DanSolo’s HQ

On Tuesday next week, along with a few other journalists and bloggers, I’ll be visiting SpinVox HQ in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. SpinVox will be demonstrating their technology to us and they will be taking questions about the recent scandal surrounding the company’s speech-to-text technology.

Here’s the invitation I received from them today:

How Does SpinVox Convert Voice to Text?

I know you are interested in finding out more about how the SpinVox Voice Message Conversion System (VMCS) converts millions of voice messages to text, so I am pleased to invite you to our Marlow Headquarters for a technical briefing where you will see the VMCS in action and get to try it for yourself.

You’ll get the chance to speak a number of your own messages to see how they go through the automation system. You’ll see how, as the messages get increasingly complex, the system might refer them to a Quality Control (QC) agent for checking or completion to ensure that they meet our quality standards.

During the demo you can get hands-on, acting as a QC agent, so that you can see both sides of the process. You will get first-hand experience of how the application works and how quickly the messages go through.

This is the first time that SpinVox has offered demonstrations of its VMCS and we hope you’ll take the time to come and see it. We’ll be running the introduction to VMCS and the demos on Tuesday 04 August, from 10.00-11.00am and from 11.30-12.30pm. In addition to the demonstration, there will, of course, be an opportunity to ask questions.

So I’ve got two questions for TechCrunch readers:

(1) What would you like me to ask the SpinVox bosses? Any burning questions?

(2) What should I feed in to the machine to be converted?

Leave your questions and suggestions in the comments below.

Update: I just spoke to Rory Cellan-Jones on the telephone and it seems his invitation was lost in the mail. But Rory’s not too sore about it: he’ll be in Mallorca anyway.

Less than a week ago, after failing to mention Bebo in AOL’s list of core product goals, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong was roughly quoted as saying: ““Bebo may be better off under AOL Ventures, with it’s own P&L.” This led to speculation that AOL is planning to spin Bebo off into a separate company, and, sure enough, things have begun to change already at the social networking site.

Stephane Panier was just appointed Global Head of Bebo. Panier was previously VP and COO at the network. Panier is an experienced strategist and financial officer who spent time at Google. His appointment fills a position left vacant for 14 months after Joanna Shields’ departure.

AOL famously purchased Bebo for $850 million in early 2008. So far, it has failed to make much of the acquisition, despite expansion into Europe. Is AOL trying to end speculation about a potential sell-off? Or is AOL preparing to cut its losses? What do you think?

There’s something in the water of Web 2.0 that makes every semi-successful start-up desperate to “give something back” before they’ve really “got” anything themselves. In the good old days, corporate social responsibility was a pricey but worthwhile PR investment; now, having social conscience seems to be part of the job description for aspiring tech entrepreneurs.

So it is with Skimbit’s Alicia Navarro, whose affiliate sales product Skimlinks has been mopping up at awards ceremonies this year: Alicia’s email signature proudly boasts Best New Business and the Special Award for Technical Innovation from the New Media Age Awards and Innovative Publisher of the Year, Best New Entrant in Affiliate Marketing and Best Use of Technology from the A4U Affiliate Marketing Awards. Beat that.

In May, Skimbit launched Good.ly, a URL shortening service tied to an affiliate tracking system that pays out “the lion’s share” of any revenue to a charity of your choice (55%, actually). Now, they’ve launched a campaign called “Chat for Charity”, pairing up with Prezzybox.com (and soon others). 

When you make a purchase at Prezzybox, you’ll be asked if you want to tweet about it. For the time being, 100% of merchant commissions go to the merchant’s choice of charity.

So the next time you feel like recommending an Aquasaur or micro electronic cigarettes to your mates, spare a thought for the Dogs Trust and use Good.ly to do it.

While Google dominates the search market of South Eastern Europe, it has never had a real presence here. Until now. Google just announced its official presence in Croatia, from where it will run all operations for the rest of the region, including Serbia, Albania, and beyond.

Internet marketing, especially search engine marketing, is still in its infancy in the region. Leading local web portals, such as Index and B92, still account for a lion’s share of the internet marketing investments. Google’s AdWords programme has only recently become popular among advertisers in the region, although campaigns are frequently mismanaged.

A rising number of AdWords-certified individuals and companies are slowly changing this. As far as competition on the pay-per-click front is concerned, Google can count on Facebook’s internal ads, as well as regional systems such as eTarget.

Hrabren Suknaic, Google’s regional manager for the Adriatic region says their main concern is raising awareness about the importance of search among Croatian and regional companies. While companies in South Eastern Europe are well aware of Google, few US-based internet companies have a true presence in the region.

Google’s move has been welcomed by web professionals in the region. Now we just have to see how serious Suknaic and his team really are.

Andrea Giammarchi has created PyramiDOM a "Spectrum DOM Analyzer". When I first saw it, and read "Spectrum" I thought I was looking at an old 48k video game, but in fact it is showing you info on the DOM:

The generated spectrum will contain every single nodeType 1 present in the document and will show via tooltip info about that node (nodeName, id if present, className if present). Moreover, it highlights somehow that node temporary changing the background (yellow one). The most wicked effect was in jQuery website itself, since it is dark, and since it is linear enough (you scroll and the spectrum is almost there where you scroll).

On the other hand, the most interesting spectrum was in Gmail, where you can spot a proper pyramid of nested divs. Each nodeName will have the same color, but for practical reasons each time this color will be different (random).

You can grab this PyramiDOM link to play.

Those crazy Germans just love their pooches. Despite a downturn that’s hitting the central European country hard, German dog owners’ community site dogSpot.de just raised a second round of funding. dogSpot’s existing investors (including the site’s founder and a couple of Angels) have re-invested in the website, which also has a sister spinoff called catSpot for, you guessed it, German cat owners. Sounds like the majority of the cash will go toward core projects like scaling the back end and building the community.

The company behind dogSpot was launched in 2007; the website itself debuted last October. It’s already receiving seven million page views per month. Incumbent competitors, which are generally less social than dogSpot, include Hallohund, the brilliantly named MyWuff and Dogzunited.

British hacker Gary McKinnon has finally lost his latest High Court bid to avoid extradition to the United States to face charges for breaking into US military and Nasa computers in 2001 and 2002. McKinnon was tracked down and arrested under the Computer Misuse Act by the UK National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. After his arrest, and without a lawyer present, McKinnon admitted to hacking, but denies it was malicious or that he caused damage costing $800,000 (£487,000). The argument of his lawyers was not that he shouldn’t be tried, but that he should be tried in the UK and that his extreme Asperger’s Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder, should be taken into account, especially since it could lead to suicide, if he was to be extradited.

However, the judges said extradition was “a lawful and proportionate response to his offending”. He faces up to 70 years in prison if convicted in the U.S. of what prosecutors have called “the biggest military computer hack of all time”. He accessed 97 government computers belonging to organisations including the US Navy and Nasa. Justifiably the U.S. is pretty sensitive about these things and under a 2003 treaty, agreed in the aftermath of 9/11 attacks, the U.S. is able to extradite a British citizen if it can prove to the UK courts “reasonable suspicion”.

Now, exactly what was this hack? McKinnon has always insisted he was looking for classified documents on UFOs which he believed the US authorities had suppressed. This is not a normal guy here. This is a mega geek who believed in UFOs. We’re not talking terrorist material. He’s been described as a 43-year-old “UFO eccentric”. There has been a “Free Gary” campaign backed by 100 MPs and celebrities like Bob Geldof and Chrissie Hynde.

As you’ll find on his Wikipedia page, he used the name ‘Solo’. The US authorities claim he deleted critical files, from operating systems, which shut down the US Army’s Military District of Washington network of 2,000 computers for 24 hours. As well as deleting US Navy Weapons logs, which rendered a naval bases network of 300 computers inoperable after the September 11th terrorist attacks. McKinnon has denied causing any damage, argued he accessed open, unsecured machines, and says the financial loss claimed by the US was created to justify the “reasonable suspicion” for extradition.

He also left this message, quite clearly the ramblings of something of a consipracy theorist nut: “US foreign policy is akin to government-sponsored terrorism these days? It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand-down on September 11 last year…I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.”

You can just imagine Gary - like so many borderline-genius geeks all over the world - hacking into computers from a darkened room in his flat in Wood Green, north London, leaving dumb, self-aggrandising messsages born largely of his Asperger’s condition.

So, what should the U.S. do. It’s quite simple really. They should hire him. Use him in the same way that the skills of so many black-hat hackers have been turned towards contributing to a network’s security, not undermining it.

In fact McKinnon’s case reminds me very much of the story of John Forbes Nash, Jr., the subject of the 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind starring Russel Crowe.

Nash was a mathematical genius who suffered from extreme paranoia, paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression. He seemed to believe that there was an organisation chasing him, in which all men wore red ties. He also mailed letters to foreign embassies in Washington, declaring that he was establishing a world government.

However, he worked at MIT and Princeton’s mathematics department, and is today recognised as a leading thinker on game theory, one of the principles the U.S. government used in their strategy to deal with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Should Gary McKinnon therefore be left to rot in a U.S. jail for the rest of his life? Or should his skills be put to better use?

This week TechCrunch Europe interrogated your hive mind on the subject of bootstrapping your startup. Most startups bootstrap for at least part of their lifetime and how it’s done can determine whether you make it as far as exogenous funding. We also asked founders what you should spend money on even when your resources are limited.

In the next two weeks we will look at getting funding and dealing with investors. Please send any tips on these subjects via email or Twitter.

• If the idea is time-sensitive, reconsider bootstrapping

Nathan Vingoe, KangaReview

When you are funded you can do more, do it faster and get to market more rapidly.  So clearly, if the idea is time-sensitive or easily copied, get funding. Funding also brings with it a network of people who have been there and done that. The greater the number people involved, the more likely it is that suitable opportunities will cross your path.

• Do the expensive work yourself

Feargal Finnegan, stealth-mode startup

It helps if you can do as much of the complex,expensive work as possible yourself and offshore tasks which can be done on the cheap, e.g. UI work.  However, avoid off-shoring companies that do not have solid technical references. My experience has been that the quality delivered can be so low that the overall cost of the software would be more expensive over the long run once you factor in fixing bugs and refactoring.

• Have a sideline

Several founders suggested having another line of income. For Sam Barnett from Struq, which tailors ads to a user’s interests, the sideline was ad arbitrage. This means buying adwords from Google and selling to Yahoo at a profit. This didn’t take much time away from the product but provided a steady revenue stream.

Stefan Richter from muchosmedia suggested consulting or selling advertising space on your blog (if it’s popular) to keep the company’s product development going. He also recommended approaching potential advertisers directly and suggesting a fixed price. This pays much better than Google ads.

• Avoid false economies

Daniel Sim, Plug In SEO

Control costs but beware of false economies. Spending a week writing an app that you could simply buy in for $30/month doesn’t make sense. Conversely, relying on a web host that makes your product too slow to use means it’s time for an upgrade. Take on free (or very cheap) debt early while there’s still ample cash in the bank. Spend everything on 0% credit cards and view your cash strictly as a reserve.

• Know when to quit your job

Knowing when to give up your job is tough. Matt Rogers from Aroxo says it’s worth talking to your employer about moving to part-time working, or even switching to a consultancy arrangement to provide you with time to manage your start-up. Before quitting make sure you  have enough cash available to complete the development cycle, even in the worst possible release timescale.

Micheal Backes from eVenture Capital Partners told us how in his first startup, the founders set revenue targets for the partners to each step in one by one from their “real world” jobs. This allowed organic growth to fuel company size as opposed to getting VC money.

• Sell early

Stefan Richter, muchosmedia

My company is a one man band and since I’m primarily a techie it is lacking some sales and marketing skills. That didn’t stop me from pulling in a handful of sales. Those sales generate small but recurring revenue which provide a valuable lifeline for any early stage company.

In fact you can sell your product before it’s even ready. Right now I am working on my next idea and I already have a few clients for it lined up, based on a functional prototype. What could be more motivating than paying customers to get your product out the door?

• Less is more

Another tip received from several founders is to keep the scope of the first release small but functional. Kimengi, which makes a text content recommendation engine, launched a blog network recommendation widget in order to get things moving even though it’s only a small part of the final system. Mathys Van Abbe from Mobypicture suggests picking a small, simple problem within the scope of the company and solving it. This will also make the resulting product easy to use. Daniel Sim from PluginSEO advises startups to focus on a few, very happy customers.

• Get a face to face working space

The founders of Kimengi are convinced that you need a consistent amount of face to face time to produce quality work so this makes it worthwhile to get an office, especially if the company has more than two people. Kimengi also came up with the creative solution of sharing their office with other businesses. Andy Gill from Chatbadge thinks that co-working spaces are ideal. The main benefit is the opportunity for networking, feedback and collaboration with other co-workers.

• It’s ok to spend money on the right people

Mathys Van Abbe, MobyPicture

Don’t focus on small financial inequalities. If one partner needs a salary while another can manage without it, then give that partner the salary to keep him in the business. The key thing is to keep motivation high and the momentum going. Pay experts if they can take some aspect of the business to a new level, e.g. design or advertising.

Several founders also said that you should only hire people (freelance or otherwise) when you are sure that you can pay them. Your employees should not have to take the same risks as you since they are not getting the same rewards .

With this 5th & last post of the "WRD E-Commerce Week" we will be modifying "our Ajaxed shopping cart" to create a one which is very ideal for designs with limited spaces.

The shopping cart will:

• be hidden at the top of the page that can be displayed with a show/hide link
• open when an item is added to the basket & auto-close
• require a manual "hide" click if opened manually
• enable us to delete products

The HTML

For The Sliding Basket:

<div id="slidingTopWrap">
	<div id="slidingTopContent">
		<div id="basketWrap">
			<div id="basketTitleWrap">
				Your Basket <span id="notificationsLoader"></span>
			</div>
			<div id="basketItemsWrap">
				<ul>
				<li></li>
				<?php getBasket(); ?>
				</ul>
			</div>
		</div>
	</div>
	<div id="slidingTopFooter">
		<div id="slidingTopFooterLeft">
			<img src="images/arrow-down.png" alt="Show Basket" /> <a href="no-js.htm" onclick="return false;" id="slidingTopTrigger">Show Basket</a>
		</div>
	</div>
</div>

The Highlights

• the div slidingTopWrap is positioned absolutely with top: 0 CSS value to stick to the top of the page
• the div slidingTopContent is hided via JavaScript when the page loads & it is actually the part which slides
• the div basketWrap, nothing unusual, wraps the contents of the basket

The JavaScript (jQuery)

Manual Show/Hide Part

$("#slidingTopContent").hide();

$("#slidingTopTrigger").live("click", function(event) {
	$("#slidingTopContent").slideToggle("slow", function(){
		if ($("#slidingTopContent").is(":visible")) {
			$("#slidingTopFooterLeft").html('<img src="images/arrow-up.png" alt="Hide Basket" /> <a href="no-js.htm" onclick="return false;" id="slidingTopTrigger">Hide Basket</a>');
		} else {
			$("#slidingTopFooterLeft").html('<img src="images/arrow-down.png" alt="Show Basket" /> <a href="no-js.htm" onclick="return false;" id="slidingTopTrigger">Show Basket</a>');
		}
	});
}); 

The Highlights:

• we have $("#slidingTopContent").hide(); in the beginning to hide the div in the initial load
• when the #slidingTopTrigger is clicked, we use the slideToggle function to show/hide the #slidingTopContent. To understand whether it is open or not, we have an if then else clause as if ($("#slidingTopContent").is(":visible")) {
  • if the #slidingTopContent is visible, we insert the "hide HTML"
  • if the #slidingTopContent is not visible, we insert the "show HTML"
• you’ll see that we used the $("#slidingTopTrigger").live("click", function(event) { rather than a standard click function. The reason is adding the new created HTMLs to the DOM

Adding Products

$(".productPriceWrapRight a img").click(function() {
	var productIDValSplitter 	= (this.id).split("_");
	var productIDVal 			= productIDValSplitter[1];

	if ($("#slidingTopContent").is(":visible")) {

		$("#notificationsLoader").html('<img src="images/loader.gif">');

		$.ajax({
		type: "POST",
		url: "inc/functions.php",
		data: { productID: productIDVal, action: "addToBasket"},
		success: function(theResponse) {

		if( $("#productID_" + productIDVal).length > 0){
			$("#productID_" + productIDVal).animate({ opacity: 0 }, 500);
			$("#productID_" + productIDVal).before(theResponse).remove();
			$("#productID_" + productIDVal).animate({ opacity: 0 }, 500);
			$("#productID_" + productIDVal).animate({ opacity: 1 }, 500);
			$("#notificationsLoader").empty();

		} else {
			$("#basketItemsWrap li:first").before(theResponse);
			$("#basketItemsWrap li:first").hide();
			$("#basketItemsWrap li:first").show("slow");
			$("#notificationsLoader").empty();
		}

		}
		}); 

	} else {

		$("#slidingTopContent").slideToggle("slow", function(){		

			$("#slidingTopFooterLeft").html('<img src="images/arrow-up.png" alt="Hide Basket" /> <a href="aaa.htm" onclick="return false;" id="slidingTopTrigger">Hide Basket</a>');
			$("#notificationsLoader").html('<img src="images/loader.gif">');

			$.ajax({
			type: "POST",
			url: "inc/functions.php",
			data: { productID: productIDVal, action: "addToBasket"},
			success: function(theResponse) {

			if( $("#productID_" + productIDVal).length > 0){
				$("#productID_" + productIDVal).animate({ opacity: 0 }, 500);
				$("#productID_" + productIDVal).before(theResponse).remove();
				$("#productID_" + productIDVal).animate({ opacity: 0 }, 500);
				$("#productID_" + productIDVal).animate({ opacity: 1 }, 500);
				$("#notificationsLoader").empty();

			} else {
				$("#basketItemsWrap li:first").before(theResponse);
				$("#basketItemsWrap li:first").hide();
				$("#basketItemsWrap li:first").show("slow");
				$("#notificationsLoader").empty();
			}

			}
			}); 

			$("#slidingTopTrigger").fadeTo(4000, 1, function(){
				$("#slidingTopContent").slideToggle("slow", function(){
					$("#slidingTopFooterLeft").html('<img src="images/arrow-down.png" alt="Show Basket" /> <a href="aaa.htm" onclick="return false;" id="slidingTopTrigger">Show Basket</a>');
				});

			});

		});
	}

});

The Highlights:

As "how-to" on sending the Ajax query & fading animations are described in the previous post, we won’t repeating the same info here & focus on the effects.

• we again run the same if-then-else clause
  • if the #slidingTopContent is open send an Ajax query to functions.php and add-the-products to basket
  • if the #slidingTopContent is closed:
    • slideToggle the div
    • insert the "hide HTML" to #slidingTopFooterLeft"
    • send an Ajax query to functions.php and add-the-products to basket
    • wait for x seconds: $("#slidingTopTrigger").fadeTo(4000, 1, function(){
    • slideToggle the div
    • insert the "show HTML" to #slidingTopFooterLeft"

P.S. To make the example work on your side, you should be creating a new database with the jBasket.sql file inside the download package & configure the database connection information inside “inc/db.php” file.

Special Downloads:
Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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Italian startup incubator H-Farm Ventures is running a competition with $200,000 prize money to fund the the 10 most original and potentially successful ideas for web shows, interactive formats and what they call “trans-media narration”. Cirkus is a competition that ends on September 5th, 2009, and is open to anyone who can come up with a fresh and engaging web based program. The winners will be awarded on September 17th, where their formats will be pitched to representatives of potential buyers from broadcasters, brands and social networks.

They will begin to work on their projects as part of the Shado team in Treviso, Italy, where they will get support for anything from the production process to marketing to publishing. They will also get a 10% revenue share based on the commercial use of the format.

Cirkus is part of H-Farm’s seed program, a six-monthly competition aimed at finding new ideas to be converted into startups: last year the focus was on iPhone apps, and the winning project, called Mappper [iTunes], has been released lately on Apple’s AppStore, after being developed internally by the digital division named H-art.

H-Farm (in case you’re wondering, “H” stands for “human”) is not an ordinary incubator, at least for the Italian market. Actually, it’s really one of a kind in this country, where venture capital strives to become more common and early stage investments mixed with support and mentoring for enterpreneurs are just a shadow of what they are elsewhere. H-Farm acts both as an investor and an enabler, providing funds up to 600K euros as well as a range of services to take care of red-tape in creating companies. They have offices in Seattle, Mumbai and London (coming soon), while their headquarters are in northern Italy.

On a call with founder and CEO Riccardo Donadon we’ve been given inside previews of a couple of projects that we’ll be probably covering as soon as they exit their private beta stage. Namely, Thounds will be an online recording and sharing platform for musicians to collaborate on the same track, while Shicon will be dedicated to designers and fashion lovers, encouraging them (through a social awarding system) to work on original designs to be featured on t-shirts, furniture, etc.