Major investors are moving past ‘Web 2.0’
The term “Web 2.0” is now officially outdated, and many venture capital investors say they’ll stay away from firms adding the phrase to their business plan.
A recent story on digital-daily.com, explained how attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo Berlin earlier this month were told “Web 2.0” should be avoided and regarded solely as a marketing buzzword.
It noted Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture capital firms, is reportedly no longer investing in Web 2.0 start-ups. “We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies,” KPCB partner Randy Komisar recently told Silicon Valley Watcher’s Tom Foremski, adding that he’d recently told John Battelle, conference chair of Web 2.0 Summit, that the term is viewed with disdain in the VC community.
Sites today considered “2.0” are popular real estate portal Zillow, Facebook and dozens of other sites that allow users to create their own content and “mash up” data using information from Google or Geojoey, a travel mashup.
Slacker MP3 player comes alive
Slacker, the Internet radio service that allows users to create highly customized radio stations from an extensive catalog, has finally unveiled a portable media player.
The device, called Slacker Portable Player, offers a new approach to the traditional idea of a hardware device that plays mp3 music or video files.
Users can sync content from stations they create with an online Slacker.com account.
The company also launched a new Premium Radio service, which costs $7.50 per month, but offers unlimited skipping, the ability to play favorites whenever you choose and no advertisements.
Starting last week, consumers could pre-order the device for $200 (2GB), $250 (4GB), or $300 (8GB). The players, which for no extra cost can ship loaded with content from your stations and linked to your account, are scheduled to arrive by mid-December.
For rent: Yahoo’s super computer
Yahoo is offering academia the opportunity to use a portion of the company’s massively parallel M45 computing environment, which consists of 4,000 computer processors running the open-source Hadoop distributed file system and parallel execution environment. In effect, Yahoo is willing to lease out its vast computing resources to assist researchers who need it. Parallel computing involves breaking down huge sets of data and distributing them to different interconnected computers for simultaneous processing and analysis.
Carnegie Mellon University became the first academic institution to sign up for time on Yahoo’s supercomputer cluster. Researchers there will use M45 to study ways to improve information retrieval, large-scale graph and computer graphics, natural-language processing and machine translation on widely distributed systems. (Source: Scientific American)