Last December, Saul Hansell left his job as a veteran reporter and blogger at the New York Times to become the programming director for Aol’s Seed, which is the new online assignment desk for Aol’s 80 different Websites. In his first blog post since he took on the new job, Hansell admits that his new career path was met by “a lot of blank stares” from friends and family. Seed is still a bit of a mystery to many, but its essentially a way for Aol to assign articles to anyone on the Web beyond the 3,500 journalists and professional freelancers it employs directly. Why is this important? As Hansell explains:

AOL is a very different company now. It is independent again. And its mission is to redefine journalism for the Internet age.

Seed is supposed to help by assigning the stories that “satisfy the world’s curiosity” (the Seed Creed). Hansell does his best to make writing articles for Aol at $30 to $300 a pop sound enticing: (more…)

Just about two years ago, we wrote about Google giving away free voicemail accounts to homeless people in San Francisco. While a very nice thing to do, it was also a bit of marketing genius by both Google and SF mayor Gavin Newsom. After all, they were getting great publicity for giving away something that was already free (GrandCentral ? which is now known as Google Voice). We wondered if they wouldn’t pull the same stunt in the future. Well, it’s the future; and they are.

Again, this is actually a very nice thing they’re doing, but it’s also an ingenious way to promote what Google clearly considers to be one of its killer products: Google Voice. This time, they’re giving out Google Voice accounts to U.S. veterans in Washington D.C. as an extension of their Project CARE program. This Saturday, Google is joining a dozen or so other Washington D.C. organizations at an event at the D.C. Veterans Affairs Medical Center to hand out Project CARE cards that will give veterans a unique Google Voice phone number and voicemail account. (more…)

Long time Facebook employee Dave Morin (pictured left), an early member of the team that led the launch of Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect, is leaving the company today, we’ve confirmed. He’s starting a new company with Napster creator Shawn Fanning. Fanning sold his most recent startup, Rupture, to EA in early 2008.

What we don’t know is what that startup will do, and it isn’t likely Morin or Fanning will be saying anytime soon. In a phone call this morning, all Morin would say is that they’ll be building Facebook Connect into the product.

Morin was previously at Apple, where he met and partnered with Facebook. He eventually left Apple to join Facebook in 2006. At the time Facebook had just 10 million users. Today, it has over 350 million users.

Morin’s personal blog is at davemorin.tumblr.com. I’d expect him to announce this shortly.

A Facebook spokesperson tells us that Morin is leaving on good terms and that “we’re excited to be working with him on the other side as a member of the developer community.”

Established in 1985, the Harbin Ice and Snow Festival is held annually and lasts from January 5th to February. The capital city of the Heilongjiang Province of China, Harbin holds the greatest ice artwork festival, attracting hundreds of thousands of local people and visitors from around the world.

(more…)

Yes, my headline is a bit facetious. But even if Apple’s tablet doesn’t save the planet, its users will be cutting carbon in three major industries. Music, books & printers could all be, to some extent, displaced by lightweight mobile computing like the Apple tablet.

USA Network has launched two new games that tie in with its White Collar and Burn Notice TV shows as well as the advertisers that sponsor them.

Yesterday, USA Network launched the first episode of seven-mission online game based on its Burn Notice, Covert Ops hit show on its TV network. The plot of the game, Covert Ops: Vegas Heist, ties in with the unfolding drama on the show and it integrates the show’s major advertiser, Hyundai.

And earlier this week, USA Network launched a similar game, White Collar: Chasing the Shadow, based on the plot of its White Collar TV show. Sewn into the story is the show’s major advertiser, Ford Taurus. In both games, players try to unravel a mystery related to the show’s plot and travel through the same environments as the show. The games have plenty of live-action video that uses the actors from the show as well.

These efforts show that games have become an integral part of the network’s strategy for making money, said Jesse Redness, vice president of digital at USA Network in New York, in an interview. (more…)

The December 2009 global search stats are out from comScore and unsurprisingly Google took the top spot for total worldwide searches last month, with 87.8 billion searches over Google sites. Google’s searches rose 58 percent from December 2008’s searches, which totaled 55.6 billion searches. Yahoo and Baidu followed Google, with 9.4 billion and 8.5 billion searches, respectively. Google accounted for two-thirds of overall searches in December, which are estimated at 131 billion.

But Microsoft saw the greatest jump in number of queries worldwide for the year, with searches rising 70 percent, from 2.4 billion in December 2008 to 4.1 billion in December 2009. This can be attributed to the launch of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, which is seeing traction. Russian search engine Yandex also grew year over the year, which volume of search queries rising 91 percent to 1.9 billion searches.

Overall search queries in December rose nearly 50 percent from the previous year to 131 billion searches, or 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute. The U.S. led the pack 22.7 billion searches, representing 17 percent of all searches worldwide. China ranked second with 13.3 billion searches, followed by Japan with 9.2 billion and the U.K. with 6.2 billion. Russia showed the highest increase in number of search queries in 2009, growing 92 percent to 3.3 billion searches. (more…)

Yesterday, Bing released a surprisingly useful new feature around recipe search. If you search for “Chicken,” you can narrow the results down by “chicken recipes” and then a whole bunch of new filtering options appear down the left-hand column. You can further narrow results by recipe rating, cuisine (vegetarian, Spanish, Southwestern), convenience (quick/easy, family, entertaining), occasion (wedding, Valentine’s Day), main ingredient, course, or cooking method. Bing is big on guided search (showing relevant search categories to help narrow results), but this goes one step further towards semantic search (the ability to index and search the Web by different facets). Recipes are just the beginning, and it’s not just Bing. Google and a handful of startups, including Evri, Hakia, and Radar Networks, are hard at work on making semantic search a reality. The race is on to bring this type of semantic filtering for nearly every category of search across the Web.

In fact, Bing’s recipe search looks a hell of a lot like T2, the semantic search engine being developed in private by Radar Networks. The startup currently offers a semantic bookmarking application called Twine which is on autopilot, but T2 is much more ambitious. Not many people have seen T2, but CEO Nova Spivack once gave me a demo and I took a bunch of screenshots like the one above (there are also slides on the Web). When you search for “chicken” on T2, you can also narrow by difficulty level, meal, main ingredient, dietary option, cuisine, course, and so on. Recipes happens to be one of T2’s strong suits. It has perhaps the largest semantic indexes of recipes in the world with 300,000 recipes. But it is also building out its semantic search index for video games, movies, music, travel, health, sports, and other category verticals.

Now here is where the plot thickens. T2 was supposed to launch by the end of last year. Part of the delay might be because semantic search is just a really hard problem. But there could be another reason as well. Rumors are swirling that Radar Networks is deep in M&A discussions with the “usual suspects.” In search, the usual suspects are Google and Bing. Spivack won’t comment on any rumors, but says that T2 is on track and that no other search engine is currently licensing it. Earlier this week, for what it’s worth, he did Tweet about how he was running around to “insane” meetings, right after he Tweeted that “Google still has a great cafeteria.” And after Bing launched its new recipe feature, he sent out this enigmatic Tweet:

I bet that within 12 months Google and Bing will be fighting to enable best faceted search experiences. Just watch.

It’s easy to read too much into these idle Tweets. Spivack is the CEO of a search startup. It stands to reason that he would have meetings with Google and and other big search engines about lots of things, ranging from licensing his semantic search technology to an outright sale. The one thing it is pretty safe to conclude is that both Google and Bing are very interested in semantic search. Bing seems to be further along than Google, as the launch of recipe search indicates.

But both are facing a buy-or-build decision when it comes to semantic search. Bing’s recipe search is only based on partner feeds and tags, not a proper semantic index. Radar Networks is a serious player here, with a total of $24 million in capital raised since 2006. It owns four patents on the technology, with 20 more pending. Radar is essentially building a huge structured database for every page on the Web, which breaks down the information contained on those pages into well-defined facets. For recipes, it is ingredients, cooking times, and difficulty levels. For video games, it can search by title, developer, character, and so on. And since it is a structured database, it can jump from “Star Wars” video games to “Star Wars” recipes. It is all linked together in the semantic index.

Radar is building that index across many different categories. each category requires its own ontology, or collection of facets which describe the things in that category. Radar is building out its own ontologies and also wants to create a SourceForge for ontologies where Webmasters can contribute as well. Some of the Webmaster tools Radar has developed will allow anyone who owns a Website to tell Radar about its Web pages. For instance, on a site about movies, the Webmaster would use a browser plug-in to mark the title, actors, director, reviews, and so on. Then Radar will take that template and apply it to the entire site. If Google or Bing adopted a similar approach, Webmasters would have a big incentive to train their semantic indexes because it would create deep links and improve their SEO.

Like I said, the race is on.

Negotiation is a critical skill for anyone on the business world ? but especially for entrepreneurs. Deepak Malhotra, associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, offers several tips to improve your abilities in this lecture given at an emerging markets conference in 2007. A warning: The video quality here isn?t stellar (it’s worth bumping it to 480p if you have the bandwidth). The advice, though, is solid ? and useful.

Astronauts aboard the ISS received a special software upgrade earlier this week, according to a NASA statement released moments ago: personal access to the Internet and the World Wide Web via the “ultimate wireless connection”.

This personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, takes advantage of existing communication links to and from the station and gives astronauts the ability to browse and use the Web. The system basically provides astronauts with direct private communications. (more…)