threat to Salesforce, as it has loyal customers, a vast database, and far more advanced features. LinkedIn seems more suited for recruiters, while Salesforce is more adept at leads. Still, this is won’t be LinkedIn’s last step into the CRM realm. Expect more CRM-like features from LinkedIn in the near future.

Reviews: LinkedIn

Tags: linkedin

It looked as if Twitter may have dropped a bomb on a number of Twitter-centric third-party apps yesterday by announcing its new Lists feature. It’s a feature that Twitter really should have implemented a while ago for better filtering if nothing else, but they didn’t, and that gave rise to services like TweepML and Wefollow. So are those guys now mad about Twitter’s latest move? No. Instead, they see it as an opportunity to make their services even more popular by hooking up with the feature through its API.

Brizzly, a web-based Twitter client from Thing Labs, was the first to come out and share its enthusiasm for Twitter’s new feature. One of Brizzly’s key selling points is that you can filter the people you follow on Twitter into groups. As the Brizzly official account tweeted out yesterday, the plan is to now support Twitter Lists. They’ll apparently offer the ability to convert your Brizzly groups into these lists, which is nice.

Meanwhile, Digg founder Kevin Rose’s latest project had been Wefollow, a Twitter directory for popular people to follow in various fields. So is he annoyed by Twitter lists, which will allow users to group people in a similar way? Nope. He tweeted out a link to Twitter’s blog post about Lists a few hours ago with the note, “playing w/twitter lists feature, this is going to be cool ”

The most interesting would-be competitor for Lists however is TweepML. The service, which we covered here, allows you to create your own lists of Twitter users to follow to send and share with others. On the surface, that sounds very similar to what Twitter Lists is, but founder Marcelo Calbucci has already gotten a chance to play with Lists and says that he too looks forward to integrating TweepML with Twitter Lists.

He also notes what he sees as 10 key differences, which we’re reposting here with permission:

• #1 You can’t create a list with yourself: A Twitter list is a subset of your followers. You cannot follow yourself, and you cannot add yourself to a list you create. If I create “Entrepreneurs in Seattle” list, I cannot be on it.
• #2 You can only add people you follow: That’s the same issue as above, but what if I want to create a list that doesn’t have everyone that I follow. For example, I might not want to follow all the 300+ Entrepreneurs in Seattle.
• #3 It’s hard to add people to your list: To add someone to your Twitter list you go to your Friends page and select one-by-one who you want on your list.
• #4 No way to go from list subscriber to tweep subscriber: Imagine you are following a list of 25 photographers. You get upset because the list owner keeps adding irrelevant people, or removing cool people. You decide you just want to follow them directly. There is no UI to do that now.
• #5 No way for people to know you are following them: If you follow a list, the people on that list won’t be notified you are following them. You lose the opportunity of them following you back.
• #6 No way to “follow-the-list-except-that-guy-who-tweets-too-much”: If you follow a list is all or nothing. You can’t exclude that guy that can’t stop tweeting.
• #7 You can’t import/export lists: They don’t support the TweepML format, but they’ve promised a server-to-server API, which doesn’t matter for end users. If you have a list with 25 accounts, there is no way to easily import a list. There is no way to export that list either, like into a spreadsheet or a text document.
• #8 What if you block someone: Blocking on Twitter is somewhat weak already, because the person can continue to follow your tweets by just going to your page (if your account is public like most people). Now, if someone creates a list that you are part of it, anyone that you blocked can follow your tweets again by following the list.
• #9 No stats or analytics: Right now Twitter does not tell you anything about your list. I believe in the future they will tell you how many people are following that list, but that’s it. No way to know how people found the list, how many people came and went, etc. This is probably not important to your average user, but for power users and business, this is critical.
• #10 No dynamic lists: Finally, Twitter doesn’t allow you to have dynamic lists. For example, if you go to TweepSearch and you want to follow everyone who’s a Security Consultant in Seattle you have to be manually updating that list.

Some very interesting points from someone who has used the feature already.

Overall, it looks like Twitter did a smart thing by allowing these competitors to check out Lists from the get-go. Rather than seeing this as a hugely threatening gesture by the service, these competitors all are welcoming it to varying degrees. Twitter also did a smart thing by making sure Lists launched with an API, so third-parties can build things that will do many of the 10 things listed above.

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Unless you’re lucky enough to have your own private jet, the whole process of air travel can be pretty frustrating even under the best of circumstances. Navigating the airport, going through security checks, dealing with luggage requirements, and hoping for no delays are just some of the issues air travelers face, and that’s before you even get on the plane.

Because there is often a considerable amount of downtime waiting for your plane to take-off and land, it’s no wonder that many of us have taken to using our cell phones or mobile devices to tweet out our frustrations (or pleasure) with the status of our journey through the sky.

Perhaps that’s why an analysis and study by Dolores Labs and PeopleBrowser interested us. The two companies teamed up to see what airlines had the largest percentage of recently satisfied customers (based on Twitter data). The results are pretty interesting:

It’s important to note that this sentiment analysis isn’t entirely error proof. By searching tweets for the name of an airline and positive or negative words, overall sentiment can be determined, but the results are far from perfect. For instance, Aloha Airlines ranked highest on the list, but they no longer exist and it seems many of the tweets might have been completely unrelated to the airline.

Still, the data is fascinating. In general, larger carriers had more negative tweets than smaller carriers like Virgin. The one exception to this rule was Southwest, which had about a 85% positive sentiment rating, despite being a larger carrier. Words like “upgrade” and “rocks” and “internet” were common in the positive sentiment tweets, while words like “fail,” “sucks” and “delay” were highly represented in the negative sentiment tweets. Incidentally, NorthWest had the lowest percentage of positive tweets.

What airline is your favorite? Do you tweet about your good or bad experiences? Let us know in the comments.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: Airlines, customer satisfaction, twitter sentiments

The second we laid eyes on Smule's autotuning, pitch-changing iPhone app, I Am T-Pain, we knew it was going to be a huge hit - and it has been. We just got some details from Smule's CEO, Jeff Smith, on how things are going so far. In the first 3 weeks alone, the application has seen 300,000 downloads. The average user spends around 66 minutes within the application -- an absolutely ludicrous number for any app, much less one out of the entertainment category. To date, 4.1 million performances have been recorded within the application. So, what's the best way to celebrate making lots and lots of money? By adding new content - oh, and giving away lots and lots of money.

The Smarter Cities series is supported by IBM. Read more about building a smarter planet on the IBM A Smarter Planet Blog.

Social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even email, instant messaging, and SMS have become the defacto way we communicate with each other. Because of the mainstream embrace of social media, we now live in a world where information is shared at lightning speeds and as a result, we’re actually finding ways to use that free flow of data and information to make the world a safer place to live.

From tracking trends in crime to finding the safest bike routes around a city, from getting emergency alerts during a disaster to understanding the spread of dangerous illnesses, social media is being used by both public officials and private citizens to make our cities safer. This post outlines just a few of the ways that social media tools are now being employed to keep the public safe and informed.

Find a Safe Place to Live

Before you even move to a new city, social media and mashups can help you to identify the safest places to live. Apartment data tracking web sites Zilpy and Apartment Ratings can both provide neighborhood crime statistics for those searching for a new place to live, for example. Another helpful tool is CrimeReports, which shows data on crimes committed in the vicinity of any street address in the United States; and families with children may want to use Vision 20/20’s Sex Offender Locator to identify the neighborhoods where accused sex offenders are residing.

Using tools like these you can find the safest places to hunt for a new home or keep on top of crime in your neighborhood and recognize trends. Is crime on the rise? If so, then perhaps it is time to start thinking about moving to a new place, or maybe people in your area need to organize around making the neighborhood safer. Other sites, like Crime Mapping, which puts public crime data on interactive maps, and the aforementioned CrimeReports, are actually being used by police to identify local crime trends.

Elk River, Minnesota Police Chief Jeff Beahen told USA Today that online crime maps recently helped the department nab criminals after a series of burglaries. The department used a crime map to more accurately predict which area the burglars were planning to hit next and deploy officers more efficiently. “We caught them in the act,” Beahen told the paper.

Local news site Everyblock also taps into public records to create mashups that can help keep people safe. In addition to plotting and tracking local crime, on many of the site’s metro pages users can also get information about recent restaurant inspections, helping them to find a safe place to eat.

Getting Around Safely

Getting around a city safely can in many cases mean advance planning. Sites like Google Transit, HopStop.com, and PublicRoutes can help you navigate public transit systems more safely, while mass transportation-focused blogs like Inside Transit and Seattle Transit Blog keep people informed about the system and give them a place to sound off.

Social media is especially useful for those who get around on two wheels. In New York City, for example, NYC Bike Maps offers interactive views of the city’s bike paths, lanes, and greenways, while Crashstat maps data about bike and pedestrian injuries and fatalities in the city. Both tools can be used to identify the most and least safe areas of the city to use a bicycle. And blogs, such as Bike Blog NYC, or Bike Portland in Portland, Oregon, and Bike Providence in Providence, Rhode Island, give bikers a way to come together, form a community, and stay informed about issues that affect bicycle safety in their city.

Many other cities (such as Philadelphia and Baltimore) have similar, user created resources.

For those more interested in walking, maps mashups and social media sites can also be helpful in keeping you safe. The Stumble Safely site, for example, is a mashup that combines a crime map of Washington, DC, with a map of local bars, clubs, and eateries, helping you find the best places for safe nightlife.

Tracking Illness

Another way social media is helping to keep us more safe, is by keeping us more healthy. Social networks have allowed information to spread in new and unprecedented ways, but illness still spreads by human-to-human contact in the same way it always has. Social media is now allowing us to more easily track the spread of illnesses, however, and be more prepared to fight them. Both Healthmap and Who is Sick? track outbreaks of illness on a map (the former using public data from governmental sources, the latter using user generated reports).

This type of data can be helpful in keeping the public informed about potential outbreaks, helping us prepare better ways to stay healthy, and it can help researchers learn about how diseases spread. Researchers have actually used similar sites in the past to learn how sickness spreads around a population and can use that data to better predict the spread of infectious diseases.

Maps and social media mashups are also being used to keep the public up-to-date on the latest potential pandemic illnesses, as well. For example, the Swine Flu Tracking Map can be used by concerned citizens to keep on top of the latest outbreaks of the particularly worrisome H1N1 flu strain.

Keeping the Public Informed

Because social media channels offer such an amazing way to spread information, it’s natural that many web services exist to keep citizens informed of important issues. CrimeWeb is a free, centralized, web-based clearinghouse for public safety information that is currently being used by many local government organizations across the US. Users can sign up to get alerts about missing children (Amber alerts) and adults, homeland security updates, major crimes and fugitives, as well as local community information. Similarly, crime data mapping web site SpotCrime offers free crime alerts by email, and also sells crime tracking iPhone applications (iTunes links) for New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and London.

Mainstream social networking tools are also being used to keep the public informed and connected. The Police Department in Dallas, Texas, for example, uses Twitter to put out crime alerts, as do the police in Boston, Massachusetts with the @Boston_Police account. The Police Department in Richmond, Virginia, meanwhile, uses both Facebook and Twitter to connect with the public and answer questions, and in Michigan, the Department of Transportation is using social media tools like Twitter and YouTube to connect with those that use their services and keep people informed of changes and interruptions in the public transit system.

Local neighborhood crime watches are also finding social media tools useful. The Shreiber Crime Watch in Dallas, Texas uses a blog and SMS alerts to keep citizens up-to-date about potential threats, and the Safe Atlanta for Everyone neighborhood watch program in Atlanta, Georgia uses a Twitter account in addition to a blog to stay connected with the public.

In addition to keeping the public informed about matters of public safety, social media services have proven to be invaluable tools for organizing and connecting people and disseminating information during disasters. After the horrific massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007, for example, Facebook became an online gathering place as people began to reconnect with loved ones and work through their grief. And social media has been used each year as a way to track and get information about the seemingly annual wildfires in California (in 2009, 2008, and 2007).

In fact, web-based and social media resources are now among the first places people turn during a disaster. “It’s becoming more organized,” says Leysia Palen, a researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “We see evidence that people are learning that online sources and communication can be very critical. Looking for help, searching lists of the missing, finding emergency housing online. It’s become an important complementary news source and a way to get involved [...] People are increasingly going to online sources — with new ones emerging every day — and learning how to behave online in emergency situations.”

Catching Criminals

With more and more public safety departments turning to social media to stay informed, it is becoming more commonplace for social media to be utilized in actual police work as well. In July, for example, the Boston Police used Twitter and Facebook to track down bicycle thieves, while the Los Angeles Police Department utilized YouTube in an effort to locate criminals that broke into actress Lindsay Lohan’s home in August.

And using social media is becoming a common trend in modern police work. From police in New Zealand using Facebook to catch a burglar, to police in Ohio utilizing social networks to circulate pictures of criminals, social media tools are becoming the modern equivalents of the Post Office wanted poster.

Police are also using the things people post on social networks and blogs as a way to track down law breakers. “We are using this (Facebook) as a crime-fighting tool. It’s becoming pretty common,” said Indiana, Pennsylvania Police Chief William Sutton after his department utilized Facebook photos and videos posted on YouTube to identify out-of-hand party-goers at a post-Super Bowl street gathering last February.

While the latter is a case of what happens when criminals incriminate themselves on social networks, it is clear that social media tools are being used in smart ways by police departments and neighborhood watch groups to make our cities safer.

Smarter Cities series supported by IBM

The Smarter Cities series is supported by IBM. Read more about building a smarter planet on the IBM A Smarter Planet Blog.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

Tags: crime, safety, smarter cities

This guest post was written by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was elected to the position in 2003 and reelected in 2007. Newsom is also running for governor of California in the upcoming 2010 election. In this guest post, Mayor Newsom announces a contest to create apps using city data from DataSF.org,.

Last week, we announced a City App Store to highlight and centralize software applications developed from government data available on DataSF.org. The response from the community has been overwhelming.

We have received a number of new civic apps that are now featured in the DataSF App Showcase. We’ve added Mom Maps, a new iPhone app that helps you find kid friendly locations in San Francisco, Dadnab a text messaging service that gives you transit directions, and then there’s EveryBlock, which has just added a new feature. The site breaks down what types of services people are requesting from the city by neighborhood, zip code and day.

This type of innovation is exactly what we were hoping for when we launched DataSF.org less than six weeks ago.

We were not sure what people would create with the data, but we knew that many of our talented developers wanted to help improve San Francisco. Now, our community is coming together to help fill our app store with even more civic apps.

The Center for Investigative Reporting’s California Watch reporting team, Spot.Us, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, MAPLight.org, the Gov 2.0 Summit, Sun Light Foundation and others are announcing today that they are joining forces to sponsor the first DataSF App Contest on Nov. 7.

The day-long app-building contest is open to developers, journalists, community organizers, policy wonks, students and others interested in building a better San Francisco from more than 100 datasets available on DataSF.org.

Register here for the DataSF App Contest. If you are interesting in sponsoring the App Contest, visit the Spot.Us page

A team of judges will pick the winning app at the end of the day and award a cash prize or Apple gift certificate to the winning team. More than $1600 has already been raised from community sponsors. If you would like to donate to the contest please click here.

We are excited to see what apps will be created from this contest. The only limit is participants’ imagination and the amount of data we are able to make available by Nov. 7. In San Francisco we are moving away from a one size fits all government to making government a platform for innovation.

If you are using or have created an application based on City data that is not in our DataSF App Showcase, we would like to hear from you.

Join Mayor Newsom on Facebook or follow him on Twitter.

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For those of you about to rock, I encourage you to pick out a nice pair of headphones. I tested four models at around $100. They are:

Ultrasone Zino - $99

Philips Tapster - Price TBA

Shure SE102MPA - $119

Klipsh S4i - $99 Which one did I love the most? While they were all special in their own way, there were two that really stood out in the round-up… but I won't ruin the surprise! Watch the video to find out.

Brightkite has been one of the major players in the location-based social networking game for a while now. Originally a TechStars startup, the company was bought in April by Limbo, with the goal of merging the two location services. Since that time however, Brightkite has been flying a bit under the radar as a fresh crop of location-based services have popped up including the new early-adopter favorite, Foursquare. But now Brightkite looks ready to strike back at the competition with Brightkite 2.0.

It’s not entirely clear when Brightkite 2.0 will launch, but indications are that it will be soon. Users have been receiving notices about it. We’ve obtained a whole bunch of screenshots purported to be of the new version. We’ve reached out to the company to verify these, but they definitely look legitimate.

So what’s new? The first thing you’ll notice is that the whole look and feel of the site has been revamped. Gone is a lot of the clutter that distracts from the main location feed. This has been replaced by a revamped top toolbar, and a new bottom toolbar (think: Facebook).

Filters are a key part of Brightkite now. Rather than having three different main streams (Me & My Friends, Around Me, Universe), there is now one with a few different filters. There are also new filters to sort through people using the service by factors like location, sex, and age.

Checking-in has been simplified, as has adding a new place. And Brightkite 2.0 promises simplified privacy settings so you can more easily set where to send you updates (to the public, or just your friends — to Twitter and/or Facebook).

Also new is the ability to “like” other people’s updates. Obviously, this is similar to the functionality found on FriendFeed and Facebook.

But the biggest change to Brightkite is that it is going asynchronous. That is to say, rather than forcing you to accept a friend request to enable other people to see you updates, those people can now simply follow you without any confirmation needed, like on Twitter. They will become your “Fans” while people you also follow back are your “Friends”.

This is an interesting move since Brightkite is a location-based service, and privacy remains the main issue for why all services, like Facebook, don’t switch to this model.

Below, find more screenshots.

CrunchBase Information Brightkite Information provided by CrunchBase

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