Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Web 2.0 Summit 2010: "Point of Control: Finance"
John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers),
Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) ,
John Heilemann (New York Magazine),
"Point of Control: Finance"
Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Eric Schmidt, "A Conversation with Eric Schmidt"
Eric Schmidt (Google),
John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing),
Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.),
"A Conversation with Eric Schmidt"
Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Mark Zuckerberg, "A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg"
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook),
Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.),
John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing),
"A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg"
Katherine Savitt Interviewed at Web 2.0 Summit 2010
Katherine Savitt is the Chief Executive Officer and a director of Lockerz, LLC, a website offering social network, entertainment and commerce for 13-30 year olds. Formed in 2009 with 50 members, the invitation-only site has rapidly grown to 14 million members in 195 countries. Before founding Lockerz, Savitt was Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. from March 2006 to January 2009, where she led both the global marketing efforts of the company's four brands as well as the digital and ecommerce businesses for the Corporation. Prior to joining American Eagle Outfitters, Kathy served as Vice President of Strategic Communications, Content and Entertainment Initiatives of Amazon.com from 2002 to February 2006, and also served on Jeff Bezos' S-team (senior management committee). From 1993 to 2002, Kathy served as President and co-Founder of MWW/Savitt, an integrated marketing communications and public relations firm. Kathy has extensive senior leadership experience with retail, e-commerce, content and social media businesses and, in addition to being a Lockerz director, currently is a member of the Board of Directors of Vitamin Shoppe, Inc. and Build-A-Bear Workshop.
Adam Lashinsky Interviewed at Web 2.0 Summit 2010
Adam Lashinsky covers Silicon Valley and Wall Street for FORTUNE. He has been on the magazine's staff since 2001, and for two years before that was a contributing columnist. In addition, he is a weekly panelist on the Fox News Channel's "Cavuto on Business" program on Saturday mornings, and he appears frequently on other Fox News and Fox Business Network programs. He also co-chairs FORTUNE's annual technology conference, Fortune Brainstorm Tech, and is a seasoned speaker and panel moderator.
Lashinsky's articles focus on finance and technology. Recent cover-story subjects have included Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Google. He also has written in-depth articles on Wells Fargo, Intel, Oracle, eBay, Twitter, the venture-capital industry, and the post-Katrina economic recovery of New Orleans.
Prior to joining FORTUNE, Lashinsky was a columnist for The San Jose Mercury News and TheStreet.com. Before moving to California, he was a reporter and editor for Crain's Chicago Business. As a Henry Luce Scholar, he also worked for a year in Tokyo as a reporter for the Nikkei Weekly, the English-language version of Japan's main economic daily. He began his career in the Washington, D.C., bureau of Crain Communications.
A native of Chicago, Lashinsky earned a degree in history and political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.
Cyriac Roeding Interviewed at Web 2.0 Summit 2010
Cyriac Roeding is the Co-Founder and CEO of shopkick Inc., focused on bridging the mobile and the physical retail worlds. shopkick's first mobile application CauseWorld turned into the fastest-growing and one of the largest mobile retail applications on the iPhone App Store and on Google Android within weeks after launch. shopkick was funded in 2009 by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), as part of its "iFund," in cooperation with Apple, and by Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn and investor in Facebook. Previously, Roeding spent a year at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence to identify next-generation cross-platform mobile and online venture concepts. Prior, Cyriac was Founder and EVP of CBS Mobile. He launched CBS Corporation's (NYSE: CBS) mobile businesses across CBS Entertainment, CBS Sports, CBS News and the CW Network. In partnerships with technology start-ups, he created U.S. industry firsts such as location-based mobile advertising, mobile video breaking news and sports alerts, and avatar-based mobile games tied to major TV shows. He grew CBS Sports Mobile into one of the Top Ten highest traffic ad-supported mobile websites in the U.S.; created the first virtual reality video gaming experience across TV, online and mobile with "CSI: NY"; and launched the first Alternate Reality Game with full primetime TV drama episode (Numb3rs) and outdoor billboard integration.
Prior to CBS, Cyriac was the Co-Founder of 12snap, a European mobile marketing and entertainment company with clients such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, L'Oreal, adidas and MTV Europe. Before that, he developed growth strategies at McKinsey & Company for global media, software and high-tech players in Europe and in Silicon Valley.
Cyriac has received several industry honors, including the first Lion Awards for mobile concepts at the Cannes Lion Festival in France (in 2003 and 2004). In 2007 and 2008, Cyriac and his team received the only Emmy Award nominations for Mobile. For 2007, he was elected as Global and North American Chairman of the MMA, with 600 member companies worldwide. Cyriac received a master's degree summa cum laude in engineering and business administration from Germany's Technical University of Karlsruhe, and studied Japanese management at Sophia University in Tokyo.
A Conversation with Robin Li, Chairman & CEO, Baidu
A Conversation with Robin Li, Chairman & CEO, Baidu
Average rating
(4.40, 5 ratings)
Add your rating
Moderated by:
John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing)
Panelists:
Robin Li (Baidu, Inc.)
5:00pm Monday, 11/15/2010
Location: Grand Ballroom
John Battelle
Federated Media Publishing
John Battelle is an entrepreneur, journalist, professor, and author. Currently founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing, he is also a founder and executive producer of conferences in the media, technology, communications, and entertainment industries and “band manager” with BoingBoing.net. Previously, Battelle was founder, chairman, and CEO of Standard Media International (SMI), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Prior to founding The Standard, Battelle was a co-founding editor of Wired magazine and Wired Ventures. He is the author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” (Portfolio, 2005).
Web site
Robin Li
Baidu, Inc.
Robin Li is the co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Baidu, Inc., and oversees the company’s overall strategy and business operations.
In the nine years since founding Baidu in January 2000, Robin has turned the company into the largest Chinese search engine, with over 70% market share, and the third largest independent search engine in the world. In 2005, Baidu completed its successful IPO on NASDAQ, and in 2007 became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 Index.
Prior to Baidu, Robin was already regarded as one of the world’s top search engine experts. His hyperlink analysis, patented in 1996, is among the inventions that shaped today’s search engine technology. Robin worked as a staff engineer for Infoseek, a pioneer internet search engine company, from July 1997 to December 1999, and as a senior consultant for IDD Information Services from May 1994 to June 1997.
Robin received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Information Management from Peking University in 1991, and a Master of Science Degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1994.
Gravity introduces system that studies your social interests
We built Gravity to help the right information find you.
Today, we live in a world in which we’re constantly bombarded by information: 90 million tweets per day, 35 hours of video uploaded per minute, 1.6 million blog posts per day and an average of 130 friends demanding our attention. With so much information being created on a daily basis, it’s hard to find what you’re looking for and impossible to know what you’ve missed.
Our answer is the Interest Graph: an online representation of your real world interests and a new lens through which to view the internet. Your Interest Graph is your own personal electromagnet. It pulls the best stuff to you based on your interests and leaves all the noise at a safe distance where it can’t distract you. We build your Interest Graph by analyzing social data (like tweets, retweets, status updates, likes and shares) to create a holistic picture of who you are and what you’re interested in. When you click personalize on a site that uses Gravity, your electromagnet gets activated and the right information starts flowing your way. We connect you with content, people and advertising based on the probability that you’ll love it. It’s about helping the right information find you.
With our platform, any website will be able to tap into Gravity's Interest Graph and enable personalized experiences for their users.
Technology
Overview
If you want to geek out on the inner workings of Gravity, read on. If you’re looking for a more simple description of what Gravity is, head to About Gravity.
Your experience on the web should reflect who you are. We call this the personalized web and we’re developing technology to make it happen.
In theory, it’s a simple idea. In practice it’s challenging to implement, a pain in the neck to collect the right data, and near-impossible to do something useful and fun with the data… but that’s our plan. Why embark on such a challenging endeavor? We think personalizing the web will make user experiences more interesting and more fun.
Two big things are needed to deliver a personalized web experience. First, you need to index the web and tag everything. You need to know what websites, content, media, products, ads, etc. are out there and what topics and interests they cover. Second, you need to create an interest graph for each person. You need to understand what people are interested in and how interested they are. Combine a rich web index and an interest graph and you can do some pretty interesting things, like filter the web based on a person’s interest.
At the heart of Gravity is a semantic engine that extracts interests from any source of information. The engine is used to understand the web and the people interacting with it. It enables us to classify information with our web ontology, to build interest graphs and to deliver a variety of personalized web experiences. We’ve filed several patents related to our technology and its application to building interest graphs and enabling the personalized web.
Semantic Engine
The basic function of the semantic engine is to take a blob of text and figure out what it’s about — like what you’re brain does when you read a newspaper article.
The first step to is to analyze the blob. We use natural language processing (NLP) extensively. Instead of simply identifying keywords, our semantic engine analyzes a variety of linguistic and statistical factors. The output of our analysis is highly structured data that contain the key characteristics of the blob — sort of like a sample of the blob’s DNA.
The next step is to compare the blob’s DNA to a DNA database; our DNA database is our dynamic web ontology. The goal is to match the DNA of the blob to DNA signatures of topics in our ontology. Your standard blob of text (a sentence) will typically generate several matches. A paragraph or page of content may generate hundreds of topic matches.
Finally, we use a modified convergence algorithm to convert a list of topic matches to a handful of interests. Our algorithm prioritizes interests based on the number of topics related to an interest and the average distance and the strength of the relationship between each topic and the interests.
That’s it. Like we said, the engine takes a blob of text and figures our what it’s about.
Web Ontology
The web ontology is our DNA database. It’s actually a data graph (not a database), which does an excellent job at representing relationships between data and lends itself to graph traversal algorithms. Our ontology has 7+ million topical nodes, further augmented by metadata we’ve created or sourced from other web services. Gravity’s semantic engine uses the dynamic web ontology to match the signature of unidentified text blobs to the signatures of known topics.
Our web ontology is built on top of Wikipedia, DBpedia, Yago and OpenCyc. These resources give our ontology its basic structure, including relationships between topics. Next, we mine the open web for topical content and related social data and map this content to the ontology — thus creating a web ontology. The web ontology is different from a normal ontology in that it’s augmented with linguistic, statistical and other metadata extracted from the web. This metadata provides the basis for the DNA signatures of topics in our database. We’ve crawled terabytes of data from major publishers, blogs, forums and other public sources of information to create the most accurate DNA signatures possible.
We built our web ontology to be adaptive over time. One of the most powerful aspects of open sources resources like Wikipedia is crowd-sourced human curation. We used a combination of human and algorithmic curation to enable our ontology to grow and adapt as the world evolves.
The Theory Behind the Interest Graph
The interest graph is an online representation of your real-world interests and a new lens through which you can play with the web. We want your interest graph to become your personal filter for the web and to help you to discover content, ideas, people, events, products and services that you’ll like.
Building an interest graph is an iterative process. Instead of just asking you what your interested in, we start by pull in information about you from the web (this might include your tweets, status updates, things you’ve liked or shared, blog articles you’ve written, or information form your profile on social networks). We use our semantic engine and dynamic web ontology to comb through your information and to identify potential interests. Our convergence algorithms reduce all your potential interests to the most meaningful ones and enable us to establish preliminary interest intensity.
Once we’ve created your initial interest graph, we give it a life of its own. Your interest graph changes dynamically over time as you interact with Gravity powered services, change your presence on the web, or makes changes to your interest graph directly. For example, we might add legos to your interest graph because of several recent tweets related, but maybe you don’t really like legos. You’ll always have an opportunity to remove interests or reduce your level of attachment.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
