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Google Maps mashups have been done and re-done… and done yet again. There is even a Google Maps social network with YouTube videos that is slowly evolving.

But apparently the hype is not over just yet.

TravelSkoot is a new Google map mashup site that allows users to “skoot” or plot points on a map that show travel plans, tours, or favorite places. A skoot can be created for places you’re going, places you’ve been, or places you want your friends to visit. You can even search skoots created by other users who have toured around a certain city. Already on the move? TravelSkoot can also be viewed on WAP enabled phones.

The site, which is currently still in beta, can list locations by themes, i.e. concerts you’ve attended, good bagel shops in the area, and top-rated hair salons. Once you have created your skoots, you can save your widget and uploaded to your personal site, Facebook page, MySpace profile, and more.

I see a few ups and downs with this skooting business. On the up side, TravelSkoot is great for creating itineraries and day-trips or seeing those created by others. It works for exploring cities you have never traveled to, and I like the feature that automatically generates driving directions if you have more than one point on the map.

On the down side, however, TravelSkoot fails to show me how it stacks up against the countless Google Maps mashups; perhaps even Google Maps itself. Plotting restaurants? Driving directions? Sharing with friends? Sigh. TravelSkoot is going to have to get a little more creative then just a catchy name if it’s going to want to grab attention.

Filed under: Laptops

var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/hardware/Eee_PC_1000_vs_901_vs_701';

There you have it, the hotly anticipated 10-inch Eee PC 1000 sized up next to the 8.9-inch Eee PC 901 (center) and original 7-inch Eee PC 701. Feeling. Misty.

Here's the scoop from Engadget Chinese who just got out of the press briefing at Computex in Taipei:

• New 6-cell battery offers up to 7.5-hours of battery for Eee PC 1000, 7.8-hours for 901, 7 hours for Eee PC 1000H
• The "H" in the Eee PC 1000(H) model means hard drive, yes, hard drive up to 80GB. A first for an Eee.
• The Eee PC 1000 will max-out with a 40GB SSD
• Fully equipped with 802.11n and Bluetooth -- hoozah!
• Intel's Atom across the board

More pics after the break.

Update: Detailed pricing and specs now in.

Continue reading Asus Eee PC 1000 vs Atom-based 901 vs original 701... fight!

Filed under: Laptops

There you have it, the hotly anticipated 10-inch Eee PC 1000 sized up next to the 8.9-inch Eee PC 901 (center) and original 7-inch Eee PC 701. Feeling. Misty.

Here's the scoop from Engadget Chinese who just got out of the press briefing at Computex in Taipei:

• New 6-cell battery offers up to 7.5-hours of battery for Eee PC 1000, 7.8-hours for 901, 7 hours for Eee PC 1000H
• The "H" in the Eee PC 1000(H) model means hard drive, yes, hard drive up to 80GB. A first for an Eee.
• The Eee PC 1000 will max-out with a 40GB SSD
• Fully equipped with 802.11n and Bluetooth -- hoozah!
• Intel's Atom across the board

More pics the break.

Continue reading Asus Eee PC 1000 vs Atom-based 901 vs original 701... fight!

The Filter, a personalized content filtering system which had been hanging around in beta status since sometime in 2006 (our coverage) has finally opened its doors to everyone and officially launched. The service was pioneered by musician Peter Gabriel and, at its beginning, was not much more than a playlist creation tool for iTunes. Today, The Filter has morphed into a larger recommendation system that finds not just music, but also movies, TV, and internet videos, customized to your personal tastes.

The Need For "The Filter"

As Corvida noted earlier, the next step for social media should be filtering, which makes the timing of The Filter's launch perfect. As web users and social media addicts become inundated with choices, there's now more need than ever for noise-reduction tools as opposed to just more aggregators.

In fact, Peter Gabriel's own reasons for creating this service echo the complaints of the information overloaded netizen. He says, "the first freedom the internet brought was the possibility of access to any content, at any time, or anywhere. Now that many of us are drowning in choice, we need good tools to help us make smart decisions."

The Filter Homepage

How The Filter Works

Some systems make recommendations based on your actions and history where others leverage the power of the crowd to find the best content, but The Filter combines both methods and uses data learned in one area to augment the other.

When you first sign up at The Filter, you begin by stepping through a brief profiling wizard in order for the site to establish an initial set of recommendations. As you begin to use the site, you can continue to personalize your recommendations in a way that's very much reminiscent of Amazon's "Recommended for You" section. On Amazon, items are rated with starts but The Filter uses a + / - sliding scale instead. However, like Amazon, you can mark items you own so they won't be recommended to you again while also helping the system get to know you better.

Getting to Know You

A second part to discovering your personalized tastes comes from "The Filter" which you download. This tool is a plugin application that works with either Windows Media Player, Winamp, and, of course, iTunes. Unlike other music player plugins like iLike, this piece of The Filter's system is not designed for social sharing, but actively collects data from your computer and sends it back to The Filter's servers. Where iLike uses the data it collects to help you discover friends of similar taste, The Filter solely uses that data for the purpose of improving recommendations.

However, that's not to say there isn't a friends element to The Filter - you can add friends and socialize with them via onsite mail and a very Facebook-esque  "Wall." However, besides inviting new friends via email, there doesn't really seem to be any good way to find new friends whose interests mesh with yours. This is one area where social music services like iLike and Last.fm have The Filter beat. For example, when you're viewing an artist's page, you're recommended more items like that artist, but not the profiles of other users who also like the artist, so it's hard to know where to begin with the friending process.

Another feature designed to improve recommendations is a profile import tool. To give The Filter a jumpstart, you can import your profiles from Last.fm and Flixster into the service to improve your recommendations quicker than if you had to start from scratch.

Is It Worthwhile?

What's most interesting about The Filter is the way that it combines your manually rated items, your buying history, your playing history, and your friends' likes (assuming you can find some) to provide an overall recommendation service. Its ability to stretch beyond just music to include videos, TV, and movies is also unique.

Yet it still feels somewhat lacking when compared to Last.fm or Flixster because, despite the social element it purports to have, it's difficult to locate other users to befriend on the service. Last.fm makes that easy - displaying other listeners when you go to play a song and offering numerous Groups where users can bond around a particular genre or artist. Flixster also has a tab on its homepage to help you "Meet People."

Additionally, the site was slow (although that could be launch day jitters) and occasionally buggy. For example, somehow clicking into the Genres section logged me out. The site's player was good - offering songs I enjoyed - but then again, Last.fm's radio is good too and they also offer software for scrobbling your tracks from your music player back to their site.

The Filter is still an interesting experiment, though. Instead of focusing on just one genre of entertainment, it has taken several different recommendation techniques and mashed them up to provide one overall aggregation and recommendation service for many different types of media.

If they can work out the kinks on the site and enhance the socializing aspect, The Filter could have a shot since it does have some unique features that make it interesting. For example, it offers entertainment news you can subscribe to and it recommends not just web videos, but also movies that go with an artist or band, and vice versa. And since you can continue to use Last.fm and Flixster (and hopefully other services in the future) to enhance The Filter's recommendations, then it's not really necessary to switch entirely. Instead, you can simply use The Filter more like an aggregator and filter for all the activity you do out on the social, entertainment-focused web.

Zemanta is a an interesting European startup that is applying semantic technologies to blogging. Sarah Perez covered the company's launch in March. One can think of Zemanta as an auto-complete function for blogging. As you are typing up a new post, Zemanta's browser plugin fetches related content - images, articles, videos, links - and provides a simple and friendly UI for inserting the related content into your blog. We caught up with Andraz Tori, CTO and co-founder of Zemanta, at the SemTech conference at San Jose last week for an interview.

Just because Zemanta's product looks simple does not mean that it is not sophisticated. Beneath the product's UI there is a powerful semantic analysis engine that matches content to Zemanta's web index. The elements of their technology include clustering, natural language processing, dynamic ontologies - the full spectrum of semantic web tech that well-publicized companies like Powerset, Freebase, and Hakia are known for.

All of these algorithms are running on a scalable, distributed grid, powered by Amazon Web Services. After meeting with Tori, we instantly knew why Zemanta won a Red Herring 100 award this year in Europe - not only are Tori and his team doing some amazing work, there is a wonderful story and passion behind the company.

RWW: What is your background?

Andraz Tori: I started programming at age of 10 and have been successful at international programming competitions in high school. I went to study computer science, however always did some things in parallel. For example, I had a 5-year detour as TV host on Slovenian national television and established a successful computer center in Ljubljana. I always look for how to improve life with technology and decided to go entrepreneurial when seeing an interesting opportunity on how to do it on a large scale.

What is it like to be a tech startup in Europe?

It's fun. It's hard. But that is even more rewarding when you overcome the challenges. Seedcamp (a UK competition inspired by Y Combinator) was a great boost for European early stage ventures and for us too. It is fun trying to bring a startup culture to Slovenia, a country that is not really used to it.

How did Zemanta get started?

We've seen that local TV house was providing all their video production on the Internet. Naturally Google could not understand and index them. We discovered that TV house had subtitles for all the shows and wrote a program to automatically create web pages that are automatically indexed and then point people to the right videos. That was too easy so we added a bunch of natural language processing and automatically connected those pages to other stories on TV portal and to Wikipedia. Now full blown web pages were created automagically. We sold this solution for pocket change and then realized that it is actually a very unique product - like nothing else out there! Then we (with co-founder Bostjan Spetic) realized that this amazing technology works on the language that only two million people speak. So we decided to go international and applied to Seedcamp. There we got first seed funding and later proper seed round from UK investors.

What is the main idea behind Zemanta?

When dealing with secretary, do you instruct her how to do every single detail or do you tell her approximately what you want, wait for result and just correct it if there are any the mistakes? We use computers today in the first way, while at Zemanta we believe it should be more of the second. Zemanta applies that idea to content creation. When author writes initial text, the service analyzes it and suggests how it can be improved.

Right now it suggests images to add, related articles, tags and in-text links. All this unobtrusively and implemented via slick interface. The better the computer understands the text and its context, the more it can help you write it. That's the idea behind Zemanta. Right now we are applying it to bloggers (via plug-ins for Firefox and Internet Explorer so they work even on hosted platforms) and we also are planning to open up an API.

How does your product use semantic technologies?

When doing our analysis we need to connect pieces of text to their semantic meaning. When suggesting tags we need to know their semantic neighborhood. But all this stays in background, the user never sees the magical semantic hand which is hidden behind simple and slick user interface. Because we find out what parts of text are about, we are able to create correct semantic markup that helps pages to get better visibility in semantic search engines or applications such as Yahoo! SearchMonkey.

What is Zemanta's architecture and use of Amazon Web Services?

Deep processing of text is a processor intensive task. You need to make it scalable, AWS EC2 is the right answer. We created our own high-availability high-performance solution that makes sure service is kept alive and well. All existing solutions only map well to classical web server + SQL server combination. We also use S3 for backups and some SimpleDB. AWS (and similar services) make life easier for startups. However you need to design your systems to be 'cloudable' from the start.

What are your goals for the rest of 2008 and beyond?

Simple, be the best utility service for bloggers in 2008. Get bloggers on board so they tell us what they want from the 'smart' service. Then provide more functionality and benefits from using Zemanta and provide an API to early adopters that want to integrate it in their own CMS or other types of applications.

Beyond 2008, we envision suggestion service so helpful that the experience becomes ubiquitously expected. In a few years you will want it whenever you will create content - be it writing a blog post, or using word processor or even in your email client. Users are going to expect computers to understand their intentions better. And help with good, insightful, directly usable suggestions. Zemanta is going to provide that service to large many of them via different delivery methods.

What companies are competing with you in the space? What other Semantic Web companies do you find interesting?

You could create Zemanta experience if you pulled different companies' products together. But we are the only one having a rounded product, not just API and not just one or two types of suggestions. You could find parts of Zemanta experience in Sphere, Calais, BlogRovr, Watson, etc.

I am a big fan of Cyc and Metaweb and hope people will build wonders on the foundations those two companies are building. I am also interested in Powerset and Twine which both could become very important if/when they make it into the mainstream.

What is one insight, business or technical, that you want to share with our readers?

Developing diverse skills pays off. And doing things with your whole heart always means an interesting journey, even when you end up at different place than you initially expected.