Google Ventures - A Venture Fund For All Kinds Of Startups

Google Ventures.

By the looks of it Google ventures has a very broad investment philosophy.

The google ventures site states and I quote “We’re studying a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech and health care.

We invest anywhere from seed to mezzanine stage and embrace the challenge of

helping young companies grow from the garage to global relevance.”



There is no minimum amount of funding outlined and also no geographies mentioned.

But rest assured given that this fund is lead by Bill Maris who was the founder

of Burlee.com, which he sold to Web.com its almost certain that this fund would

be initially focused on the US markets. Also as their contact address suggests

there is no presence in India.

Google has been known for acquiring startups around the world and has done

very few direct investments. It has though been an investor in the Seedfund

and Ventureast a seed stage venture fund in India. But this new launch of a

venture fund should not affect that engagement as Google ventures clearly

looks like a US focused fund.

Fund to acquire strategy?

Startups looking towards google as a prospective investor might be concerned

on one issue is that Google may be the kind of investor that might fund to acquire.

After all thats what it has been doing the last decade as acquitions have been

the way google has taken to grow its multi billion dollar empire. Its very possible

that google would have an affinity towards investing in startups and technologies

that it wants to acquire at a later date.

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Facebook : Enable auto-login using Google , Yahoo etc

You can now link both your Google Account (including Gmail) and Yahoo ID

with your Facebook profile.

The advantage of linking you other online accounts with Facebook is that if

you are signed-in into any of the above services, you’ll automatically be logged

into Facebook as well. So for example, if you working in Google Docs or writing scraps

in Orkut and then decide to open Facebook in another tab, you won’t see the Facebook

sign-in screen anymore.

To set up this association between Facebook and Yahoo/Google Accounts,

just go to Facebook -> Accounts Settings and click "Add a new linked account".

Facebook lets you link only one account per web service so choose the ID that you use most frequently on the web.

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YouTube XL Brings To Your TV

This morning YouTube invited a small group of press to unveil the latest evolution of the site’s viewing experience. It’s called YouTube XL, and it’s going to bring the vast majority of YouTube’s content to your TV or large-screen computer monitor. It’s already live, and you can check it out here.

At its core YouTube XL is basically a redesigned version of the YouTube website. It’s still run in the browser, and you don’t have to download anything to get it working (assuming you have Flash installed). It looks (and according to the demo, feels) like a native application.

One of the first things you’ll notice about the interface is that it’s very clean. This is due in no small part to the fact that it currently doesn’t have any ads (we can probably expect this to change). But YouTube has stripped out many of the suggested videos, comments, and other content that clutters the main site in favor of a much more streamlined interface that is usable from across the room.

One of the most appealing aspects of XL is that it will work on nearly any device that has a browser and can connect to the TV. That means you’ll be able to use it though your PS3 (though it sounds like there are some limitations - for example, the PS3 doesn’t support HD YouTube videos yet). Likewise the Wii will be able to use the new site, but because of its lower hardware capabilities it outputs at at a lower resolution.

Of course, one of the most key elements to offering a TV-like experience is the abiity to control the application remotely. You can use a wireless keyboard, but YouTube has developed found something a bit more practical called Gmote, a remote control app that runs on Android phones. You can scroll around menus, and also input text if you’d like to search. It’s only on Android so far, but because it’s open source you can potentially develop for other devices as well. The input is sent over your Wi-Fi network.
Update: Gmote is actually a third party application that works well with YouTube XL, but YouTube didn’t develop it in-house.

With Hulu’s release of Hulu Desktop earlier this week, and today’s release of YouTube XL, it’s clear that the video wars are going to be fought in the living room over the next few years. YouTube XL definitely has potential, especially with its integration with the PS3 and the Wii (Hulu Desktop only works on computers). Now the site just needs to work on bringing more premium content to YouTube - it’s fun to watch silly user-generated videos on my computer, but if I’m going to couch surf through YouTube on my big screen TV, I’d rather watch content that’s a little more polished.

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SEARCH= Bing vs Google

That was fast. Irish programmer and SEO specialist Paul Savage has made this very basic web service, which lists all results for search queries on Google and Bing side by side so you can compare which one produces the best results for the keywords you enter on one single page. We’ve played around with it a bit and found that the tool proves that the user experience for both search engines really is very different:

- searching for ‘Google’

Google will show news results about themselves first, and a link to their homepage later, which makes sense since people are probably already on there. The rest of the results consists of Google products and local versions of the search service. Noteworthy difference is the presence of a button that lets you drop down a widget displaying information about Google’s stock without the need to leave the page.

Bing, on the other hand, provides a list of possible extended search queries on the left sidebar, and a list of useful direct links to Google services below the first result. It also lists ’similar’ searches on the right sidebar (not visible in this screenshot) with alternative services - Bing being the first one they recommend. It also displays a box that you can use to jump to Google search, and it keeps track of your search history right on the page, unless you turn that feature off.

- searching for ‘TechCrunch’

Google only shows internal network links on the first SERP with the exception of our Twitter account, Netvibes profile and Wikipedia entry, while Bing mostly shows links to third-party services (Wikipedia, OnSugar, Flux, Blip.tv, AboutUs.org, Facebook, GitHub, Mahalo, etc.). From the viewpoint of TC the company, the latter situation is not ideal, and to top it off running the query on Bing apparently means potential visitors will see the names of competing blogs in the left sidebar. On the upside, you can open the Wikipedia article on TechCrunch on the same page, which makes for a seamless user experience if information about us was what you were looking for.

- searching for ‘Linux’

Using Google, you get much better results for this query, period. Google lists at least five very relevant links (Kernel.org, Debian.org, RedHat.com, LinuxJournal.com and LI.org) that you will not find in the first 15 search results on Bing. No nifty sidebars, nor any amount of spot-on similar results will help Microsoft here.

- searching for ‘Office Space quotes’

Here, Bing takes the top prize, although with this particular query the results are much more similar, which can be attributed to the fact that it is more detailed (three words instead of one like the other examples). Why do I say that? Because Bing is the only one of both that correctly lists the movie Office Space’s Wikipedia entry in the first few results, while Google doesn’t even list until the fifth page of results (both rank Wikiquote quite high). Also, this is where the extended search options in the left sidebar at Bing really shine: ‘Office Space sound clips’, ‘Office Space WAV files’, ‘Office Space Clips’, etc. - that’s the stuff you’d likely be looking for.

It is far too early and this is far too unscientific a research method to jump to any conclusions - we’d need a Jump to Conclusions mat for that - but using Savage’s tool gives you a nice clean overview of what most people who’ve tried both engines today: Google and Bing at the very least feel very different, and while you can argue about the quality of one engine versus the other back and forth as much as you want, it’s painfully clear both need improvement. Of course, if there continues to be no clear winner on the quality front, then Google has already won the battle before it starts, expensive ad campaigns be damned.

That said, please allow me to reiterate a point Michael made yesterday as well as in the past, that I most definitely agree with: Microsoft is damn right not to give up the search game yet like some are suggesting they should. Please stop calling for a monopoly in search, let these companies compete and fight hard for every user, and I’m sure we’ll see more innovation in this space soon enough.

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