Three years ago, when John Battelle and Chas Edwards met with me for a cup of coffee across the street from the old Business 2.0 offices in downtown San Francisco, their company, Federated Media, was still in its infancy, and our company, Giga Omni Media, was little more than a dream. John, a long-time friend and a peer from the tech media world, asked me if I would sign on with his studio of talent and let them represent my then one-man effort, GigaOM.com, commercially. Naturally, I said yes. In the time that passed we had our ups and downs, successes and embarrassments. But we progressed and prospered together. Continue »

Google has finally pulled back the curtain on a new feature that until now has been in restricted beta: the addition of wiki-style functions in standard search results. Once logged into a Google account, this allows you to click a small up or down arrow to move a specific result, click and delete it from your search entirely, or click on a small comment bubble and leave your comments on that result. Google will remember those settings the next time you search for the same keywords, and has said it may even work for similar or related searches. In many ways, Google is taking the same principles that power a site like Digg and applying them to search. Continue »

The Wall Street Journal this morning had a short article pointing out the somewhat obvious reasons why location-based services on cell phones are still not mainstream. It also helpfully pointed out that carriers were working on it. To recap, LBS services need three main things: a way to get location (which we have thanks to GPS chips and even the ability to triangulate using Wi-Fi networks), software that can make sense of geographic information and do something with it (which are out), and cooperation between handset makers and carriers to enable developers to access such services easily. Continue »

Yieldex, a startup that helps online publishers forecast ad inventory, has won the Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge, netting $100,000 in cash and services. Yieldex built its ad forecasting platform using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and the Amazon Simple Storage Service. It won $50,000 in AWS services as well as $50,000 in cash, and may even get an Amazon investment. In addition, it and six other finalists got to pitch their businesses to several VC firm including BlueRun Ventures, CMEA Ventures, Greylock Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Madrona Venture Group, who help judge the contest. Last year’s winner Ooyala managed to score $8.5 million in venture funding two months after it won. But those were different times. Continue »

If you follow me on Twitter, then you already know that I’m looking for a research assistant, a person whose primary job would be to help me dig up information for longer, in-depth blog posts. This position doesn’t require a special degree or even a permanent address in San Francisco. What it does require is the ability to quickly ferret out information from various public sources. Continue »

I’d better hightail it to Washington, because a reshuffling of Congressional Committee members is poised to herald more regulation for telecommunications firms on issues ranging from rural access to Net Neutrality. Yesterday Rep. Henry Waxman ascended to the head of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce — which you may remember for its investigation into how web firms use consumer data — and convened two hearings into online privacy. Continue »