Data Services TastyLabs Launches Skills.to Joshua Schachter and his team of star developers at TastyLabs have begun work on a second project, an endorsement and people search engine called Skills.to. The site lets you endorse people for their skills in various fields, see what the people you know have been endorsed for and search for people with particular skills. The site is just… Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments
Data Services Can OpenGeocoder Fill the Platform Gap Left by Google Maps? How do machines understand what place you're talking about when you say the name of a city, a street or a neighborhood? With geocoding technology, that's how. Every location-based service available uses a geocoder to translate the name of a place into a location on a map. But there isn't a really good, big, stable, public domain geocoder… Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments
Analysis How Two Startups Use Games to Beat the Developer Crunch "You can't judge if someone is one of the best programmers in the country in 1 minute, but it turns out you can in 5 minutes." Good software developers are hard to find. Startups are all about finding creative solutions to common problems - so why not this one too? Two startups that have found creative and interesting ways to solve their… Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments
Analysis When Bots Go Mad There may or may not be robots that are truly "good" someday, but there will probably be bad robots, if there aren't already. If not bad robots, then bad robot situations. You can catch a taste of the feeling of what might go wrong in the robot pricing wars that elevate the cost of certain used books on Amazon into millions of dollars. For… Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments
Amazon AWS Launches Simple Workflow Service Amazon just announced the availability of a new service called Simple Workflow Service (SWF), which allows developers to define a series of complex steps in carrying out a business process, then implements and monitors those steps all together, as a service. "This new service gives you the ability to build and run distributed, fault-tolerant… Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments
Data Services Pixar Engineers Leave to Build Real World Living Toys Teddy Ruxpin, meet Siri. Imagine a children's toy designed by the people behind the Toy Story and Finding Nemo movies but connected to the web and chock full of artificial intelligence. Then add in visual tracking, speech recognition and massive network scalability. It appears that's what San Francisco startup ToyTalk is building, based on… Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments
Analysis Why Talent Management Tech is Super Hot and Bound to Get Hotter Skill building, tracking and optimization, knowledge retention and measurement of workplace effectiveness - those are the aims of some of the software industry's hottest companies. SuccessFactors got bought last year for $3.4 billion by SAP. Taleo got bought by Oracle for $1.9 billion last week. Salesforce bought Rypple and Workday is one of… Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments
Internet of Things How Big Data From Connected Machines Gets Used "Big Data" is a hot topic these days, but there hasn't been a lot of discussion about the specifics of what will most likely be one of the biggest sources of data: newly web-connected devices in the home and workplace. I spoke this week with Bill Zujewski, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy & Marketing at M2M (machine to machine… Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments
Crowdsourcing Kickstarter's New Kings Late last night Jane McGonigal, the most respected authority in the world of gamification, Tweeted that she'd pitched in to support the creation of a new point and click adventure game from respected game development shop Double Fine. That was the first trickle I saw of what quickly became a flood of support for the Double Fine Adventure… Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments
Analysis LinkedIn Eats Rapportive: Let's Hope the Magic Lives On Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at an advertising industry conference with Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Arrington, my former employer, was bored by the conversation and mocked me throughout it. One of the last questions we were asked on the panel was what technology we were most excited about at the time. I said I was most excited by… Marshall Kirkpatrick View comments