LogMeIn IPO Shows Mobile Workforce Is Expanding

by Mielle Sullivan, Janus Networks

It has been a slow year for IPOs, especially Venture backed IPOs, but LogMeIn excited investors when it went public on Wednesday. The offering of the remote access company based in Woburn, Massachusetts was so anticipated that analyst John Fitzgibbon said the IPO “should blow the socks of people.”

LogMeIn offered its shares at $16 apiece, but closed its first day with shares at $20.02, up 25%. Such a good opening day scored nearly 10x returns for the four venture firms that together invested $20 million dollars in the company. LogMeIn now has a market cap of $428 million.

Founded in 2003, LogMeIn has poised itself to profit from an increasingly mobile and decentralized workforce. Mobile broadband growth in particular has accelerated this trend, and adoption rates will only continue to speed up. As the need for remote access intensifies, companies have began to look for tools proactively — all of this is very good for LogMeIn.

Some analysts believe today’s success could prompt dormant VCs to start investing in technology again. Despite a slow year overall, every tech related IPO in 2009 has gained in the first day of trading. Innovation, it seems, always draws dollars, even in tough times.

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Semanti: Where Search Meets Your Friends

by Mielle Sullivan, Janus Networks

There have been several attempts to use crowdsourcing to help users find the information they are looking for on the web. The whole social bookmarking approach can be seen as a human solution to a mass of information and less-than-perfect search results. Google even displaysStumbleUpon ratted sites with a star ranking for SU users. While knowing a site is popular can be helpful for many searches, a recommendation from a friend is usually more valuable.

Enter Semanti, a Firefox add-on that combines search results, semantic parsing and friend recommendations through Facebook Connect. Just install the add-on and start saving search results you like with the Semanti button. Semanti stores your queries and saved results, so the next time you search for the same term (or something similar) on Google, Yahoo or Bing, the saved results will appear at the top. Next, invite yourFacebook friends to use Semanti and their favored results will also appear at the top of your search results. You can access your Semanti saved searches on any computer or any search engine, as long as the add-on is installed in your browser.

The semantic parsing is also personalized, by you. Instead of relying on complex language software to determine what you mean in a given searchquerie, Semanti displays several definitions in a definition menu. If you need to specify what you meant to refine your search, simply click on the menu and chose from the variety of meanings.

Of course the power of the “friendsourcing” will depend on how many of your friends adopt the tool. Given the mass of add-ons for Firefox, you may have to sell your friends on the concept. However, the one-click bookmarking and automatic return of favored searches on similar terms makes Semanti atime-saver for me, even if I can’t get any of my friends to use it. No longer will I need to try and remember which site was useful the last time I searched for something, Semanti saves it all right there. Plus, I may even get a little help form my friends.

Palm Pre, iPhone 3GS Comparison by Mielle Sullivan, Janus Networks

Palm Pre

Price

* $200 after $100 rebate when you sign up for Sprint or renew your contract

Battery Life

* 5 hours of use time
*Removable, rechargeable battery

Calendar Syncing

* WebOS’s Synergy system syncs up with Outlook, Google and Facebook at no extra charge
* Integrated personal and work calendar

Fun/Helpful Features

* 3 Mega pixel camera with LED flash
* Video recorder
* Remote Data wipe if phone is lost
* Watch live television of select programs from Sprint TV

iPhone

Price

*16 GB model for $200, or 32 GB model for $300 when you sign up or renew your At&t contract

Battery Life

* 5 hours of 3G talk time
* 6 additional iPod listening hours
* 3 additional Wi-fi, video watching hours
* Unremoveable, rechargeable battery

Caledar Syncing

* Syncing with Outlook, Google and Yahoo is available along with a MobileMe account for $99 per year

Fun/Helpful Features

* 3 Mega pixel camera with autofocus, auto-macro and enhanced low-light performance
* Video recorder and limited video editing
* Lost phone-finder calls can be placed through MobileMe
* Remote data wipe if phone is lost

Conclusion: For most basic smartphone features, the Palm Pre and the iPhone are about the same. AT&T and Apple seem to charge a bit more for services and extras associated with the phone like MobileMe, though the iPhone does have more options in extras and fun features.

The Kindle DX: Bigger Screen, Bigger Price Point

by Mielle Sullivan, Janus Networks

Amazon’s latest evolution of the e-reader, the Kindle DX, shipped last week just four months after the Kindle 2 made its debut. In March, I wrote that the improved functionality of the Kindle 2, though impressive, was ultimately disappointing. Consumers seemed to have sci-fi influenced expectations of e-readers. How does the DX measure up? Better, but the cost is probably too high for most to justify the cost.

At the top of the wish list for many e-reader devotees is a bigger screen — for reading magazine and newspaper articles without a loss. The DX has a screen with 2.5 times the display size of the Kindle 2, measuring about 9.7 inches diagonally. But there is still no color. The DX produces impressive monochromatic images, but lack of color renders magazine reading somewhat lifeless. The interface also doesn’t replicate newspaper page layouts, but rather displays individual articles whole, which is convenient, but a bit blocky in appearance at times.

At the release of the last Kindle, users also complained the reader didn’t support enough formats or the ability to edit documents. The new DX does include a built in PDF reader that allows readers to access many more PDF files than previous Kindles. This opens up, among other things, the Google books library. There is still no file editing, but not even the prototypes e-readers offer more than the ability ad “notes” to a displayed document. As I mentioned in my March article, full document editing is probably better left to a laptop than the e-reader.

Amazon says the DX isn’t primarily aimed at consumers, but rather textbook toting students and professionals with lots of business documents. Since these two markets probably have the most demand for the convenience of an e-reader, it is understandable Amazon would want to be the leader in larger e-readers. But at a cost of $490, I think Amazon may have priced themselves out for most people that would be interested in a Kindle DX. Workers may indeed benefit from the 3.3 gigs of storage, but the textbooks have yet arrive for the DX. I don’t see many students shelling out the cash for a product they can’t benefit from yet.

With the competition still lagging behind, it will be interesting to see if this premium-priced device truly establishes the Kindle brand as the undisputed standard for e-readers for consumers, professionals and students. If so, Amazon will benefit down the road even if initial sales are small.

ATT Wireless Announces 3G Upgrade, Plans for 4G Evolution

by Mielle Sullivan, Janus Networks

American Telephone & Telegraph (ATT) announced last week that big advancements are on the way for its wireless service. By the end of the year, users will have stronger indoor coverage and download speeds twice as fast as what they currently experience.

“With the array of smartphones, laptops and emerging devices taking advantage of ATT’s 3G network today, we know that customers are excited to experience higher mobile broadband speeds, and we are deploying the right technologies at the right times to help them get the most from that experience,” said Ralph de la Vega, the President and CEO of ATT Mobility and Consumer Markets.

Currently, ATT uses a technology called High Speed Downlink Packet Access/Universal Mobile Telephone System (HSDPA/UMTS) with typical download speeds of 700-1.7 Mbit/seec. The upgrade will be to the similar, but more evolved, High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) 7.2 wireless technology. HSPA 7.2 has theoretical download speeds of 7.2 Mbits – or about 1 megabyte – per second. However, At&t admits that real world speeds will be significantly slower.

To increase the reach of its network and deliver stronger indoor service, the carrier also plans to nearly double the 850 MHz spectrum it has dedicated to high-speed wireless. 2,100 cell site connections will be added across the country to achieve this goal. Dropped calls and spotty service are chief complaints among At&t’s customer base. Stronger reception may improve the company’s reputation and lure more customers.

Even bigger plans are on the way for 2010 when ATT will begin testing LTE, or Long Term Evolution wireless technology. LTE is a contender for the 4G standard and is similar to WiMax. But LTE is less open, more proprietary and currently faster than WiMax — all of which has contributed to wider adoption among carriers. In a few years, some analysts believe LTE and WiMax could advance to compete with wired broadband. If that happens, it wouldn’t just be a wireless evolution, but rather a second wireless revolution and ATT could be poised at the front.

It Will Take More Than a Great Product for Microsoft to Gain in Search

Several information blogs reported last week that Microsoft’s new search engine, possibly named Kumo, could debut as early as this week at the All Things Digital conference. Microsoft has been trying to gain more of a voice in the search market for some years and has purchased several search technologies. However, this is the first sign the new engine might be ready to hatch. There is plenty of genuine interest in watching if Microsoft can be a real player in search, but when competing with Google, technology is only one of many battle grounds.

A recent Neilsen study gives Google 64.2 percent of the US search market with Microsoft only at only 10.3 percent. Other studies have put Google’s share closer to 80 percent and growing. Even within Microsoft, it is reported, 80 percent of employees still use Google.

Despite the omnipresence of Google, there is a lot of improvement to be made in search. All of the big search engines return a lot of irrelevant information, especially on long tail searches. Google has had a few outages lately and recently there have been some rumblings at search conferences that perhaps Google has hit a wall– in market share and innovation.

Kumo plans to tackle the challenges of search with some neat user experience features and some potentially powerful back-end technologies. The UI will have a left hand navigation bar that breaks search results into different categories ( photos, blogs, product detail pages etc.) and allows the user to quickly switch between categories. The back-end technology will encompass the abilities of the search engines Microsoft has purchased: Medstory, a health search engine, Farecast, a travel search engine, and the highly anticipated but untested semantic search of Powerset.

With all this innovation, what stands in Kumo’s way? Well, like it or not, Google is the backbone of the Internet right now. It has, arguably, one of the most powerful brand associations in history. Google has become synonymous with finding information. Websites and businesses spend huge amounts of time and money trying to master Google’s algorithms and web crawlers. Google has gained close to a natural monopoly, something that has continually worried federal lawmakers. But people go to Google largely because they want to. And, at the moment, they do have the best technology.

To really gain ground in search, Kumo will have to return better results with a superior user inferface, get a blitz of good press, earn some very influential fans and–most importantly–wait it out. Breaking the Google habit is a cultural shift at this point, even if the technology promotion are perfect. Cultural shifts, though they don’t always seem like it, are long sells. Ripples do become waves, but rarely overnight.

CubeTree: A Step Forward for Office Communication

by Mielle Sulliivan, Janus Networks

Inter-office communication can be complicated. There are lots of messages: messages for you, messages for your team, messages for your branch or company as a whole, interesting articles coworkers share…the list goes on. To often all of these messages can end up in a big pile in your inbox– where they can easily be lost. A new startup, CubeTree, address some of the challenges of workplace communication through a platform inspired by social networking.

In CubeTree, employees can create a profile, send out micro-updates, “follow” other coworkers, share documents, set up wikis, and much more. One particularly useful feature is the search tool– great for finding documents created by coworkers and filed with mysterious logic. The passive sharing of micro-updates for non essential information, like industry articles, is convenient because it helps reduce emails and therefore the chances that an important message will be buried.

Setup is quick and painless. Because CubeTree exists in the cloud, there is nothing to install. Just sign up for one of their three subscription levels and begin. Most employees will already be familiar with the social networking environment, so training is minimal. CubeTree also easily incorporates information from other commonly used office programs, such as Google Reader, Salesforce and Tripit trips.

Of course CubeTree is not the only company to take an idea that evolved in the social space and use if for the workplace. Yammer is already the standard for business micro-messaging. SocialText delivers workplace wiki solutions and LinkedIn is the site for professional profiles. But CubeTree offers it all, on one platform, with superior security assurance because the founders come straight from Symantec, an IT security leader.

For all its functionality, CubeTree is not an office suite. It doesn’t compete with any of the standard business software, but rather stands along side it. CubeTree is a complimentary office tool to help coworkers stay more organized and in better communication–something nearly every workplace could use in today’s hyper-information age.

Windows 7 to Have Touch and Gesture Capabilities

by Mielle Sullivan, Janus Networks

By now you have probably heard of Microsoft Surface, the expensive tablet PC that enables the user to manipulate images and interact with applications by touching and tapping the surface–similar to a giant iPhone. But now it is confirmed that Windows 7, set to come out sometime this fall, will have some touch and gesture recognition features built in.

Acer also announced on April 30th that its Aspire Z5600 will feature a 24-inch screen with 1080p resolution that was designed specifically to utilize the touch features of Windows 7.

On compatible equipment, Windows 7 will recognize gestures such as: tapping and double-tapping (just as you would with a mouse button); drag and drop; scrolling (by pull-touching the main window rather than a scroll bar); pinching (to zoom in and out); two-finger tapping (to zoom and orient); rotating (by touching two spots and then twisting); flicking (for quick shifts left and right); and pressing-and-holding (to right-click).

As a pure concept the Surface, and all touchscreen technology, has a lot of sex appeal to consumers. But there are doubts the technology will really get mouths watering on the business side. Bill Gates has said the expansion of user interfaces beyond the keyboard will have a far reaching impact on computing. “In the next few years, the roles of speech, gesture, vision, ink, all of those will become huge. For the person at home and the person at work, that interaction will change dramatically,” said Gates at a digital event last year.

There is huge potential for this kind of technology, but habits, ideas and computers will also have to evolve before it fundamentally changes computing. For touch and gesture recognition to take off in the work place, I think work styles and culture will have to change–and that is long sell.

On the consumer side, I don’t see the Surface becoming mainstream until the price comes down–way down. Despite strong interest, the Surface it self sells for about $17,000, and (probably for due to price) is only being sold to retailers and hospitality businesses. Touch technology within computers like the Aspire will catch on if the hardware and software make it natural to use, which may not happen right away.

As with all computing advances, it may take two or three generations to find the right recipe for large scale adoption. However, being part of Windows 7 means touch and gesture recognition has come a long way culturally and technologically, even if kinks need to be worked out and devices themselves still need to evolve.

You can contact the author at press@janusnetworks.com.

Pulse Smartpen:The First Social Media Pen

by Mielle Sullivan, Janus Networks
If you are not already familiar with it, the Pulse Smartpen by Livescribe, is a computerized pen with an infrared camera and digital audio recorder that helps you link audio to handwriting. Just tap on any note or drawing on the accompanying “dot paper” and the pen will replay the portion of the recording that was recorded when the note was written. Its one of the more practical gadgets on the market, and has been gaining press and users since its launch about a year ago.

As you can imagine, a large percentage of Pulse users are college students. “My Pulse smartpen has been invaluable to me in my classes, particularly my pre-med classes, where I need to take very detailed and accurate notes,” said Kal Shah, a junior at University of California Berkeley. “With my Pulse smartpen, I can pay more attention to what my professor is actually saying rather than scribbling down every single word. It’s also awesome to use when I’m studying for tests.”

Livescribe has taken the utility and fun of its pen one step higher by giving the Pulse a social media platform. Pulse users can post an image of their notes, along with the audio to either the Livescribe community or Facebook. If the author allows, users can even share other people’s notes with friends. The Livescribe community has ten categories of posted notes including academic notes, how-tos and art.

In order to further engage social media using college students, the company created a Facebook application called “Where are you going to college?”
The application is an interactive map that allows Facebook users to see who is going to their college, and what schools their friends are going to. Students can apply for the scholarship by putting their college on the map and writing a 140-character statement on how they plan to achieve in college. Students can submit their entries at www.livescribe.com/mapyourcollege.

It’s always interesting when a brand can add a social media component to its features, but for the Pulse sharing seems particularly useful. Within private online groups, students can instantly compare notes and corporate teams can hone in on essential parts of a presentation. Public uses range from the sharing of sermons to political speeches in a more dynamic way.
By linking writing, audio, the web and community Pulse takes jotting into the 21st century.

You can contact the author at press@janusnetworks.com.

Piracy is Just Part of the Film Industry’s Problem

by Mielle Sullivan, Janus Networks

Last week the Swedish creators of file sharing community The Pirate Bay were convicted of copyright violation and given a one year jail sentence. The story once inflamed the ongoing debate about copyright and ownership of information. Both the studios and the “pirates” are sticking to the same familiar arguments of lost revenues and freedom versus corporate greed respectively. But after everything that has happened in the music and newspaper industries in the last ten years, it has become clear that how content is consumed online and how money can be made from online distribution is more nuanced than these tired talking points.

What the movie studios must come to accept is that regardless of any single file sharing site, they– like the music and newspaper industries–will be radically altered by online distribution. The internet was designed to distribute information, and it performs this function very well. Digital information is also designed to be distributed, so it will be. Movies are digital information. Legally or illegally, file sharing is here to stay. The bigger realization is that even legal, online film distribution will cause a huge market disruption.

While revenue from theater showings may hold steady, the sales price of media for private consumption will continue to decline–a trend that precedes the internet. Through streaming and downloading, the net has made a much wider variety of films and TV shows immediately available to consumers instantly. Every film, TV show etc. available on the web must compete with every other movie, TV show etc. available on the web–more options means less market share for any one product. It is this sudden market expansion that has been so much trouble for newspapers.

Having said that, the film industry is different from the news industry. One news article may contain the same basic information as the next, but one movie is unique enough that it wont compete head to head against another movie as easily. Neither is the film industry completely analogous to the music industry. We listen to individual songs more often than we watch individual movies, which is why we never rented songs. With complete convenience achieved, access to a large selection is increasingly the determiner in how people watch movies at home.

There are two factors that are keeping online movie selection down. 1.) Licensing. The studios are scared to death of cannibalizing DVD rental and sales revenue, which account for tens of billions dollars and the majority of its revenues. Exactly how much revenue is something of an industry secret, but in 2005 it was 85.5% and growing 2.) Connection speeds. Downloading large files at slow connection speeds isn’t viable. Obviously, both of these situations are changing quickly. Broadband adaptation and speed are rising rapidly, making video streaming and downloading available to more people. Content licensed for online distribution is growing as well. Hulu and Netflix have had several new streaming content deals in the past few months, but the selection is still painfully small.

More and more consumers have the ability and desire to view films online, but find no legal sites with a compelling selection. This does push some people towards piracy. And it’s a bit of a catch-22 for the studios, if they distribute their content online, they lose life-sustaining DVD sales. If they don’t distribute their content online, they encourage piracy.

The industry will loose some revenue, but Netflix and Blockbuster have already proven that the subscription model for film distribution is profitable and popular. Illegal file sharing sites also leave a lot to be desired in selection, so it is possible to compete against them. I do believe people will pay for a dependable video on demand site with a very good selection. Despite their hedging, the sooner such sites exists, the better for the movie industry. Subscribers rather than sales are new revenue source.