CommerceNet News

PatientsLikeMe Featured in the New York Times Magazine

Tue, 06 May 2008 09:50:00 PDT

CommerceNet portfolio company, PatientsLikeMe, is featured in a New York Times Magazine article, "Practicing Patients," by Thomas Goetz.

"At first glance, [PatientsLikeMe] looks like just any other online community, a kind of MySpace for the afflicted. Members have user names, post pictures of themselves and post updates and encouragements. As such, it's related to the chat rooms and online communities that have inhabited the Internet for more than a decade.

But PatientsLikeMe seeks to go a mile deeper than health-information sites like WebMD or online support groups like Daily Strength. The members of PatientsLikeMe don't just share their experiences anecdotally; they quantify them, breaking down their symptoms and treatments into hard data. They note what hurts, where and for how long. They list their drugs and dosages and score how well they alleviate their symptoms. All this gets compiled over time, aggregated and crunched into tidy bar graphs and progress curves by the software behind the site. And it's all open for comparison and analysis. By telling so much, the members of PatientsLikeMe are creating a rich database of disease treatment and patient experience."

>Read the full article

CommerceNet Portfolio Company—CollabRx—Accelerates the Discovery of Effective Treatments and Permanent Cures

Tue, 06 May 2008 09:44:00 PDT

CollabRx, one of CommerceNet's latest portfolio companies, applies collaborative science to slash the time, cost, and risk of therapy development for neglected diseases.

CollabRx builds and operates virtual biotechs for foundations and patients who urgently seek cures for their diseases. The CollabRx research platform connects researches to one another and to a network of scientific services, providing unprecedented opportunities for knowledge sharing and economies of scale.

Learn more

Healthcare 3.0 video presentation now online

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 14:31:00 PDT

The video of Marty Tenenbaum's presentation Healthcare 3.0: Transforming Medicine through Collective Intelligence can now be downloaded as well as viewed online. This particular presentation was given at the Biomedin 200 Collaquia at Stanford University in May.

Here's the abstract:

All of healthcare is an experiment, but we measure only a small portion of the outcomes, i.e., in clinical trials. We're also not very good at collaboratively analyzing the data, interpreting the results, and disseminating them in a timely and meaningful manner. In this talk we will present a vision and technological approach for addressing these problems by using the Web to tap the collective intelligence of patients, physicians and medical researchers, ultimately bringing the world's knowledge and resources to bear on curing diseases one patient at a time.

Study finds weaknesses in online banking authentication

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:57:00 PDT

The New York Times reports on a study authored by CN Fellow Rachna Dhamija. The study, conducted with colleagues at Harvard and MIT, tested a website authentication system currently in use by Bank of America, ING Direct and Vanguard. In this system, online banking customers are asked to select an image that they will see every time they log in to their account. If customers do not see their image, they could be at a fraudulent, or "phishing" Web site, and should not enter their passwords. However, in a usability test, the researchers found that most online banking customers did not notice when the images were absent and provided their passwords.

Public radio's FutureTense program interviewed Rachna about the study and released a short MP3 of the interview.

More details can be found in the draft paper [PDF], which will be published at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May.

CommerceNet Sponsors Online Marketplace for Cal Student's "Big Ideas"

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 13:19:00 PDT

In collaboration with CommerceNet and ChipIn (a CommerceNet portfolio company), the University of California, Berkeley launched an online marketplace to help students raise funds to support their projects to change the world. The Big Ideas @ Berkeley marketplace (http://bigideas.berkeley.edu/) promotes student projects aimed at addressing some of the biggest challenges of the 21st century, such as clean energy, safe drinking water, global poverty reduction, technology-based entrepreneurship, and health care for the uninsured.Development of the marketplace was supported by CommerceNet; the technology for the site was developed by ChipIn (www.chipin.com), an online service that provides a quick, easy and secure way of collecting money from groups of people.CommerceNet encourages you to learn more about and support these bold projects!Read more at: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/12/13_ideas.shtml

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CommerceNet Holiday Open House

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 17:00:00 PDT

Check your inbox for an invitation to the 2006 Holiday Open House at our offices in Palo Alto, at 169 University Avenue. Cocktails, conversations, and connections after work on a Tuesday evening - who could ask for more? Another jumbo chocolate fountain, like the last two years? Well, stay tuned...

If we've overlooked you, please don't hesitate to drop us a line!

WWW2006 Podcast: "Where's the innovation in mashups [like FlySpy]?"

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 12:45:00 PDT

Back in May, CommerceNet participated in several events at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference in Edinburgh. The conference organizers commissioned series of podcasts interviewing WWW2006 participants professionally recorded and produced by Bright Indigo's Peter Croasdale.

On their fourth and final installment, "Business and Society" (program notes, full transcript coming in September), released on August 15th, they interviewed CommerceNet Labs director Rohit Khare about the nature of innovation in Web 2.0, and how to unlock value with 'mash-ups' (MP3). In particular, about 20% in, he discussed FlySpy and the kind of disruption its user interface represents by reusing the flight reservations booking infrastructure.

First Monday publishes retrospective on Trust Management

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 10:45:00 PDT

Almost 10 years ago, Rohit Khare and Adam Rifkin wrote an ambitious survey paper of the emerging discipline of Trust Management on the Web (as opposed to, say, straightforward security and cryptography). A few months ago, the peer-reviewed online journal First Monday. In honor of their own 10th anniversary year, they invited a few authors to contribute reflections on their original papers, republished here in a special issue on Commercial Applications of the Internet.

Follow this link for our Reflections on: Trust management on the World Wide Web.

Lost in (Deep) Space: CommerceNet at JPL Communications Workshop

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 14:30:00 PDT

[Update: Slides on Agoric Exploration now available, in Keynote and PowerPoint format also.]

No, it's not (yet) time for Martian explorers to purchase digital music downloads as the new frontier in e-Commerce. CommerceNet Labs research has been invited, though, to particpate in a Deep Space Communications workshop at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratories during the Second IEEE International Conference on Space Mission Challenges for Information Technology from July 17-20 at the Pasadena Conference Center.

We'll be speaking about the potential of market-based control mechanisms for allocating scarce resources amongst competing mission priorities that require choreography of assets across multiple agencies. We wrote a short introductory proposal with Prof. Richard N. Taylor for a NASA resarch program back in 2004, and while we're far, far from expert at deep space communication, we are excited about 1) agoric control and 2) decentralized software architecture.

While somewhat tutorial in nature, we'll plan to tailor it to the level of experience our audience has had with concepts such as the economics of uncertainty, prediction markets, markets for workplace decision making (Zocalo), and using event-based architectural styles to synchronize multiple devices/platforms. Other aspects of the problem we hope to point at are: the difficulty of underwriting "units" of currency for diverse assets (some camera time with some bandwidth at the same time vs. some storage and processing (compression) and bandwidth later on), scheduling results from grid computing such as Tycoon, and related efforts in general-game playing (AI) and trading agent competitions.

MediaMachines Open Sources FluxPlayer for X3D

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 09:00:00 PDT

MediaMachines, a CommerceNet portfolio ignition company, recently announced an open source release of FluxPlayer for X3D, 3-dimensional visualization browser plug-in for working with standard, scriptable, 3D objects. Released under an LGPL license as the Flux project on Sourceforge, there were several dozen developers working with it within the first few days. We look forward to significant growth in this arena as developers tackle building a decentralized version of the user experiences popularized by systems such as Second Life. Stay tuned for further open source releases from MM soon, too...

Media Machines Releases Source Code for Enabling Web-Based 3D Virtual Worlds
Award-Winning FLUX(TM) Software Now Available as Free Download to Virtual World, Social Network, and AJAX Developers Under Open Source License

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - (MARKET WIRE) - July 10, 2006 - Media Machines, Inc. (www.mediamachines.com), a leading provider of solutions for real-time 3D communication, announced today that it has released the source code to its FLUX? 3D platform under an open source license.

FLUX allows developers and content creators to publish their interactive 3D animations, models and virtual worlds to a standard web browser. Today's FLUX release includes FLUX Player, a lightweight browser plug-in with a one-click installer for end consumers. 3D developers can create content in a variety of popular 3D modeling applications including Autodesk 3ds Max? and Google Sketchup?. Additionally, FLUX supports Javascript for creating rich immersive experiences.

"Online virtual worlds are here," said Tony Parisi, creator of FLUX and president of Media Machines. "Fast 3D graphics on home PCs, broadband penetration and consumer desire has made the mass distribution of 3D web content a practical reality," Parisi continued. "An essential ingredient in this formula is a runtime platform based on open standards, with an open source implementation. FLUX is the ideal starting point for connecting existing virtual worlds and building a web-enabled Metaverse."

FLUX is a leading implementation of X3D, the XML-based, ISO open standard for delivering 3D graphics content over the web. Media Machines' customers have utilized FLUX since 2002 to experience online virtual worlds and immersive content for a variety of engineering, education and entertainment projects. FLUX has won several technical excellence awards, including the Web3D Showcase at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference for two years in a row.

"The release of the FLUX source code into open source is an extremely important development for the real-time 3D graphics community," commented Alan Hudson, president of the Web3D Consortium. "FLUX is a welcome addition to the growing body of open source code for developing X3D software, thereby ensuring the rapid spread of X3D-based web applications. The Web3D Consortium welcomes this event and congratulates everyone at Media Machines."

Media Machines will continue to foster the development of online virtual worlds with a series of open source technology offerings over the coming months. Additionally, Media Machines recently released KML2X3D?, a free translator that converts Google Earth (SketchUp) KML 3D models to industry standard X3D files for display in web pages.

The FLUX source code is licensed under the Gnu Lesser General Public License (LGPL). To download the FLUX source code, please visit www.mediamachines.com.

About FLUX

FLUX (current version 2.0) features a highly optimized engine for rendering X3D content and a one-click installable media player plug-in for viewing X3D content embedded in web pages. FLUX is suitable for use in a variety of commercial settings, including web sites, turnkey products, and enterprise applications. FLUX is available for Windows and runs as a plug-in for use in Internet Explorer and Firefox, and as an ActiveX component in Windows applications. Support for other operating systems is currently under development.

About Media Machines

Media Machines is a leading provider of technology and solutions for real-time 3D communication. Media Machines is spearheading the development of standards and technologies that lower the barrier of entry and total cost of ownership for developing real-time, rich media applications. Media Machines was founded in 1999 by Tony Parisi, co-creator of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) and Extensible 3D (X3D), the ISO standards for 3D graphics on the World Wide Web.

microformats.org Anniversary Party

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 20:00:00 PDT

Hot off the presses! Stay tuned for more information on sponsors, giveaways, and, most importantly, fresh new code...

June 20, 2006 - 20:00 - 23:00 - microformats.org Anniversary Party - at 111 Minna

Come join us for an evening of drinks, dancing and micro-desserts to celebrate the first year of microformats.org!

CommerceNet Sponsors ACM's Electronic Commerce Conference

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 09:00:00 PDT

Next week is EC'06, the seventh annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGECOM). CommerceNet is proud to join Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Akamai, CombineNet, and the University of Michigan in sponsoring the premier academic event in our field.

One of the most exciting subdisciplines growing up around this arena is Sponsored Search Advertising, an area we've written about before. The second annual workshop is being held in conjunction with EC'06 with a fascinating twist: the first pay-per-click bidding agent competition:

Are you interested in e-commerce / machine learning / operations research / data mining / artificial intelligence? Put your skills to the ultimate test. Enter an intelligent bidding agent in the 2006 Sponsored Search Bidding Agent Competition . Your intelligent agent will need to balance exploration versus exploitation in real-time (the classic k-armed bandit problem), and react intelligently to fickle and potentially explosive changes in customer behavior.
But we're not just talking about a mathematical exercise. You will have the opportunity to actually bid in the real-world, with real money, and with the chance of making or losing your funds. Through a special arrangement with Microsoft AdCenter - who are providing the auction platform and are offering free funds to teams - and a retailer who is yet to be announced - we are offering you the chance to bid with real money on a real retailer. The winner will be the team that creates the greatest percentage increase in revenue. Are you ready for this challenge? Read on!

(Im)Moderation at InfoWorld's SOA Forum in NYC

Wed, 17 May 2006 11:00:00 PDT

Next month, InfoWorld is organizing its second SOA Executive Forum. That is, the second conference this year; that's how much interest in this area has been ramping up. Of course, it's not surprising that well-hyped fair-haired technology of a few years ago is only now delivering - once it's in the shadows of a whole new boom in hype (WWII.0 anyone?)

CommerceNet's Rohit Khare will be moderating two panel discussions on the Technology Track on Wednesday, May 17th in New York: SOA Meets Web 2.0 and The State of the Stack: Where Web Services Standards are Today.

The first session speaks to the potential of bottling the spirit of MashupCamp and unleashing it within the IT department. The "Web 2.0" world doesn't use the lingo of Composite Apps, XML, and WS-*; you'd hear mashups, microformats, and REST instead. And please don't call them ASPs: the cool new kids are all about the ad-supported browser-based hosted services.

Credit for that analogy above about the change in language is due to UC Berkeley professor Robert Gluskho, one of our panelists. Enterprise architect (and author) James McGovern of The Hartford pointed out that, technology buzzwords aside, the more profound change may be in recasting IT services within a larger ecosystem, services whose community of users live on either side of the corporate firewall. That kind of cooperation is key to the a interesting new business experiment headed up by Lew Tucker at Salesforce.com: AppExchange, where other companies' apps can be rented side-by-side with their flagship CRM - and those partner apps can run off of the same database and extend each other's data models. Of course, that kind of deep integration is easy to imagine on a centralized platform, but lots of the data (and services) needed actually reside on other Web servers; that's why we also invited John Yapaola from Kapow, who sell a powerful visual programming tool for scraping and remixing multiple Web applications in a robust way.

The second session is a topic further from Rohit's heart: who else could have written as incendiary a panel title as WS-* Considered Harmful? While he'd like to ask why we need a stack at all - the REST approach can be implemented with a slew of loosely-coupled tools, open-source and commercial, we're fortunate to have some leading lights and actively-engaged practitioners of Web Services as they currently stand to survey the field for us: Real-World SOA blogger David Linthicum and middleware pioneer Steve Vinoski from Iona.

CN Director Raj Reddy Wins 2006 Vannevar Bush Award

Tue, 16 May 2006 11:37:00 PDT

Congratulations to our newest Director on CommerceNet's Board on this rare honor for applying science to imporving society!

PITTSBURGH?Raj Reddy, Carnegie Mellon University's Mozah Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics in the School of Computer Science, will receive the 2006 Vannevar Bush Award, an honor presented by the National Science Board in recognition of his contributions to science and his statesmanship on behalf of science and the nation.

The board cited Reddy for his pioneering research in robotics and intelligent systems, and his significant contributions in the formulation of national information and telecommunications policy.

Reddy and Charles Townes, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of the laser, will both receive Vannevar Bush awards this year at a May 9 dinner at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

The National Science Board, which provides scientific advice to Congress and the president and oversees the National Science Foundation, established the Vannevar Bush Award in 1980 to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to mankind and the nation through public service activities in science and technology.

...more from the official press release from NSF

Internet Identity Workshop 2006 coming to Mountain View

Mon, 01 May 2006 13:00:00 PDT

CommerceNet is proud to be a supporter of the second Internet Identity Workshop. This time, it will be held here on the Peninsula, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It starts on the afternoon of May 1 with some tutorial sessions, and proceeds all day on Tuesday and Wednesday in "open space" style. It should be a worthy successor to the Identity Gang's inaugural session last year in Berkeley, which CommerceNet also helped support. Come join us - there are still slots available for registration, on a sliding scale from $75 (Student) to $250 (Commercial)...

MSDN hosts podcast on Microformats

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 13:14:00 PDT

Alex Barnett, though he works at Microsoft and has an MSDN-hosted blog, was interested enough in microformats personallyto invite Tantek �elik, Dan Connolly, and myself to record a conversational podcast introducing microformats. In fact, at microformats.org wiki, you can find an index of several more podcasts about microformats from around the Web. I'd also note that it's crossed the radar of Citizen Journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor.

Red Herring on Newroo acquisiton by Fox

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:01:00 PDT

Congrats again to our friends at Newroo, and best wishes in La-La Land...!

More Startups Snapped Up: Small startups are still good buyout targets (3/27/06)

Google is not the only one buying tiny startups to get the minds behind them. When the dust cleared after a flurry of acquisitions last week, the online content software sector was three companies smaller.

The news came rapid-fire: Blog company Six Apart picked up cameraphone blogging application developer SplashBlog; NewsCorp?s Fox Interactive bought customizable online news gatherer Newroo; NewsGator bought mobile RSS reader SmartRead and mobile podcatcher SmartFeed (which makes tools for downloading syndicated updates of web sites and podcasts). It was difficult not to see a trend.

...

Newroo, for its part, had no users. It delayed its launch as well as a round of funding after entering talks with Fox Interactive. The three-person San Francisco-based team had taken a seed round from CommerceNet. They are building something called a ?memetracker? which learns about new online content on a particular topic and retrieves information based on a user?s interests. Apparently the activity is not a blip. Mr. Holston, Mr. Berkowitz, and Fox Interactive President Ross Levinsohn all say they are open to additional purchases in the next year.

AI Meets Web 2.0: Audio and Video

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:29:00 PDT

Audio and video of Marty Tenenbaum's presentation AI meets Web 2.0: Building The Web Of Tomorrow Today is now available, taken at the PARC Forum on January 12, 2006. This is the latest version of the AAAI/IAAI talk, with more emphasis on tapping the collective intelligence of the Web (people and computers).

A New Year's Gift: Come One, Come All!

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 19:00:00 PDT

To ring in a successful 2006 for microformats, and structured blogging in general, CommerceNet is sponsoring the 10 January meeting of SDForum's Emerging Technology SIG in Palo Alto - free admission & pizza for all!

There's more details on their website and the microformats.org website, and ours, but the bottom line is, we hope you can come on down and learn about this technology and check out the latest demos for finding, sharing, indexing, and programing with microformats.

AI Meets Web 2.0

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 04:50:00 PDT

Announcing CommerceNet Labs Technical Report CN-TR-05-07, AI Meets Web 2.0: Building the Web of Tomorrow, Today (PDF, 4MB), with reformatted illustrations and hyperlinks. This paper puts Marty Tenenbaum's Semantic Web 2.0 presentation from July into an updated article-friendly format. It's the perfect paper for end-of-the-year musing about the Web circa 2005 and it makes a great starting point for thinking about what the next five to ten years of the Web will bring.

12/13: CommerceNet Holiday Open House

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:00:00 PDT

Check your inbox for an invitation to the 2005 Holiday Open House at our new digs in Palo Alto. Cocktails, conversations, and connections after work on a Tuesday evening - who could ask for more? Another chocolate fountain, like last year? Well, stay tuned...

If we've overlooked you, please don't hesitate to drop us a line at cn_rsvp@Commerce.Net!