Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we’ve learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today.

Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways.

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We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future. Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark)

Here’s how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report:

Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics.

Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots.

Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn’t see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010, even a year and a half after it launched.

We haven’t been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web (our coverage) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move.

A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages.

Take that, semantic web doubters.

We’ll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri’s work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company’s technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

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For obvious reasons, we care about what goes on in various parts of the world, particularly New Zealand and other areas that are underserved in terms of Internet access.

So, we were quite excited to learn this evening of a new proposal that would give New Zealanders – including a couple RWW staff members – a better broadband experience. According to NZ website Stuff, a haldful of well-known innovators and entrepreneurs are teaming up on a $900 million dollar project that would give Kiwis (and their Ozzie neighbors) “virtually unlimited” broadband access via an international cable that would run across the Pacific Ocean. Just how much of a difference would this cable make compared to current Internet access?

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The difference would be significant, as Stuff’s graphic shows:

The plan is to construct a 5.12 Terabits per second-capacity fiber cable to connect Australia and New Zealandto the U.S. – a cable that would deliver data at five times the speed of the current network.

This proposal puts Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, TradeMe creator Sam Morgan, entrepreneur Rod Drury, and techies Mark Rushworth, John Humphrey and Lance Wiggs in competition head-to-head with Southern Cross Cable, a large network partially owned by Telecom New Zealand. The team, called Pacific Fibre, hopes to complete the project by 2013.

Of course, the next step is figuring out the exact cost of the proposed cable – the group thinks $900M might be a highball figure – and find investors. However, as Tindall eloquently noted, you have to spend money to make money – something anyone with an interest in NZ’s economic future and global competitiveness must consider.

“The New Zealand Institute identified billions of dollars in economic potential by unleashing the Internet,” he said, “and it is beyond time to address the issue. This is necessary and basic infrastructure – we must decrease the distance between New Zealand and the international markets.

“Doing so will be incredibly valuable for New Zealand and Australian businesses and consumers. If we are able to deliver on this cable this it could be as valuable to our NZ economy as the quantum leap refrigerated ships were to our export trade many years ago.”

How feasible do you think this project will be? Is 2013 a realistic time table? And where do you think Pacific Fibre’s investors will be found? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

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As the cloud is getting more players and interfaces, best and worst practices are emerging. As the market grows and more companies try to plug in, the cloud may benefit from guiding principles.

Similar to new technology movements in the past, a natural process is underway to define “what is good”, which, for some in the industry, equates to “what is open”. Like religion itself, open can be defined in ways that are uplifting, or on the other side of the coin, restricting. Also, we learn again, nothing is free.

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Cloud APIs Must Walk on Water

If you’ve been part of a software development project, you know that sometimes it’s hard to get the team to all agree on best practices for interface design, database optimization, or even what technology to use. In this analysis, we take a look at some of the movements in cloud computing that start to lay a framework of good as it relates to this technology.

In this context, API designers for cloud applications need to think ahead and avoid common pitfalls. For several reasons, more than ever before. First, because many people will be accessing your one piece of code. Second, is that in this world of open APIs, it’s easy to compare your code against another.

We notice that data management practices are at the core, and details matter when provisioning in platforms. At the same time that groups are forming to align practices and forms of virtualization and cloud standards, a voice whispers that perhaps this is a free-market problem. People who benefit at solving it, will; others will ignore it or compete directly. We enjoyed this post from Joyent on where standards matter in a practical sense.

In essence, the question raised: If a vendor makes it easy and bakes in the ability to “just do it”, do you know or care about the standards? This seems to mirror an iPhone development paradigm, which is to expect work from the vendor SDK or libraries. The SDK wraps standards implementations, which is done in the way best understood by that vendor.

Do Unto Others as You Would Have Done To You

We know the cloud is big – perhaps it will inevitably be bigger than the Internet itself as it usurps our conception of location, space and time.

Where power forms, rules, groups, and organizations do as well. In information technology there is always tension between open standards and defacto standards. The former are crafted through agreements, the latter through leadership and market dominance.

We asked in a prior series “Will a single company become the dominant provider in the cloud?” Today we look at the more practical side of “who is winning now” – who is setting the rules and who is in the trenches.

Quite a number of the responses to our earlier posts emphasized that “the cloud should be free”, meaning that it should have governing principles to avoid one vendor from owning the landscape.

Here are a few groups that have emerged to provide some context in how this may come together, both philosophically and practically. In both, the devil is in the details. A good summary of some of the current combining of forces is by the Open Grid Forum. (In our opinion, grids have given way to clouds as the dominant concept in this technology makeover).

• A resource directory of initiatives is located at the Cloud Standards Wiki, which in itself was formed by a handful of organizations and movements working to align around setting rules and patterns for cloud computing.
• The Open Cloud Consortium is organized around developing practices around sharing resources and has recently focused on a developing a test bed.
• The DMTF is working at the core definition of virtualization. It recently focused on the 1.1 version of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification that focuses on packaging virtualization instances and creating a portable mechanic distribution by defining envelope and collection parameters around the virtual machine and its services. The organization, which contains members of IBM, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, XENSource, Sun, and NEC, has submitted 1.1 for consideration as an ANSI and ISO standard.
• The efforts by the federal government in its data.gov initiative shows that there’s a market that’s starting to see the value of raw government data formats. Soon, we would expect this to be powered by a mesh of computer resources that allow all sorts of jobs – integrated jobs – to work with these data sets. It would comprising an active government cloud.

Do Not Covet Thy Neighbors Network Resource

When looking for things to avoid, we found a lot of philosophical questions around data ownership, logging and portability. These discussions are alive and well and seem to be being absorbed into vendor solutions and consortiums like the ones mentioned earlier.

For a more practical view, we turned to a friend of ReadWriteWeb, Thorsten von Eicken, and have summarized his thoughts from a recent post, “Top Cloud API Sins. Bold items are our (loose) mapping to biblical terms.

• Do not covet your neighbors resources.: Listing of resources without the details, e.g., a list-servers call that doesn’t return all the details for each server. This makes it very expensive to poll for server state changes …
• Do not make cast idols: Not returning a resource id on creation. Some APIs don’t give you a server i.d. when you request a server…
• Labor six days, rest on the seventh: Providing a task queue. Several APIs I’ve seen have a task queue that is supposed to provide updates on tasks that are in progress E.g., you launch a server and you get a handle onto a task descriptor. For us that’s just overhead…
• Though shall not bear false witness: Not returning deleted resources in a “list resource” call. In particular, terminated servers must be returned in a list servers call for a certain duration, probably at least for an hour. Ouch!…
• Shall not covet his neighbor (or force me to repaginate): Pagination that goes page-wise instead of using a marker, e.g. where you get page one or the first 100 resources and then issue a query for “page 2″ or “from 100 on”. Explain to me how a client can get a consistent resource listing when resources can be added and removed concurrently…
• Randy Bias added to Torsten’s post: Treat others as you want to be treated Your UI MUST use your API so you understand how to be a consumer of your own API…

We plan on keeping up with this list and seeing how it intersects with implementations and standards that evolve. Please let us know your thoughts below.

Nirvana: Smells Like Services Orientation

Torsten goes on to describe a picture of the future. “Now here’s what I’d really like to see. This is what we’re working on for internal purposes and it’s not easy, which is an event based interface instead of a request-reply based interface… ” This sounds like a vision where we all win.

Smart services in the cloud, rather than resources alone. This starts to get us closer and closer to an object-orientated network. Maybe that’s what the cloud will be for platforms, infrastructure and software. The industry has been quick to identify the layers. But perhaps the point is piecing them together in a smart transactional framework.

A way to engineer highly reliable systems around these architecture challenges may sound familiar to those who monitor existing data centers today.

Torsten continues, “We run a good number of machines that do nothing but chew up 100% cpu polling EC2 to detect changes. Fortunately cpu cycles are cheap ”.

This is practical intervention between vision and get it done. We find it refreshing to hear this type of dialog in the industry and see a fresh opportunity for defining efficient patterns for this next generation of the cloud infrastructure.

Perhaps a new concept is forming: “Divine Computing”. Where do you sit in the “just do it” spectrum?

Photo credit: tsarkasim, Amsterdam Esogna

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We’ve all heard of the big company that started as two guys in their garage, but these days, with startup organizations and incubators, more and more success stories seem to feature companies that built their success from group collaboration. One excellent example of how startups can take advantage of collaboration is to work in a coworking environment with other companies and entrepreneurs.

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Tuesday I had the opportunity to chat with Harry Lin, CEO of Lottay, an online gifting service that has spent a large portion of its short history coworking with outside developers and entrepreneurs. Starting in October of last year, the company spent six weeks working in the offices of San Francisco-based Ruby on Rails development house Pivotal Labs. In December they moved into a space at the Ventura Ventures Technology Center where they work alongside other consumer Internet startups, sharing ideas and resources.

“The thing about a startup is that you’re always under resourced; you never have enough people,” Lin told ReadWriteWeb Tuesday. “So the more you can make out of less, the better off your are, the faster you can go, and a startup is all about speed.”

Lin, formerly the Vice President of ABC.com and General Manager of Evite, was brought on board at Lottay after the company received Series A funding in the summer of 2009. Below are some highlights from my discussion with Lin on the benefits of coworking environments for startups.

How did Lottay benefit from the Pivotal Labs experience?
We camped out at the Pivotal Labs office for the entire six weeks. We were in San Francisco and sitting in their office everyday with the two developers that were on our contract. The reason this worked better is that it was very intense and very concentrated; you had no other distractions. The other reason it was fantastic is that its a room full of 25 top notch Ruby on Rails developers. We were only paying for two of them in our engagement, but there were the other 23 sitting in that room working on various things.

We would come up with a problem or a hurdle we couldn’t get over and we would just shout out, “Hey has anyone ever done this with a library?” and some guy would jump up and say, “Yeah, I’ve done that!” Voila! Problem solved. And that would happen all the time. So we were getting the benefit of this very open, huge brain trust that Pivotal had even though, technically speaking, we were just paying for the two guys. The third other thing I’d say was great about the environment is that they had other clients in there. So we got to meet, talk to, and get to know some other Internet companies, and that was really cool.”

What is the experience like now in Ventura?
There are 12 of us in this incubator here in the city of Ventura; it’s a very deliberate ecosystem the city is trying to push, and we’re part of that ecosystem. We all speak the same language, the same jargon, the same shorthand. If one of us comes up with a brilliant idea or an interesting strategic question, we’ll grab each other, white board it, sit in a room, chat in the hall way – the kind of random things that happen when you’re all physically located in the same place. The other thing that we benefit from is that because this is run by the city, we get a lot of support in the form of a fantastic rate on rent, free wifi, marketing and public relations, and they’ve helped us find recruits when we have openings to hire people. The city is more than just a landlord, they’re trying to jump-start this ecosystem.

So you would suggest that early stage startups try to find coworking space?
If possible, I would not do the “in your basement” or “in your garage by yourself”. Those are the legendary stories we like to hear about, but I think the majority of successful startups has had some kind of coworking environment. I worked for nine years in the Bay area and I know that while there are official incubators, there are also these offices where nine out of the ten companies there are high-tech companies. Being with other people who are doing the same thing is hugely beneficial.

In the consumer Internet space, especially with how the Web has evolved over the last decade, everything is getting more social and more open, both in terms of the consumer behavior and in terms of the development and how things are produced. So it just stands to reason that in launching and trying to grow these types of businesses, you should be more social as well.

Is there anything startups should avoid when in a coworking environment?
It is tempting to do a lot of partnerships with other startups because you’re there, you know each other, you understand each other’s pains and trials and tribulations. Resist the temptation unless is makes a lot of sense. Usually what a startup needs by way of partnership is a large established company.

What is your advice to the young startups out there looking to launch or grow their business?
There will be 100 problems to solve every week. I can guarantee you that at least 75 of those problems have already been experienced and solved by someone else. That’s the problem with being in a garage or a bedroom by yourself; you’ll probably end up trying to solve those 75 problems yourself. When you’re colocated and coworking with other entrepreneurs, you can share. “Oh, you’ve got that problem? I’ve got that problem, and here’s the solution.” You can benefit from their learnings and not have to reinvent the wheel, which saves you a lot of time.

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Navigating SXSW is overwhelming to say the least! To help you out ReadWriteWeb has been breaking the events, panels and parties down into vertical reviews. This post provides what we think are some of the best for marketers and online strategists. We’d also love to hear your recommendations in the comments.

Online strategy is multi-faceted. You need to know as much about marketing and understanding people and their motivations as you do perfecting the online experience, understanding the next technology breakthrough on the horizon and being an excellent conversationalist – while still being able to measure the impact of it all. So this list provides a smattering of some of the best to see in all four.

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This is part of a series of ReadWriteWeb guides to SXSW Interactive 2010. If this guide isn’t your cup of tea, be sure to check back for more information soon!

How Your Brand Can Succeed in the New Web

With Brian Solis. “Engage is the new book by Brian Solis that will debut at SXSW. Representing the third book on new media and its impact on society, culture and communication. Engage will help anyone not only understand the changes in the media landscape but also how to lead it. Brian Solis will be joined by a special guest to discuss the new book and answer questions followed by a book signing.”

The Future of Influence

“The ability to share online has allowed consumers to control and filter the Web. For brands and publishers, tapping into Influence is critical to social media’s future. What is influence and how is it measured? Leading voices in social media from multiple backgrounds will define the value of influence, discuss best practices, and predict future impact. Data will be shared! This panel is sponsored by ShareThis.” With Tim Schigel, Paul Berry, Dave Knox, Mike John-Baptiste, Shiv Singh.

Extending Your Brand? There’s an App for That

“For many, brand extension into the digital realm means a Web site, a banner ad, a viral campaign. But applications can extend conversations and perceptions of a brand, as well as add to discussions and ideas in compelling new ways. How can applications help your brand and idea be more authentic, genuine, user friendly, and just plain old fun? Learn from the folks that are making it happen. This panel is sponsored by Microsoft Silverlight.”

The Human Experience

With Gary Vaynerchuk. The content of this presentation has not been announced, but knowing Gary and his successful track record in growing business through the use of social media, this one is not to be missed.

Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

With Douglas Rushkoff. “Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values.”

I Don’t Trust You One Stinking Bit

“What gives people confidence on the Web? Bringing together experts in social capital and online trust, we help you build the company your users can love and call their own.” With Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data

Clay Shirky hasn’t announced the content of his presentation yet. He “divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, Web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web.”

The Young and the Digital

With Craig Watkins. “In 2006, S. Craig Watkins participated in the MacArthur Foundation’s well-funded digital media initiative alongside a select team of scholars and tech experts. The goal was simple: to understand young people’s emphatic embrace of social and mobile media. Watkins went on to build a small research team that skillfully collected over 500 surveys and conducted 350 in-depth interviews with young adults, parents, and educators.”

Design and Usability, The UX of Mobile

“The term ‘user experience’ used to be an afterthought in mobile application design. The iPhone changed all that and has set a new benchmark for user experience on mobile devices. This panel will serve as a primer for anyone interested in learning how to apply UX principles to the creation of applications for iPhone, Android, and mobile websites.” With Barbara Ballard, Tom Limongello, Scott Jenson.

The Ten Commandments of User Experience

“User experience is the result of your interactions with a product or service, specifically how it’s delivered and its related artifacts according to the design. In this presentation we will explain how following the 10 commandments can boost your project’s ease of use, appeal, conversion rates, and more.” With Raina Van Cleave, Nick Finck.

Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!

“So you’ve designed a great product, fixed a stack of usability problems and spent a fortune on marketing. The only problem is, people aren’t using it. In this session you will learn how to get your users to do what you want them to through good design, human psychology and a touch of mind control.” With Andy Budd.

My Three-Year Old Is My Usability Expert

“Children are perfect testers for the innate usability of visual structures. Learn how neuroscience and cognitive psychology research can make your designs and interfaces more intuitive.” With Dave Stanton.

Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized?

“The emergence of the real-time Web enables an unprecedented level of user engagement and dynamic content online. However, the rapidly growing audience puts new, complex demands on the architecture of the Web as we know it. This panel will discuss what is needed to make the real-time Web achievable.” With Scott Raymond, Brett Slatkin, Dare Obasanjo, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jack Moffitt.

Time + Social + Location. What’s Next In Mobile Experiences?

“As more devices become location aware, social uses will continue to evolve beyond just who and what,to WHEN. Adding the temporal dimension creates new opportunities for social interaction. Learn about ways to leverage and use technology to add features at the intersection of temporal, social, and location.” With Naveen Selvadurai, Josh Babetski, Greg Cypes.

ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here?

“From Facebook’s newsfeed to Twitter’s relentless real-time updates, the metaphor of the “stream” has taken social networking beyond blog posts and on to rich social activities. Learn about ActivityStrea.ms – the open format adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Windows Live – and how it’s fundamentally changing the social Web.” With Chris Messina.

HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches

“HTML5 is coming. Originally called “Web applications 1.0″, it brings new semantics, JavaScript APIs for drag and drop, offline storage, generating images, plugin-free video and form validation. It’s upset semantic Web advocates, accessibility evangelists and baffled developers. Cut through the crap: learn what it is and what it does.”

What Are Analytics? A Guide To Practical Data

“Analytics are often a confusing and convoluted mess, but that doesn’t mean that they have to be. The Guide to Practical Data will help ensure you’re reaching your full analytical potential. Learn how to analyze public and proprietary data to accelerate the success of any initiative.” With Margaret Francis, Blake Robinson.

Those are our SXSW Interaction recommendations for marketers and Web strategists. If you’ve got suggestions or feedback, let us know in the comments! See you in Austin!

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Bookmarking service Delicious has just rolled out a Google Chrome browser extension.

Like other Chrome extensions we love to play with, this one is lightweight, fast and useful. There’s no bulky sidebar here. Bookmarks can be created and saved with a miniscule “TAG” button and they can be searched from Chrome’s excellent omnibar. So, do you think this will prompt loyal Delicious users – many of whom had been holding out on Chrome in favor of Firefox – to switch to Google Chrome entirely?

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This is what the button and simple form for bookmarking a page look like:

<img src="https://chrome.google.com/extensions/img/lnejbeiilmbliffhdepeobjemekgdnok/1268091464.43/screenshot_big/1"

While this extension doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of Delicious’ other browser add-ons, the team noted that the public demand for a Chrome extension prompted them to release a beta earlier than they would have liked.

“It doesn’t have all the API’s needed and it’s missing a good chunk of the functionality we believe it needs, but we’re getting so many requests for the Chrome extension that we’re going to make this available sooner than we originally planned…

“As soon as Chrome is able to support the functionality needed we’ll ensure the features of this extension matches that of our other browser add-ons. There are still some interactions we’re not quite happy with that we’ll address shortly, but we wanted to give you an official Google Chrome extension as soon as possible.”

What do you think? Does the new Delicious extension make you want to use Chrome more? Or if you’re a Chrome fan, does this move give you a renewed interest in Delicious? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Discuss

Social media gurus: We all know one. If you’re lucky, you know only one.

They are the attendees of tech parties, the “Twitter consultants,” the armchair generals of the Internet, and their numbers grow by the day. Yet most of them couldn’t distinguish a line of code from a badly punctuated haiku.

What’s to be done with the social media experts? Accept that their blathering may contain some wisdom? Or require technical exams for all Twitter users with more than 1,000 followers? You decide! And make the NMDs among us take our “technical” quiz.

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There is always grave danger when amateurs turn overnight into experts. This sub-professional clown town is where B movies and Soulja Boy come from. It’s also the birthplace of every blowhard who tells you you’re “doing it wrong” without any technical knowledge or original thought to back it up.

Sometimes, it’s not such a bad thing – in fact, there are a great many non-technical social media folks who are doing a great job of creating quality content and helping brands get themselved situated on the Web. But most of the people I can think of who fit this description have been doing their thing for so long that they’ve had to pick up a few technical tidbits along the way to ensure their continued success and to ensure they weren’t sounding like idiots.

However, I hold the strong opinion that if you’re working in technology – even as a PR flak or social media consultant – you should be able to understand some of the terms, concepts and people that make your business possible. Otherwise, you risk your own reputation by taking the chance that you’re scarily wrong or laughably vague, and you risk gumming up the works for your clients by not knowing how to communicate with their audience, many of whom are very technical folk.

Ultimately, taking the time and effort to understand the technology you use is simply a matter of taking pride in your work, just like the barista who knows all the ins and outs of the perfectly pulled free-trade organic espresso or the skilled sommelier who, though he may not make the wine himself, knows everything about who did and where and how.

Take this quick survey, my social media gurus. (Techies, don’t take the survey; you’ll skew the results.) If you can’t work out the answers, you might be sounding like an idiot – I tell you this because I’m your friend and I care about you. And remember, when you cheat, you’re only cheating yourself, so no Wikipedia for you.

Let me know in the comments what you think about the issue. Am I being an elitist prig? Did I not take my rant far enough? How much do you think a social media expert should know about tech? Would you work with someone who couldn’t sail through this “technical” survey?

var PDF_surveyID = “0CB7279E686F7832″;
var PDF_openText = “View Survey”;

View Survey

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If your Foursquare check-ins could be limited to backyard outings and trips to the mailbox, you may be interested in a new mobile application called Miso. With this service, a startup from Bazaar Labs, also the makers of a social network called Flixup! for movie chatter, you can perform Foursquare-like “check-ins” when watching a particular TV show or movie. Homebodies, this app is for you.

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With Miso, instead of checking in to locations outside of your home, like bars, restaurants and events as you do with popular mobile applications like Foursquare, Brightkite, Loopt and Gowalla, the Miso app takes the “check-in” model and uses it to connect people enjoying TV shows and movies. Although you could check-in when watching a movie at a local theater, the app is just as useful to those who tend to stay at home.

Foursquare for the Boring?

For those with the heyday of youth behind them, social outings to bars and restaurants and other “fun” events are slowly replaced with more boring trips to the grocery store, playgroup meetups and other errands unworthy of sharing with a mobile social network. In addition, tighter household budgets forced upon families by the down economy has many trading weekly evenings out for low-cost movie nights at home, cuddled up with the latest Netflix DVD – or even just good ol’ fashioned cable TV.

Thanks to Miso, even homebodies like this can participate in the check-in craze. Although you can still share what you see at the theater, if desired, the beauty of this app is that you don’t need a social life to socialize via your mobile. Instead, you can just chat it up with other fans of home entertainment, where you discuss the latest episode of “Lost” or the newest HBO original movie, for example.

Using Miso

To use the app, you “check in” by sharing what you’re watching. And as with Foursquare, you can unlock badges the more use participate on the network. (At last – couch potatoes can have badges too!) These badges help you show off your interests to other Miso users so you can connect with similarly like-minded folks.

According to news from MobileBeat, a new version of the app is set to go live this week during the South by Southwest conference. In the updated release, you’ll have the ability to add location along with your check-in – in case you ever make it out to the local cinemaplex after all. You can grab your copy of Miso from here (iTunes link).

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Mark Fletcher builds software, that’s just what he does. He may have sold the system that became Yahoo Groups for $400 million, and then made millions selling Bloglines to Ask.com as well, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to stop making software. And it’s not just any software he makes, either. Those two projects changed millions of peoples’ lives.

Tomorrow morning Fletcher will unveil his newest creation, a lightweight group communication tool called SnapGroups. We first wrote about it two weeks ago but hadn’t been able to take a look until tonight. We’re happy to report that you’re probably going to like it a lot: it’s easy, it’s clear, it’s got good social design and it’s real time. Check out the screenshots below.

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Update: Just after we posted this, Fletcher says he’s lifted the password from the site and it’s live!

SnapGroups makes it really easy to create a group discussion around a particular topic, invite people, set variable privacy controls and then participate in that conversation as part of a whole “newsfeed” style stream of updates from all your various groups in one place. Fresh comments, likes and dislikes get pushed to your browser live using a home-made bit of AJAX and the whole thing couldn’t be much simpler. It’s a lot of fun to use, in fact.

Fletcher says this is only the beginning, that all kinds of features are still to come, but he’s focused on the basics for now. He started working on the site in October and says his favorite part of the project was “learning about the new technologies that have sprung up in the past couple years.” “The various databases that have come out recently are great,” he told us. “I’m using Mongo, but there are many interesting projects now.” The core of the site is written in C++.

Fletcher says SnapGroups will go live tomorrow morning. You should try it out when it does. Invites to groups will no doubt be flying around Twitter and Facebook. It may very well become something you want to use regularly. Hopefully there will be a way to export your conversations easily. Fletcher is a pretty straightforward guy and will probably implement just about anything that enough people ask for and that isn’t too hard to do.

Mark Fletcher has a habit of building relatively simple things, like the first major email list system and the first popular RSS reader, that end up being a defining player in the rise of a new era online. Simple, real-time group communication? Not at all hard to imagine that being a big new thing as well.

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Everywhere you look these days, people are attempting to start innovative businesses and nonprofits, working on putting team, product and financing together, and generally trying to change the world – or, at least, their world – through entrepreneurship.

Meanwhile, I strongly suspect that the mortality rate of tech startups is as high as ever (no rigorous scientific tracking there, just common sense and observation – please do share stats if you know of some). In any case, one failed startup is one too many.

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Guest author Greg Boutin helps startups and early-stage ventures defy a certain death, through strategy and marketing services. He blogs on entrepreneurship and on semantic technologies. He thanks Arnold Wytenburg, William Mougayar of Eqentia, Fabien Tiburce of Compliantia, and Ceara Scullion for their priceless input on this post.

So, wouldn’t it be great if we could align on a guiding set of principles on how not to kill a startup? Think Hippocratic Oath for entrepreneurs – just not strictly an oath, and more in the spirit of “Doing Good” than “Doing No Harm” (or “Doing No Evil” for that matter). After all, unlike humans, doing nothing to a startup is a sure path to death, so we need to be more proactive.

And yes, I know, blanket business principles can sometimes be silly (if you haven’t yet, I recommend you read the Halo Effect by Rosenzweig), but as the recent book The Checklist Manifesto argues, situations can also sometimes be improved with the introduction of simple, field-tested guidelines. I can personally tie every startup failure that I know of to the principles below not being respected.

So here is a rough copy – or should I say an alpha – of a list, based on inputs from other entrepreneurs, and my own experience as a startup consultant and entrepreneur. Please make your own suggestions for changes and additions/subtractions in the comment section. If I get many responses, I’ll compile the best submissions into a beta version to be published in a follow-up post.

And of course, our list will always remain in beta. Without further ado:

How Not to Kill Your Start-Up (v 0.1)

1. This one’s obvious – watch your cash flow. Whether your plan is to fund your startup through investors or through revenues, plan ahead. Every other principle below flows from this simple one.
2. Spot a real problem and concentrate your efforts on solving it. Do not disperse your time among too many concurrent, unrelated pursuits.
3. Identify your target market(s) and collect market feedback early on. Seek to understand your prospects and customers through first-hand observation (how do they currently deal with the problem you are trying to solve?) and continuous inputs.
4. Design and develop a minimum viable solution as fast as possible. A minimum viable solution is anything you can extract a firm commitment from a potential client or investor with.
5. Surround yourself with dedicated, effective people. Build a small team and a pipeline of strong players, and nurture a circle of supporters with knowledge and/or financial resources. Incentivize everyone intelligently (if nothing else, respect can go a long way) and reward them fairly.
6. Read Crossing the Chasm. Appreciate the difference between early adopters and mainstream prospects. Know which one you target, and do not confuse technologies and products with whole solutions. Only offer whole solutions to mainstream leads.
7. Consider other sources of competitive power than just technological sophistication, e.g. superior customer experience or service, exclusive distribution partnerships, or other market-based advantages.
8. Have a plan for cutting through market noise. Know how prospects will hear about your solution. Understand that building a great product is required but rarely sufficient to build a great business, it needs to be marketed one way or another.
9. Invest time in selecting and testing a business model, and be open to changing it based on new learning. Choose one you are able to sell to investors if you go down that road (even if it is based on traffic only, à la Twitter, have a monetization model you can justify).
10. Be creative and resourceful in meeting your objectives. Seek cost-effective solutions, and do not give up in the face of adversity, but seek to learn and adapt your approach to overcome obstacles.

And ultimately, remember that startups sometimes need to be killed, for their own good (or yours at least). Do not fear failure, because that is the fastest road to failing as an entrepreneur. Just rinse and repeat.

Photo by B S K.

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