Screenshot of Foodie (click to enlarge)

Glam Media, the online media company that produces content and serves ads for a primarily female audience, on Thursday is launching a new website, Foodie.com, its first foray into the culinary space. Social networking features will be built into the new Foodie website, making it the first site from Glam that deeply incorporates the technology acquired when it bought Ning in late 2011.

A launch with great expectations

In an interview this week, Glam CEO Samir Arora said he expects Foodie to very soon become one of his company’s top most highly trafficked sites. “One year ago, we discovered that our top ad category in revenue during the first quarter of 2011 was food. We didn’t even have a dedicated food category at that time,” Arora said. “That really drove us to sequence Foodie as an important launch.” Glam expects Foodie.com to attract 10 million monthly uniques soon after it debuts — a very impressive draw by most standards.

At launch, Foodie will feature content from prominent chefs, restauranteurs, established food critics and bloggers, and ads from companies including Betty Crocker and Dannon Activia. The real key news about the site, though, is that readers of Foodie will be able to fill out complete social profiles to let them interact with each other and Foodie’s content creators and brands. Glam describes Foodie.com like this: “A full social network for consumers to directly discover, connect and follow top foodies.”

Still an appetite for social media

But will people really want to create yet another social media profile? Glam certainly thinks so. According to CEO Arora, that’s because sites like Facebook are just too general to help us connect with our individual interests like food. The people with whom you’re friends on Facebook may not be the same people with whom you’re interested in sharing recipes. “When I connected my Facebook graph to my Yelp account, I found that I have nothing in common with my friends in terms of our restaurant tastes,” he said.

It’s a fair point — as popular as general social networking sites have become, people still go to specialized content producing sites on the web. Facebook’s Timeline and Open Graph is trying to turn Facebook into a central place where people can customize their ideal web experience content and all, but perhaps people will still want to keep separate online niches where they deal with people who align with them along very specific interests. Foodie.com wants to be the place people go to read and connect with like-minded people about all things culinary.

Food may be just the beginning

Arora said this push toward social was always the direction in which Glam planned to go, and that the Ning acquisition which closed in December accelerated the process. “Otherwise, if we had to build it ourselves, we’d probably take five years.” If Foodie is a success it’s expected by the company to be, other verticals in Glam’s portfolio could go the social route as well.

It’s an ambitious move to make, but Glam already has such a massive audience — 220 million unique visitors a month, 90 million of them in the United States — that if anyone besides Facebook is going to turn itself into a totally social content web destination, it’s them.

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Lenovo is entering the TV business at this year’s CES, and it’s doing so with a splash: The company announced the world’s first TV set running Android 4.0, a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich, Sunday. The device, dubbed the Lenovo K91 Smart TV, will initially be available only in China, but Lenovo is looking to launch it in other countries later this year.

Here’s what the TV will offer aside form the latest version of Android:

• The K91 is powered by Qualcomm’s 8060 Snapdragon processor, which clocks 1.5 Ghz.
• It will have 1 GB of RAM, 8 GB of storage and 2 GB SD card.
• There will be two models, one with a 42” and one with a 50” 3-D LED screen.
• It will have an integrated 5 MP webcam, which will be used for facial recognition. Why would you need that? Parental control, of course.
• There will be a 3-axis gyro gamepad, but the regular remote control sounds pretty cool, too: It will have a touchpad as well as an integrated microphone, and voice recognition will make it possible to control the devices without pressing any buttons at all.

Owners of the device will be able to access Lenovo’s yet-to-be-launched cloud services from the TV to stream personal media stored in the cloud. Lenovo hasn’t officially announced its cloud plans yet, but it sounds like it will offer media and screen sharing across mobile, PC and TV devices.

It’s worth pointing out that the K91 won’t actually be running Google TV, which is based on Android 3.1 a.k.a. Honeycomb. Lenovo instead chose to customize Android 4.0. It’s unclear whether it will have access to the Android Market, or whether Lenovo is launching its very own app store to power its foray into the TV market.

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Twilio, a cloud communication platform powering a wide array of apps, is capping off a huge year of growth with million in Series C funding from existing investors Union Square Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. The new money will be used to continue Twilio’s worldwide expansion, as it moves beyond its recent foray into the UK to the rest of Europe and beyond.

The San Francisco company has grown its customer base by about 400 percent this year to 75,000 developers, who build everything from group messaging and conferencing solutions to voice and text message notification apps and web-based distributed call centers. The Twilio platform lets developers plug in the basic communications components that used to come from traditional telecom vendors. Now, developers just pay for what they need and easily integrate a host of services without needing a strong telecom background.

Hulu, for example, was able to set up call centers on multiple continents within one month using Twilio. Twilio’s API is now the fifth most popular for developers, said Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-founder of Twilio, and half of all American households are now touched by apps using Twilio.

“We believe in opening up the black box of communication for developers,” Lawson told me. “People who wouldn’t have participated in communication because of steep technological or economic barriers are building things now.”

Twilio has been evolving the platform beyond SMS and voice services that hooked into old copper-based phone systems and this summer began offering VoIP services. It’s showing that it can grow even as old phone systems fade away and developers rely less on integrating text messaging and move to more app-to-app messages. The company got help from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, which established a dedicated 0,000 Twilio micro fund last year and has committed to a second round, this time with matching funding for developers provided by Ron Conway.

Twilio, which is up to about 85 employees, previously raised .7 million including a million round last year. Lawson said the company is looking to hire more engineers and more sales and marketing people. He declined to talk about the financial details but said Twilio has been growing revenues substantially over the last two years.

As the app boom grows, it’s back-end infrastructure providers like Twilio that continue to thrive as they help enable more and more of the mobile apps flooding the market.

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Where Google goes, people follow. So consider Google’s excursion into the travel industry. The move seems a logical part of the company’s strategy to challenge established markets; the recent launch of Google+ to take on the social media behemoth Facebook, Google Offers encroaching on Groupon’s territory — the track record is definitely there.

And then there is Google Hotel Finder, essentially a sophisticated, fully functional online travel agency. The only thing it needs to become a full-scale online travel agency (OTA) is to add a “book-it” button (for now the site leaves final bookings up to the likes of Kayak, Priceline, and Expedia et al).

Book-it buttons aside, Google has been on a “gobble” in recent years. Its new Hotel Finder joins an expanding list of travel-focused services like Google Flights and Google Plus, along with a host of other acquisitions — most recently foodie favorite Zagat for million — to make the search engine (and the anything and everything portal to the web), a formidable player in the online travel industry.

In 2010 in the US alone, the hotel industry generated roughly 0 billion, so I really don’t see Google’s foray as simply an experiment. Google is out to generate some serious profits: OTAs are sophisticated search engines and that is precisely what Google does best.

With 91 percent of web users already relying on Google to perform basic searches, they will likely remain loyal to the Google brand when it comes time to search for hotels, comfortable with using their new services. Considering that level of customer dedication, the most immediate impact on the travel industry would likely be a clamoring by hotels to get noticed by Hotel Finder’s digital spotlight. Using its signature map function allows users to gain an organic, close-up sense of a given hotel’s neighborhood. It also boasts an easy price-comparison to historical averages, both for a specific hotel along with others chosen on a so-called “shortlist.” This is something that’s never been done before.

Google’s gobble is also likely to aid the continued popularity, not to mention profitability, of the entire online hotel-finding and travel industry. In other words, another nail in the proverbial coffin for traditional travel agents (though writing off traditional travel agents may prove premature, as some online travel web users have reverted back to travel agents for their bookings). Even if Google were to remain on the OTA sidelines, Hotel Finder’s web presence will ultimately drive traffic to other OTA sites. Either way, it’s potentially a win-win.

While it’s hard to measure the economic impact of a new hotel search site, the amount of online bookings, (buttressed by sites like Google Hotel) has surged in recent years. The year 2007 marked a watershed moment when for the first time more than half (51 percent) of US travelers booked their travel plans online, according to a 2008 Hotelmarketing.com study. And by the end of last year, more than 45 percent of all hotel bookings were completed online. Moreover, eMarketer and Jupiter, two Internet research firms, predict that 2011 will see online booking revenue to the tune of 5 to 146 billion.

All of this data leads me to the question – will Google Hotel Finder ultimately challenge OTAs directly – especially if there’s so much to gain?

Of course, I cannot say definitively, but I do believe that Google has the potential and capacity to take on the travel industry and become a full-service OTA. It has the infrastructure, it has the desire to control – or at least lead, and it certainly has the desire for revenues. As OTA earnings continue to swell and more travelers rely on them, the earning potential for Google is massive. It has been and continues to be shuttering a series of failed attempts to gain entry into certain spaces, but travel is almost a sure bet.

Regardless of its intentions, Google and its related products have effectively become online institutions. When it comes to the world of web-based hotel hunting, Google has already gone.

Consumers — and hotels — are following their lead.

Bruno Perez is vice president and co-founder of Revpar Guru, which provides a real-time, automated solution to help hotels maximize their revPAR, or revenue per available room. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Freakland.

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ZiiLabs’ first foray into the tablet market, the ZiiO series, didn’t exactly get our gadget senses tingling, but that hasn’t stopped the company from churning out reference designs for OEMs looking to cash in on the tablet craze. The latest in its line of Jaguar designs is the Jaguar3, a 10.1-inch tablet packing the company’s 1.5GHz dual-core ZMS-20 or quad-core ZMS-40 SoC and both front (of unknown resolution) and rear facing cameras (up to 12 megapixels). Sporting a magnesium case with a svelte 8.1mm or 7.4mm-thin profile depending on your preference and pocketbook, it packs a 1200 x 800 capacitive multitouch display running Android 3.2. In addition to the menu of hardware options, ZiiLabs is offering audio upgrades courtesy of Creative’s Sound Blaster technology, plus custom software for HDR support and panoramic picture-taking. That’s quite an impressive menu of options for you OEMs to choose from, now let’s get some of these things to market, shall we? PR’s after the break.

Continue reading ZiiLabs unleashes Jaguar3 super slim slate reference design

ZiiLabs unleashes Jaguar3 super slim slate reference design originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Sep 2011 06:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If HP does indeed sell off its PC business, it might have to nail its foray into cloud computing to avoid becoming a punchline decades down the road. Without that extra -million-plus in revenue, and billion lighter in the wallet after buying Autonomy, something has to pick up the slack.

Buying Autonomy gives HP an interesting set of capabilities around what Autonomy calls “meaning-based search,” but it doesn’t suddenly put HP on par with Oracle and IBM in terms of being an enterprise software vendor. Gavin Clarke at The Register lays out the case for why it doesn’t. Among his key points are (1) that enterprise search isn’t as lucrative and sticky as ERP or CRM software; (2) that Autonomy only earned 6 million in its most-recent quarter, compared with .59 billion for HP’s PC business; and (3) that IBM already has an established business enterprise search business (as does, I might add, Google).

On top of Autonomy’s core capabilities, its technology that gives context to queries could potentially add make a nice addition to HP’s big data portfolio, which presently consists only of Vertica only. IBM, EMC and even Leo Apotheker’s previous company SAP are making big investments in advanced analytics and big data processing because there’s a lot of money to be made in helping businesses make sense of their data. One health care startup, Apixio, already is doing something similar to what Autonomy does by adding context to medical-record searches. Presently, HP is far behind its peers working hard on Hadoop, predictive analytics, machine learning and other advanced capabilities, but Autonomy could provide a stepping stone to get there if HP is willing to do the work to build from it.

But HP has something that neither Oracle, IBM nor, really, any other large non-Microsoft software have: a complete plan for cloud computing. Like IBM and Oracle, HP has a strong enterprise cloud business in place, complete with converged infrastructure options that package cloud software with high-end hardware configurations. And like IBM, HP has a set of outsourced services that can fall under the cloud umbrella for the purposes of serving large enterprises.

Where HP sets itself apart, though, is with what’s on its roadmap. The company is planning a whole collection of developer-focused cloud services — a la Amazon Web Services — that, it’s rumored, will officially emerge at VMworld later this month. If AWS has proven anything, it’s that there’s big business in public, commodity cloud computing if done right and if it comes from a trusted provider, which HP no doubt would be.

HP’s also a Microsoft Windows Azure Appliance partner, which hints at the possibility of it reselling the Microsoft cloud platform either as a service or as software preloaded on specialized hardware. Already other Microsoft partners Dell and Fujitsu have announced or actually rolled out their own Windows Azure services.

However, HP has been taking its lumps from analysts, investors, the press and just about everyone else since announcing its plans to buy Autonomy while disposing of webOS and its huge PC business. It has to hit a home run in the cloud to avoid falling into an absolute tailspin. Leo Apotheker made a big to-do about its grand cloud plans earlier this year, so unveiling an uninspired set of IaaS, PaaS and cloud-storage services will just add more fuel to the anti-HP fire.

Of course, he also highlighted the importance of webOS in the same speech, so who knows how confident anyone should be about HP’s cloud strategy.

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