While there have been many real-time search engine launches over the past few months (Scoopler, Topsy, Collecta, CrowdEye), most of them so far have fizzled (see Google Website Trends chart above). After an initial burst of curiosity, interest tends to dive. One exception, however, is OneRiot, which appears to be gaining some early traction in the real-time search race.
Earlier this week we pointed out how the almost $4 billion in smart grid stimulus funds would provide a way for young startups to do deals with utilities, and a potential way for a startup to leapfrog the competition. Well, here’s another example of that: On Wednesday Tucson utility Tucson Electric Power (TEP) announced it has requested $25 million under a smart grid grant program that’s part of the stimulus package, and it plans to use the funds for a project that would include a residential demand response program from energy management startup Tendril.
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The skirmishes that have been taking place between Hewlett-Packard and Cisco as each tries to encroach on the other’s territory in an effort to own both the enterprise and consumer IT markets have been heating up over the past year. HP has been strengthening its ProCurve line of enterprise networking products, an area where Cisco dominates. Meanwhile Cisco has moved into one of HP’s traditional markets with the launch of its own enterprise servers, dubbed the Unified Computing System. That prompted HP to retaliate by inking a deal with Riverbed, long one of Cisco’s data networking archrivals.
This guest post is written by Mary Hodder, the founder Dabble. Prior to Dabble, Hodder consulted for a number of startups, did research at Technorati and wrote her masters thesis at Berkeley focusing on live web search looking at blog data.
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A VC recently remarked that investing in Internet startups is now basically the same as investing in the “cement business.”
His point was that the two tailwinds that fueled two eras of explosive growth of business on the Web — rapid Internet adoption in the 1990s and the mass switchover from dial-up to broadband earlier this decade — have petered out. And so they have.
Austin is among the places that people are flocking to in the recession, according to BusinessWeek. Other magazines have given Austin (and all of Texas) similar praise, mostly because it’s so darn cheap to live here. But I don’t want to lie to y’all — Austin may not be the best place to build your tech startup. Or even look for that great tech job. It’s not that I don’t want more transplants coming here (I work from home, so traffic woes don’t stress me out, and more tapas bars downtown are always a good thing), but Austin has gone downhill as a tech town.
Offerpal Media, an advertising platform concentrated on helping developers monetize social networks by offering virtual currency in exchange for participating in ‘offers’ like online surveys, has filed suit against Kickflip, the company behind the Gambit payment engine.
Homeowners may soon be managing their energy consumption via Cisco’s Linksys broadband gear. The networking giant unveiled a deal this week that will see it lead a $1 billion smart grid infrastructure buildout for Duke Energy and Cisco tells us that for the consumer portion, it will largely be deploying its own smart energy home hardware, which includes Linksys products and “homeplug” devices that transfer data via power lines. Mark Miller, director of business solutions for Cisco, said the company has been working on various energy management products — some of them in the Linksys portfolio — for the last 18 months.
Google CEO on Microsoft’s Bing effort “They do this about once a year.” [PaidContent]
Tragic news today for the Silicon Valley community. Rajeev Motwani, a prominent Silicon Valley angel investor and the Stanford professor perhaps best known for serving as the advisor for Larry Page and Sergey Brin during the formative years of Google, has passed away.
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