Does Google’s Equality Drive Extend To Old People?

Google posted earlier today on its efforts towards building a workplace that provides equal treatment to all staff. Google noted that it has ranked highly on the U.S. Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index during a “time of rapid growth for our population of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees (whose group name is, naturally, Gayglers) around the world.”

Google’s inclusive work environment for GLBT employees should be commended, but does equality in Google extend to old people? Brian Reid doesn’t think so.

Reid is a former Google Director of Operations and Engineering and in now entering his third year of battling Google for unfair dismissal. Reid claims that despite receiving positive work reviews he was dismissed by Google after being told he was “slow”, “fuzzy”, “lethargic”, and did not “display a sense of urgency” and was told by a manager that his ideas were “obsolete” and “too old to matter”. Reid also noted in evidence that some of his colleagues referred to him as an “old man”, an “old guy” and an “old fuddy-duddy”.

It would appear that Reid did act in a fashion that was different to the general working ethos of Googlers. By his own admission Reid would leave work at 7pm and noted that he was regularly asked why he wasn’t remaining at work when Google provided dinner for its employees. An issue with diabetes also meant that Reid was required to eat at regular intervals, even when this meant interrupting meetings.

Google has denied the allegations, saying that Reid was let go after the project he was working on finished. An Appeals court has allowed the case to proceed with a trial date to be advised.

Eventvue Grabs Angel Round Over The Weekend

The firstTechStars startup has gotten funded over this weekend. Eventvue has closed a round estimated to be about a quarter million dollars from Brad Feld, David Cohen, Dave McClure, Wendy Lea, amongst others. See our earlier coverage of them here.

Eventvue brings social networking to the context of conferences, helping conference goers re-connect or follow up with business they couldn’t follow up with in the limited span of a conference. Networking at a conference is a fairly inefficient process, left up to chance encounters and stacks of business cards. Anything that can help optimize the limited conference time that thousand dollar ticket bought you is an easy sell.

Confabb is the most direct competitor in the space, but has focused on being a comprehensive directory of the who, what, and where of industry conferences rather than on the palm greasing that goes on at the events. More social competitors include Meetup.com and Eventwax. Eventvue is set for a public launch later this year.

Urbanspoon: Restaurant Reviews Coming To A City Near You

Urbanspoon is a small Seattle startup that wants to help you find the perfect restaurant. Their goal: compete head on with Yelp and other user review sites, specifically around restaurants.

But they are approaching the market in a different way than Yelp and others. Instead of talking users into coming to their site and writing reviews, they’re taking a decentralized approach and aggregating available reviews from trusted sources around the web - local newspapers, citysearch, etc. The approach is very similar to what Rotten Tomatoes has done successfully with movies.

Users can vote on each restaurant in the system and can also leave comments - effectively their own reviews. And anyone that wants a review they’ve written on a blog or elsewhere to be included can do so by adding a bit of code to the post.

So far, so good. They’re claiming 1.5 million monthly page views on 500,000 unique visitors. The company covers fourteen U.S. cities currently, with fifteen more on the way. And they’ve done all of this with a three man team and no funding. All three founders, Ethan Lowry, Adam Doppelt and Patrick O’Donnell, are ex-Jobster employees.

LiveStation Readying Multi-Station Client

The Microsoft/ Skinkers P2P live television streaming LiveStation project demonstrated a multi-channel client at the IBC conference earlier in September.

Although not currently available for general testing, the demonstration proved that a product that streams one channel really well can actually scale over multiple content streams.

The Silverlight powered client competes with other P2P live television products including Zattoo. See our previous coverage here for an overview of the various operators in this space. As Skinkers CEO Matteo Berlucchi notes in the video below, LiveStation does not compete with Joost; this is a product that streams live TV and does not do video on demand.

The following video comes from James Clarke.

Graspr Steps into the Crowded Instructional Video Ring

Teresa Phillips, founder and CEO of Graspr and one-time Yahoo VP, says that “Graspr is not just another video site or social networking community.” I’m not so sure.

The company has granted me access to Graspr prior to its presentation at Demo this afternoon and its public unveiling later this evening. I’ve kicked the tires, and while Graspr explicitly claims to be “the social media and learning company with the Internet’s largest user-generated video showcase for instructional content,” the site could probably be rebranded for any other purpose involving video and members.

This would be totally fine if there didn’t already exist a good video social network for instructional content. But several good ones do exist, including 5min, eHow, Sclipo, SuTree, Expert Village, Instructables, and VideoJug.

To be sure, Graspr works well enough. Everything revolves around instructional videos, so in many ways its like YouTube, et al. In addition to simply browsing and viewing videos, users can jump to particular scenes within videos, add notes to video segments, view related videos, open supplementary files attached to videos, and participate in discussion threads and chat rooms attached to the videos.

On the social networking side of things, users can create profiles and make friends. Their profile pages show all of the videos they have contributed, any of which can be grouped into series.

I’m tempted to label Graspr YASN, but to be fair they will provide an online video editing tool, which helps to differentiate them (well, maybe not from YouTube itself). They also have an ad-revenue sharing scheme in place to incentivise the production of content. I only wish their were more innovative aspects to Graspr that could get me more excited about it.

Mobile Video Company Vantrix Takes $12 Million Series B

Online platform delivery specialists Vantrix Corporation have secured $12 million in Series B financing, in a round led by JK&B Capital. Existing investors SummerHill Venture Partners, Entrepia Ventures, BDC Venture Capital, and Innovacom have also participated. Ali Shadman from JK&B Capital joins the Vantrix board as part of the deal.

Vantrix will use the proceeds from the round to expand the company’s operations globally and to invest in infrastructure and R&D to support the company’s growing customer base.

Vantrix offers a mobile focused rich media delivery platform; or in laymen’s terms it provides delivery tools that allow video to be easily viewed on cellphones. Manish Jha, CEO of Vantrix said that of the Vantrix platform: “Delivering rich media on mobile phones should not be hindered by obstacles such as the fragmentation of devices, screen sizes, codec types, content formats, media player characteristics and network incompatibility issues. Vantrix helps content providers and carriers worldwide overcome these barriers to deliver ubiquitous and compelling new mobile services to consumers.”

Second Life 2.0: The Metanomics Conference

Things are changing in Second Life. The period of glee abandon in which companies joined Second Life, built giant edifices to their offline brands which no one visited, then ran away has passed. We are now seeing those who survived and new players in Linden Lab’s online world build something new, something perhaps more sustainable and in tune to user needs.

On the surface it appears that Second Life is repeating the internet development cycle, but at an accelerated rate. The scandals and useless attempts at bringing offline brands to Second Life parallel the first web boom. After the crash of 2000, many fled the web, whilst a core few remained and over time, along with new players, started to build interfaces that were useful. Second Life today is like 2001-2002, the dawn on a new age; Second Life 2.0.

A rather late comer to Second Life is Nick Wilson. Wilson was best known as a SEO blogger writing for several years at Threadwatch. After selling the site he cast his direction towards Second Life, launching the Metaversed Blog, a chronicle of the ups and downs of doing business in Second Life. Wilson has officially announced the Metanomics Conference in conjunction with Cornell University, a series of events that will explore business and policy in the “metaverse” of virtual worlds over several months.

I asked Wilson whether we were indeed witnessing a change:

The corporations in SecondLife are just ignoring the backlash, and are getting on with it. We lost a few in the initial rush, but those still standing, are standing strong, and leading the way for others. Breaking the trail if you will. Less about showy press splashes, and more about finding really useful ways to use virtual environments to collaborate with colleagues long distance, engage customers and experiment with the platform.

Interestingly Wilson sees those remaining in and now joining Second Life as looking towards longer term goals:

None of these companies really expects to be pulling profit out of virtual ventures right now. but they all see the potential, and firms like Sun, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Amazon are in it for the long haul.

Wilson says that Metanomics is about bridging the gap between those comfortable in Second Life, and those wary of it:

One of the things that I want to do, is use video, podcasts, web to bring this stuff to people in formats they’re more comfortable with. To bridge the gap between those who’re comfortable in SL and those not yet there. Hence partnerships with SLCN.tv for all of these shows and the team up with Cornell.

The conference preview video is below. The first session is September 17, unfortunately smack bang in the middle of TechCrunch 40, but for those not joining us in San Francisco and interested in the potential of Second Life and other online worlds, it would be worth a look.

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gBox: Give The Gift Of DRM-Free Music

gBox is a new take on selling digital content. Instead of emphasizing sales directly to consumers, gBox is encourages you to create wish lists and buy gifts for your friends and family. To kick-start the service, they’ve sealed a pretty big deal with Universal to be the retailer for their new “Open MP3″ experiment into DRM free music. In a move that’s a snub to Apple’s iTunes, Universal will be buying Google AdWords for their music, linking people to the gBox site to buy their artists’ music. gBox will be expanding to other forms of digital content in the future.

gBox is not only a destination retail site for digital content. It also has an embeddable gift box widget to show off what you want to your friends. Your friends can then buy it for you directly from within the widget. It will be available as a general embed or specialized for 7 of the big social networks (no Facebook). Their current offering, music, will go for 99 cents per track and $9.99 per album (to stay competitive with iTunes). You have to have a gBox account to receive a gift, but not to buy one.

Considering people already pay 99 cents to send their friends virtual gifts on Facebook, I’d expect buying a real song to be an attractive proposition. It also seems like a missed opportunity for a network like MySpace, which runs on Snocap.

You can download the content after its bought for you, but need a special gBox plugin to control the downloads since some content partners (Sony, IODA) will be selling music with DRM. This makes the offering somewhat disappointing, because the plugin will only work for IE (FF on the way) and not on the Mac.

gBox was started in June as an angel funded spin-off from Navio systems. They’re a 20 person company based in Cupertino, California.

US Endeavour shuttle to stay docked to ISS until Aug. 20

MOSCOW, August 13 (RIA Novosti) - NASA has prolonged the Endeavour shuttle's visit to the International Space Station, where it has been docked since Friday, until August 20, the agency's Web site said.
Inspection shows tile gouge almost reaches shuttle skin Spaceflight Now
NASA: Shuttle tiles pierced Chicago Tribune
New York Times - Channel 4 News - Forbes - The Australian
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http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn

Email Attachments Are So Uncool

Online office suite Zoho released another product tonight, called Zoho Viewer. It is similar to Scribd (and the upcoming Docstoc) - upload an office or PDF document for easy viewing on Zoho’s website or embedded into other web pages.

Zoho Viewer is different than Scribd, though. With Scribd, documents are public by default (there is a private option). Zoho isn’t looking to create a community around documents like Scribd does. All documents are private and you must know the URL to view them. They are not listed in any directory or searcheable. So it is useful primarily to quickly upload email attachments and other documents you want to share with a few people but not the whole world. Viewers can also quickly download the document in its original format.

See the video below for an overview of Zoho Viewer. As an aside, I really like Viddler, which Zoho used to host the video. The quality is a lot better than YouTube and the player is very well done.

MOTOROLA - W220 (Black)

MOTOROLA - W220 (Black) This 93 grams clamshell phone has a lithium-ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 460 minutes and standby time of 290 hours. It has a 65k colour TFT display with resolution of 128 x 128 pixels. It also has features like polyphonic ringtones, dual band, mp3 capability, fm radio, MMS, EMS, SMS, GPRS, WAP, calculator, calendar, currency converter, alarm, clock and ringtone composer. Price Rs. :- 3,705 User Rating : 5.57 Good

SAMSUNG - SGH-E690

SAMSUNG - SGH-E690 This 83 grams clamshell phone has a Lithium-Ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 360 minutes and stand by time of 250 hours. It has added features like 65k colour TFT internal display with resolution of 128 x 160 pixels and 65k colour external display with resolution of 96 x 96 pixels, voice dial, voice mail, call conferencing, triband, flight mode, vibration mode, predictive text input, polyphonic ringtones, music player (mp3, AAC and AAC+), fm radio, alarm clock, calendar,inbuilt dictaphone, handsfree speaker, MMS, EMS, SMS, EDGE, GPRS, Bluetooth, USB Connector and is WAP enabled. It has a VGA camera with features like 4x digital zoom, photo effects, multi shot, self timer, mosaic shot, image quality adjuster and video recording. It also has an inbuilt memory of 16MB, microSD card slot and sales package consists of 256MB microSD card. View More Price Rs. :- 8,079 User Rating : 10.00 Perfect

Latest future bazar mobile phones

SAMSUNG - SGH-E690 This 83 grams clamshell phone has a Lithium-Ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 360 minutes and stand by time of 250 hours. It has added features like 65k colour TFT internal display with resolution of 128 x 160 pixels and 65k colour external display with resolution of 96 x 96 pixels, voice dial, voice mail, call conferencing, triband, flight mode, vibration mode, predictive text input, polyphonic ringtones, music player (mp3, AAC and AAC+), fm radio, alarm clock, calendar,inbuilt dictaphone, handsfree speaker, MMS, EMS, SMS, EDGE, GPRS, Bluetooth, USB Connector and is WAP enabled. It has a VGA camera with features like 4x digital zoom, photo effects, multi shot, self timer, mosaic shot, image quality adjuster and video recording. It also has an inbuilt memory of 16MB, microSD card slot and sales package consists of 256MB microSD card. View More Price Rs. :- 8,079 User Rating : 10.00 Perfect

SAMSUNG - SGH-P310 This 73.6 grams phone has a Lithium-Ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 240 minutes and stand by time of 242 hours. It has added features like 262k colour TFT display with resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, voice mail, call conferencing, triband, flight mode, vibration mode, predictive text input, polyphonic ringtones, music player (mp3, AAC and AAC+), alarm clock, stopwatch, calendar, document viewer, inbuilt dictaphone, handsfree speaker, MMS, EMS, SMS, EDGE, GPRS, Bluetooth, Infrared and is WAP enabled. It has a 2MP camera with features like 4x digital zoom, flash, photo effects, multi shot, mosaic shot, image quality adjuster and video recording. It also is pda enabled and has an inbuilt memory of 80MB and a microSD card slot. It comes with a Leather Case with inbuilt secondary battery. View More Price Rs. :- 18,999 User Rating : 4.00 Mediocre

MOTOROLA - W375 This 88 grams clamshell phone has a lithium-ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 450 minutes and standby time of 250 hours. It has a 65k colour TFT internal display with resolution of 128 x 160 pixels and a mono external display. It also has features like VGA camera with 4x digital zoom, polyphonic ringtones, predictive text input, vibration mode, triband, mp3 capability, fm radio, MMS, EMS, SMS, GPRS, USB Connector, WAP, handsfree speaker, calculator, calendar, currency converter, alarm, clock and ringtone composer. View More Price Rs. :- 5,490

MOTOROLA - L7i This 96 grams phone has a Lithium-ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 315 minutes and stand by time of 345 hours. It has added features like inbuilt dictaphone, handsfree speaker, voice dial, voice mail, call conferencing, specific caller tones, vibration mode, quad band, predictive text input, bluetooth enabled, SMS messaging, picture messaging, inbuilt games, polyphonic ringtones, EDGE, GPRS, MMS and is WAP 1.2 enabled. It has a microSD card slot, inbuilt VGA camera with 4x digital zoom and video recording feature. Its sales package consists of 128 MB microSD card, USB connectivity cable and headset. Price Rs. :- 8,200

MOTOROLA - RIZR Z3 This 115 grams slider phone has a Lithium-ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 400 minutes and standby time of 350 hours. It has added features like voice dial, call conferencing, specific caller tones, quad band, 2MP camera with 8x digital zoom, photo light and video recording, email client, calendar, calculator, flight mode, inbuilt dictaphone, handsfree speaker, vibration mode, predictive text input, PTT, SMS, EMS, MMS, EDGE, GPRS, Bluetooth, Infrared, USB Connector and is WAP enabled. It comes with 262k colour TFT display with resolution of 176 x 220 pixels and also has features like mp3 capability, polyphonic ringtones, pda enabled, inbuilt memory of 20MB and a microSD card slot. Price Rs. :- 13,138