Yahoo Tries Its Hand At Mobile App Search

If apps replace the mobile web, and along with it, traditional search, then the search engines need to figure out how to adapt. Yahoo is taking a tiny step towards embracing mobile apps with a few new products for searching apps. It is launching both iPhone and Android apps for app discovery, as well as desktop app search experience.

The iPhone app is called Yahoo! AppSpot, and I’ve been trying it out a little. AppSpot is about app discovery, much like Chomp, Appsfire, or Disrupt startup Do@. It scans your apps so that it won;t show you apps you already have in results, and also takes into account what you own to show related apps. AppSpot gives you daily recommendations in various categories (music, games, news, social networking, travel, utilities) with the now-familiar slot-machine rolling UI. It also lets you search for apps by keyword, and returns results based on title, description, popularity, and other factors.

The results aren’t horrible, but they aren’t spectacular either, from what I can tell. A search for “music” brings up Pandora Radio as the top pick (duh), followed by Shazam, Last.fm, Yahoo Music, and NPR Music. Well, at least it got the first one right.

A search for “photo” apps beings up Shuuterfly for iPhone as the top result for me, followed by PhotoFunia, PhotoSync, and Photo Frames LITE. Wrong. To be fair, I have most of the usual suspect photo apps already on my iPhone (Instagram, PicPlz, Path, Color), but still there are so many like Hipstagram or With that I don’t have and didn’t even show up. Quite frankly, I’d be better off using Alexia’s flow chart. (Although, PhotoSync does sound worthwhile, until iCloud turns its wireless syncing into a feature of iPhoto).

At least AppSpot is an improvement over the native app search in iTunes. It’s faster, and there are more ways to search. It doesn’t just give you the top 100 apps in each category when you are looking for recommendations. Given that the App Store now has more than 425,000 apps, that’s a good thing.

I haven’tested out the Android app, but I suspect it works pretty much the same, except for Android apps. There are 200,000 of those. The Website delivers results along with a QR code that can be scanned by the apps so that you can basically transfer a search result over. Although if you have to open up your app to scan the 2-D barcode from your screen, you might as well just search on your phone.

Yahoo is making a play here for the app discovery market, but the app discovery startups out there need not shake in their boots just yet.

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Bitly Makes Its Bitly Pro Features Free To All Users

Link shortening service bitly has just made its Bitly Pro features available to all its users, free of charge. In beta since 2009, Bitly Pro served over 10K shortened domains, including P.Diddy’s diddy.it (just go there, you won’t be sorry) and the Dalai Lama’s Dalaila.ma.

Users who want to try out bitly Pro (which is now just bitly) can head over to bitly, log in with an existing or new account and set up their custom short domain and domain tracking features by redirecting their domain’s DNS to Bitly’s severs.

So now you too can experience His Holiness’ URL shortening and domain analytics service of choice, without having to plunk down the cash or wait. Beat that http://T.co/.

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Lawmakers Get Involved In “Locationgate,” Propose Data Privacy Law

The “Locationgate” scandal that saw so much coverage back in April hasn’t been in the news much lately, but that hasn’t stopped lawmakers from trying to prevent similar situations. Two senators, Al Franken of Minnesota and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, have proposed a mobile privacy bill today hoping to strengthen the level of consent needed for app developers and device makers to collect and share location data.

In case you’ve been living under a rock (in a location already stored on your phone, no doubt), it all started when two researchers in Britain discovered that Apple’s iPhone and iPad had been recording location data, and storing it on the device. This had people up in arms, of course, and it was only a matter of time until Google was discovered to be doing the same thing. Since then, people have been pretty peeved about it, so much so that the long arm of the law is getting involved.

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#Winning: EcoFactor Software Puts Thermostat On Auto-Pilot To Curb Energy Waste

EcoFactor, an energy efficiency startup based in Redwood City, Calif. was named a winner at the Utility Technology Challenge today in Boston. The other two winners were Ideal Power Converters and Power Tagging, according to a press release from the event.

EcoFactor’s flagship software as a service (SaaS) helps electricity consumers and utilities to diagnose and curb energy waste related to heating and cooling. This technology works with any kind of grid-enabled, or two-way thermostat. According to Scott Hublou, a senior vice president of product and a co-founder of EcoFactor, here’s how it helps curb energy waste:

“We look at the way outside weather conditions correlate with indoor heating and cooling needs at home. Then, we ask ‘how effective are your heaters or air conditioners at overcoming that?’ Once our system calculates and can understands the correlation, we can adjust the thermostat. We have an objective of reducing the energy required to keep the house comfortable. We can also help power companies reduce peak demand, and shift the load…”

Businesses that provide power, or energy management services to home owners— including cable operators and telecommunications providers, electric and gas utilities— are EcoFactor’s current and targeted customers. EcoFactor is available to end users in 10 states through a combination of pilot and commercial programs today.

The company recently found that homes that put their heaters and air conditioners on auto-pilot— via EcoFactor pilot programs across the country, and one commercial program in Dallas, Texas— realized a 17 percent reduction in energy use related to heating and cooling, on average. According to the most recent available D.O.E. study, half of the average Americans’ home energy bill is spent on heating and cooling.

The Utility Technology Challenge was started in 2009 (with funding by the U.S. Department of Energy) by the Clean Technology & Sustainable Industries Organization (CTSI). EcoFactor competed against fifteen semifinalists, listed below:

* 7 AC Technologies, Massachusetts (www.7actech.com)
* EcoFactor, California (www.ecofactor.com)
* Electric Pipeline Corporation, New York (www.elpipes.com)
* Energy Compression, Inc., Massachusetts (www.energycompression.com/)
* EnerVault, California (www.enervault.com)
* Ideal Power Converters, Texas (www.IdealPowerConverters.com)
* Innosepra, LLC, New Jersey
* Minesto, Sweden (www.minesto.com)
* NovaThermal Energy, Pennsylvania (www.novathermalenergy.com)
* OsComp Systems, Massachusetts
* Plasma2Energy, Texas (www.Plasma2Energy.com)
* Power Tagging, Colorado (www.powertagging.com)
* Tropos Networks, California (www.tropos.com)
* V&R Energy Systems Research, Inc., California (www.vrenergy.com)
* XTreme Power, Texas (www.xtremepower.com)

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Review: Vue Video Network With Motion Detection

When I last looked at the Vue Video Network in 2009 I found it to be fairly rough. These tiny, battery-powered cameras were very cool and you could set them up and then “visit” them via the web to see what was going on. However, they weren’t a real security system in that you couldn’t be alerted to motion, making the cameras overly simplistic. However, with the launch of the the new Vue cameras with motion detection, I’m pleased to report these things are finally ready for prime time.

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Hell Yes, Mayor Bloomberg. I’m With You.

New York City Mayor Bloomberg calls for major immigration reform:

The Mayor proposed green cards for graduates with advanced degrees in essential fields; a new visa for entrepreneurs with investors ready to invest capital in their job-creating idea; more temporary and permanent visas for highly skilled workers…The Mayor also announced the results of a study conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy – a bipartisan group of business leaders and mayors from across the country – that found more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants and those companies employ more than 10 million people worldwide and have combined revenues of $4.2 trillion.

and

“We would not have become a global superpower without the contributions of immigrants who built the railroads and canals that opened up the west, who invented ground-breaking products that revolutionized global commerce, and who pioneered scientific, engineering, and medical advances that made America the most innovative country in the world.
“But make no mistake: we will not remain a global superpower if we continue to close our doors to people who want to come here to work hard, start businesses, and pursue the American dream. The American dream cannot survive if we keep telling the dreamers to go elsewhere.

“It’s what I call national suicide – and that’s not hyperbole. Every day that we fail to fix our broken immigration laws is a day that we inflict a wound on our economy. Today, we may have turned away the next Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin. Tomorrow, we may turn away the next Levi Strauss or Jerry Yang.

“And we certainly will be turning away many of the people who – like my grandparents, and no doubt many of yours – came to this country with almost nothing except one thing: a desire to work – and work and work and work – to build a better life for themselves and their families.

In the last presidential election I interviewed most of the candidates on a variety of tech issues, including immigration. Most of the candidates punted because the issue is so politically charged. Everyone knows immigrants fuel Silicon Valley, but most politicians won’t fight for it.

It’s exceptionally frustrating to see our government doing so many things that hurt growth in Silicon Valley. So frustrating that I ranted in 2010 that the best thing the government can do is just leave Silicon Valley alone.

In that post I said “I would have said let in any highly educated person in the world that wants to live here, but I know that isn’t going to happen. We will continue to shun the next generation of brilliant foreign entrepreneurs because of some absurd fear that they’re going to take away our jobs. In a few years those entrepreneurs will no longer want to live here anyway.”

The fact is that those immigrants create companies, create jobs, create wealth. The issue of illegal immigration over our Southern border must be separated from the issue of immigration of people who want to come here to build companies. I am so happy to see a politician take this stand.

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Day One Capital Launches As Hungary’s ‘First Institutional Business Angel Fund’

Day One Capital has launched what it claims to be the first institutional angel fund in Hungary.

The new fund aims to tackle an oh-so-familiar problem faced by much of Europe: the lack of “seed money and management mentoring for innovative early-stage tech startups”, says Day One Capital investment manager Aurel Pasztor. The fund hopes to raise €2-4m and is targeting companies in the IT, telecommunications, energy, biotech and finance sectors with investments between €200-400k.

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