$250 million Venture Capital Fund Established For Investment In Social Web

Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers along with Facebook, Amazon, and Zynga, are establishing a $250 million fund (the sFund) to aid the development of a new generation of social web offerings. 

"There's going to be an opportunity over the next five years or so to pick any industry and rethink it in a social way," said Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. "We think that every industry is going to be fundamentally re-thought and designed around people."

With KPCB putting up most of the money, the others are offering assistance in various ways. Amazon will provide it's web services platform for one year to selected companies and Facebook providing access to it's platform team and beta APIs.

The big focus of the fund will be social start-ups from all industries but no money will be provided to direct competitors of Facebook, Amazon, or Zynga (so there's the hook!).

"Think of it as a quarter-billion-dollar party. The third great wave of the internet is mobile and social together. It's going to be tectonic," said KPCB partner John Doerr.

Source: BBC 

Starbucks Hopes More Digital Freebees Will Attract And Retain Customers

For a rather lengthy time this summer I was mayor of my local Starbucks, the baristas know me their and often have my favorite latte underway when I walk in the door... guess I'm a bit predictable. At a corporate level, taking a page out of McDonald's playbook, Starbucks is attempting to do the little things better in a hope to grow business and retain customers in a slow economy. The efforts are extending beyond the get it right attitude at the store level. In addition to it's free wifi offering earlier this year and free music downloads, one track per week, the company is now promising it's U.S. customers e-books, movies and other exclusive offers such as no fee access to some paid websites. It's also testing beer and wine sales in a few locations attempting to ramp up the slow late afternoon and evening sales period. 

“This chain needs to refocus on not becoming bigger but becoming better in its existing units,” said Jack Russo, a retail analyst at EdwardJones in St. Louis.

Keep getting my coffee right and give me free digital downloads... what's not to love about that? Well, I guess as long as you are a coffee freak and don't mind paying a premium to get your fix on, the above holds true. If it's strictly the fast food experience and fast food price you are looking for there's a Tim Horton's (or Dunkin Donuts) to be found on just about every other block.

Source: The Globe and Mail

Yet Another Facebook Privacy Issue - Oops, We Did It Again!

Another high profile security issue at Facebook has Canada's privacy commissioner again raising the possibility of a probe into the company's treatment of confidential user information. 

"If applications covered by [privacy law] are disclosing personal information without consent, that's a significant concern to our office," the office of Jennifer Stoddart said in a statement Monday to CBC News.

"We are looking at the situation and evaluating the possibility of launching an investigation."

The breach discovered by a Wall Street Journal investigation, indicates that at least 10 of the most popular Facebook apps, including FarmVille, Mafia Wars, FrontierVille, and Texas HoldEm Poker, all by game developer Zynga, were found to be sending user ID numbers to at least 25 advertising, marketing and internet tracking companies.

hmmm, the highest traffic games sending data to advertisers and nobody at Facebook knew about it? Just saying!

Source: www.cbc.ca

Images From Space - A DIY Family Science Project

This is quite possibly the best father / son science project of all time! Enough said...

Stan Lee And The NHL Team Up For Fan Recruitment

In an attempt to appeal to new young fans the National Hockey League (NHL) has drafted comic book legend Stan Lee to create a new team of 30 super heroes with powers reflective of their corresponding city / team name. The partnership is called the Guardian Project and has reportedly been in the works for a year.

“I’ve always believed that every great plan starts with a great story,” Lee said in a statement. “In the creation of Guardian Media Entertainment and its unique and unprecedented relationship with the NHL, I truly believe we have the perfect combination from which to launch 30 new superheroes and excite young fans around the globe.”

Source: Wired.com

Urban Transportation Without The Congestion - Sweeb

In 2008 Google announced  it's Project 10^100 to fund innovative research aimed at world changing ideas and promptly received more than 150,000 categories from the public for which to consider funding. In September of this year Google Inc. announced an investment of $1,000,000 USD in a project/product named Shweeb, to assist with transit research and development.

Shweeb is a derivation of a German word "schweben", meaning to "float" or "suspend". As the tale goes, Shweeb's inventor Geoffrey Banett was living in Tokyo in the late 90's and found it extremely frustrating and unsafe to ride his bicycle to work each day. The English teacher's students also expressed their concerns and planted the seed for the development of Shweeb. Currently deployed at an adventure park in New Zealand Barnett plans to announce shortly where the first practical implementation as a public transportation system will take place. 

"Although it is pedal-powered like a bicycle, it's got none of the resistances that are inherent in a bicycle, being that you're riding feet-first into the wind with a very small frontal area," he said. "The wind resistance is really low compared to a bicycle. ... I can see people of any age and any fitness level being able to cover a kilometer [0.62 miles] without any effort at all, let alone sweat."

Source: CNN & shweeb.com

Google Makes Investment In Off Shore Wind Farm

The Official Google Blog has announced an investment by the company in a backbone transmission project off of the mid-Atlantic. 

When built out, the Atlantic Wind Connection (AWC) backbone will stretch 350 miles off the coast from New Jersey to Virginia and will be able to connect 6,000MW of offshore wind turbines. That’s equivalent to 60% of the wind energy that was installed in the entire country last year and enough to serve approximately 1.9 million households.

Besides the environmental advantages of off shore wind energy, Google says the project makes good business sense as well and is "... investing 37.5% of the equity in this initial development stage, with the goal of obtaining all the necessary approvals to finance and begin constructing the line. Although the development stage requires only a small part of the total estimated project budget, it represents a critical stage for the project."

There certainly is ample wind off the east coast, and by locating the turbines offshore, in relatively shallow waters, the producers should not meet the same objections that land based wind farms do regarding noise and health affects to local residents. The turbines will supply power to the strongest land based grids along the coast via under water cables. At 1.9 million households it's still but a drop in the bucket, but it's a great start.

42

Here's a shout out to all of you geeks celebrating 10-10-10 which as we all know is binary for 42 and represents the "Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything" It doesn't get much better than this!

Google's Johny Cab

Drawing on the immense computing power of Google's server farms, the search giant has been quietly testing  self driving cars with the aim of aiding mankind according to the Official Google Blog. 

According to the World Health Organization, more than 1.2 million lives are lost every year in road traffic accidents. We believe our technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half. We’re also confident that self-driving cars will transform car sharing, significantly reducing car usage, as well as help create the new “highway trains of tomorrow."

In order to accomplish it's goal Google has enlisted help from several leading participants in the field including "...some of the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges, a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the U.S. Government. Chris Urmson was the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge. Mike Montemerlo was the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge. Also on the team is Anthony Levandowski, who built the world’s first autonomous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge, and who also built a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside." 

Here is a small video clip from the NYTimes article:  

Note that there is an occupant in the driver's seat who is a specially trained driver to man the controls in the event of a system failure, and a software engineer in the passenger seat who monitors the software. Google says that their major concern in the experiment was safety and that they had worked with local law enforcement on all test drives. The test drives where apparently scouted first by manned vehicles that mapped the route and noted road conditions. 

Scoble And Zuckerberg Discuss New Facebook Features

Robert Scoble, Scobelizer.com (also from Rackspace and  building43) and Mark Zuckerberg discuss Facebook's new Groups, Dowload Your Data, and Platform Apps Dashboard features released to the site over the past day or so. Here is the recorded discussion:

While Groups seems to be the one feature that is attracting the most attention, I'm impressed by Download Your Data and the Platform Apps Dashboard. Not to say that Groups is not a cool feature, but for a company who has had it's share of criticism regarding personal data giving the user the ability to make copies of their data and an easy way to see who is looking at what is a big step towards being open and accountable. If nothing else, it may make users more aware of what they are sharing and just what's out there for others to see.