Programming Blog

12 Mar 2010

enemies internet reporters without borders Reporters Without Borders released its annual report [PDF] on online access today. They call it Enemies of the Internet, and it shows a world where online censorship, intimidation and worse is increasing.

It’s not surprising that as access to the Internet expands, more and more dictators and tyrants will try to suppress it. But what’s troubling about this year’s report is the inclusion of two democratic countries: Australia and South Korea.

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Both countries were included in the report’s Under Surveillance list – a sub group of the main Enemies list.

Australia’s proposed online filtering system is something RWB says it has “never before seen in a democracy.” Additionally, in the state of South Australia it’s now against the law to be anonymous online if it’s in the context of an election.

In South Korea, a new censorship law allows for five-year prison sentences for anyone found using the Internet “to disseminate false news intended to damage the public interest.” The same law requires online visitors to register their real name and national ID card number when visiting sites with more than 100,000 members.

Here are a handful of the worst violators of online freedom of expression on the Enemies of the Internet list:

Burma

Two high-ranking government officials have been sentenced to death for having e-mailed documents abroad. Net censorship is a serious matter in Burma. Massive filtering of websites and extensive slowdowns during times of unrest are daily occurrences for the country’s Internet users. The legislation governing Internet use – the Electronic Act – is one of the most liberticidal laws in the world.

China

As its polemic with Google and the United States on the Internet’s future unfolds, China continues to intensify Web censorship, faced with an increasingly forceful online community.The much-vaunted promises made by organizers at the open ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have proven to be mere illusions for the world’s biggest netizen prison. Expanded dissemination of propaganda, generalized surveillance and crackdowns on Charter 08 signatories are commonplace on what has become the Chinese Intranet – with significant consequences for trade.

Egypt

More than a mere virtual communications tool, the Egyptian Internet has become a mobilization and dissension platform. Although website blocking remains limited, authorities are striving to regain control over bloggers who are more and more organized, despite all the harassment and arrests.

Iran

Iran, one of cyber-censorship’s record-holding countries, has stepped up its crackdown and online surveillance since the protests over the disputed presidential reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009. The regime is demonizing the new media, which it is accusing of serving foreign interest.While a dozen netizens are serving out their terms in Evin Prison, bold Internet users are continuing to mobilize.

Saudi Arabia

An emerging bloggers’ community is up against harsh censorship. These bloggers are confronting the traditional forces of Saudi society, which are attempting to prevent the Internet from becoming a forum for free discussions. Saudi Arabia is one of the first countries to have been authorized to write Internet domain names in Arabic.The Internet penetration rate, currently estimated at about 38% of the population, is rising. How- ever, it is still one of the most repressive countries with regard to the Internet.

Syria

Syria is reinforcing its censorship of troublesome topics on the Web and tracking netizens who dare to express themselves freely on it. As a result, social networks have been particularly targeted by omnipresent surveillance. The promised technological improvements are slow to materialize. The authorities’ distrust of the potential for dissident online mobilization may be playing a role in this delay.

Vietnam

The progress made by Vietnam in the domain of human rights, which allowed the country to become a member of the World Trade Organization in 2007, is nothing but a distant memory. As the 2011 Communist Party Congress draws nearer, the regime is muffling dissident views on the Internet, and its first target is critics of the country’s policy toward China.

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6 Thoughts About Location Madness

In: web resources

12 Mar 2010

Location based social networks – are you over it already? It feels like location is all we ever hear about anymore, especially this week leading up to SXSW.

We’re excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-ups What Twitter’s Geolocation API Makes Possible and The Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived. But it’s getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness.

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That Phrase: “Location, Location, Location”

You’re going to hear journalists use it far too much. Want to know where it came from? Language sleuth William Safire investigated for the NYT last year and concluded that the phrase was probably first used in a 1926 real estate classified ad in the Chicago Tribune: “Attention salesmen, sales managers: location, location, location, close to Rogers Park.” Don’t you feel more savvy now?

Too Many Startups?

We’re under embargo on almost all of them, but we can tell you there are at least 25 companies making location-related announcements at SXSW this week. Probably more. The Dunbar number of startups in a particular market, if you will, is something like 5. More than that and most people stop taking new entrants seriously. It’s one thing to offer different technologies along the value chain of location, but sharing your location and aggregating messages by things like hashtag are two very crowded niches right now. One of my favorites is SitBy.Us, an app that lets you see where your Twitter friends are sitting in a conference session. That’s pretty cool.

You’ve got to wonder if and when Location will Jump the Shark and what consumer exhaustion for it might mean for the long-term prospects of the market. Everyone wants to be “the Twitter of SXSW 2010″ but the fact is that SXSW represented a statistically insignificant increase in Twitter usage, historically speaking.

Location Startups “Not Playing Nice”

There are loads of ways to post your location but it’s very hard to get a feel for who exactly is where. SimpleGeo launched a site called Vicarious.ly today that aggregates check-ins across scads of services, all around Austin. It doesn’t work very well, though. SimpleGeo’s Matt Galligan told us today that the site is really just a proof of concept and that our perception that these startups aren’t playing very nice together is very true. “And it’s a real shame,” he told us. It’s hard for a 3rd party service to clearly identify whether these competing services are really talking about the same location, for example. No one tells their users what users on competing services are up to in the same location. Gowalla’s Josh Williams says he doesn’t know what the problem is and that Gowalla is very open about user data by open standards.

Update: Galligan pinged us after publication to clarify: “I mostly meant the problem with venue data was because of how awful the *business listings* market is. There’s certainly issues with non-connecting venue data but it’s a *very* hard problem to solve, so I don’t blame them right now. It can, however, be solved in the future.”

We Need Cross-Service Venue Tracking

If you’re thinking of going to a place, or you’re there and wonder who else is, what you need is a place where you can see who has checked in there across all services. For the place to be at the center of your experience, not the service. Michael Arrington says the new AOL Lifestream lets you track particular locations, but that service only supports Foursquare among location services. What we need is something like that across any and every check-in service. That’s the kind of thing that data standards can enable.

Google’s Chris Messina told us that the Activity Streams standard has a namespace for “place” and would probably add support for GeoRSS soon, but that so far Google Buzz is the only location service that seems to be supporting it.

Gowalla Doesn’t Get Enough Love

Gowalla’s API is read-only, meaning that 3rd party apps can’t publish check-ins to the service like they can to Foursquare. Gowalla says they are working on it, but they are the underdog already and this isn’t helping. AOL’s cool new Lifestream product, for example, only supports Foursquare, not Gowalla. That’s a real shame. You know what’s nice about Gowalla, though? You can see who has checked into a place and when, even if they aren’t friends of yours. That’s not something that’s easy to do with Foursquare at all. It’s also much prettier than Foursquare and uses peoples’ full names, instead of grade-school-style first names and last initials. Gowalla’s API just isn’t seeing the adoption that Foursquares is, though. Have you seen Avoidr.org for example? That’s pretty funny stuff and it’s built on top of Foursquare.

The above is for illustration purposes only. I like both these guys just fine.

Imagine the Future, It’s Going to Be Different

If location based services ever become popular with the mainstream, every urban area might end up looking like the Foursquare map of downtown Austin this weekend. That means services are going to have to come up with creative and interesting new ways to make that data usable day-to-day and not overwhelming.

Likewise, when you think about the future, imagine Facebook being a player in this market, because they are going to be soon. It’s possible that Facebook and Twitter could be where all these other services meet-up. Brightkite has different features than BlockChalk but we can see what our friends are doing across any of these apps on Facebook, perhaps. And Facebook is where your mom checks-in, if she’s not an early adopter.

Finally, will location tracking be persistent? Loopt right now uses mobile carrier tie-ins to track your location constantly and expose it to a circle of trusted friends. Is that something that all services will enable in the future? Gowalla CEO Josh Williams told us “no way” does he think that will be the dominant model, but Adam Duvander, author of the forthcoming book Mapscripting 101, says he agrees with Loopt: that the value in persistent location tracking will be so compelling that everyone will end up going for it in the end, once proper privacy settings are figured out.

What do you think, do you think persistent location tracking is the future of location based services?

These are some of the things I’m thinking about location this week.

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First Look at TechStars Historical Results Data

In: web resources

12 Mar 2010

TechStars is an early stage venture fund based in Boulder, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb was given an early peek at historical results data on TechStars companies, which the organization is about to release. The data shows acquisition and failure rates, as well as how many of the TechStar companies have gone on to receive angel or venture funding.

TechStars reports that nearly 6 of 10 of their companies have historically gone on to receive outside angel or venture funding (not including friends or family). Five other companies reported that they are now profitable without outside funding, so overall 27 of 39 (69.23%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability.

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Of the 39 TechStars companies analyzed, 29 are still active (74.36%), 4 were acquired for > $2M (10.26%), 1 was acquired for < $2M (2.56%), and 4 failed (10.26%). One of the companies is listed as "other" (2.56%), but there is no explanation of what that means.

The data that TechStars reports is similar to a recent study by the blog Awesome Zombie, which did an analysis in December of similar early stage venture fund Y-Combinator. Awesome Zombie found data on 145 Y-Combinator companies from a variety of non-official sources, such as CrunchBase, news articles and discussions on Hacker News. It found that 82 Y-Combinator companies are active (24 having received further public investment rounds), 33 failed, 14 were acquired. The rest were stealth, unknown or "other" (e.g. merger or private investment).

The TechStars numbers are very encouraging for early stage companies. Nearly 70% of TechStars companies have raised outside funding or have become profitable on their own, which is comparatively better than the more high-profile Y-Combinator (with the proviso that the Y-Combinator data was unofficial and gathered by a third party).

TechStars attributes this success rate to its "mentorship driven approach." The program also only funds 10 companies per batch, which TechStars says is due to its focus on quality over quantity.

TechStars CEO David Cohen told ReadWriteWeb, "I think that the programs that will ultimately prove to be most powerful for their local entrepreneurial communities are those which follow the mentorship+community formula that we pioneered. It’s powerful in so many ways when you get dozens of mentors involved in very hands on, meaningful ways with each company from day one of the program."

I happened to be in Boulder on Wednesday, where Elyssa Pallai and I met with a group of TechStars companies for lunch. The knowledge and passion for web technology exhibited by each person at the lunch impressed me a lot. If this group of young entrepreneurs were representative of the Boulder startup scene, then it’s a city with plenty of vitality and smarts.

If you’re a U.S. company interested in applying to TechStars, applications for their Boulder program are open for a few more weeks. TechStars also has a new Seattle program starting soon.

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