One of my favorite Web 2.0 collaborate production sites of all time is dotSUB — tagline: “Any video. Any language.” I’ve been bumping into Michael Smolens, CEO and founder of the innovative startup, for the past couple of years at video and social media conferences on both coasts.

dotSUB is a Web-based tool that enables the subtitling, or captioning, of Web videos int/> [...]

Wed Jul 14, 2010 13:58 pm

While so much of the startup scene is funded by investment capital, it's tough to know exactly where all of that money comes from. In chasing the power behind the investment throne it's easy to believe that everything conspires by the hand of the Illuminati and leave it at that. As of today, Volition Capital's Larry Cheng spells it out for us in perfect clarity. You may be indirectly pitching for your own money.

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In a blog post entitled, "The Money Behind the Money", Cheng explains that private equity investments generally come from a select few sources. While he offers a "Funds of Funds" category that invests on behalf of the below groups, because this category is an intermediary and is not a true source of capital, it's safe to assume that the below three groups constitute the majority of investment capital in the country:

1. Wealthy Families: This funder behind the funders is not surprising. Cheng explains that single family trusts and foundations are the original investors in a number of firms including J.D. Rockefeller's contributions to Venrock. In other words, your startup money moves from the affluent, to VCs and finally to you.

2. University Endowments: Alumni gifts play a huge roll in the investment landscape. Wh/> [...]

Thu Feb 25, 2010 20:05 pm

Yahoo! will release security and workflow products for Hadoop today that it is turning over to the open-source community.

The products have been built internally at Yahoo! and will be donated to the open-source community. They are designed to provide the enterprise with more incentives to use Hadoop for distributed data storage. The products will be donated to the Apache Foundation as part of the events at the Hadoop Summit, taking place today at Yahoo! corporate headquarters.

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Yahoo! began using Hadoop in 2005. It now uses Hadoop in all aspects of its business. Hadoop is used by Yahoo! for managing traffic, annotating content and personalizing the network for visitors to the home page. Yahoo! has 170 petabytes of storage. It could grow to three times that amount in the next three months as Yahoo! introduces new products.

The enterprise is motivated to protect its assets above anything else. It's Hadoop's lack of apparent security infrastructure that gives pause to IT managers. The new Yahoo!'s security service virtualizes clusters and applies different levels of security, based upon the user's permissions. It's essentially an IT management service for managing security.

Oozi is a workflow engine designed to automate the complex processes that it can take to set up and manage a Hadoop infrastructure. It allows people to set up a set of stages, steps and decisions. The workflows manages the sometimes customized methods people use when setting up Hadoop. Oozie i/> [...]

Tue Jun 29, 2010 07:15 am

Google's Blogger has teamed up with Zemanta to create a Zemanta Gadget for Blogger.

Zemanta CEO Boštjan 'Bos' Špetič has posted about the gadget on the Blogger Buzz Blog, saying, "Previously, Blogger users could install a Zemanta browser plugin to recommend content while you blog, enabling you to read news to learn more about the topic, link articles to improve the value of your post, [and] use pictures to make you post richer."

The gadget, he says, will make it easier to use Zemanta on Blogger. This video explains Zemanta:

"Simply write a couple of sentences and the recommendations will show up automatically," says Kim. "You can preview them and then simply click on an item to add it to the post."

There are tutorials on how to use Zemanta available here.