stanford

Boost SAT scores by 400 points, says start-up

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Crazy parents, pay attention. You'll probably be forking money over to Jason Ma in the near future.

Ma, CEO and founder of VC firm Congruent Partners, is behind Vanteus, an education center that helps high-achieving students boost their SAT scores. Companies like Kaplan and the Princeton Review concentrate on a wide swath of students, Ma said.

Vanteus' courses and education modules are geared at kids who want to raise their score from 1800 or 2100 closer to the 2400 maximum. (There are now three modules on the SAT, so an 1800 is equivalent to 1200 in … Read more

Speeding up iTunes downloads, the Israeli way

Yossi Vardi, the guy who helped bring instant messaging to the world, is now trying to speed up video downloads.

Vardi is an investor in Haifa-based SpeedBit, which sells an application for speeding up downloads of games, videos and music. He claimed that by using the application, the download of a movie decreases from more than an hour to 22 minutes.

Downloading movies, of course, will get worse as high definition spreads. Some of these download services have received their share of customer complaints.

"It's the fastest growing application ever," he said, during a hallway conversation at … Read more

Start-ups batting cleanup at AO

Here are the last of the notable start-ups from today's Always On conference.

GroupSystems is a collaboration service that works on desktops and mobiles. Pitched here: the company's ThinkTank product. It's supposed to replace or augment meetings, and record the decisions made in them. The CEO claims that NASA, the CIA, and other giant organizations use the service. The company, which is backed by the nation of Sweden, is supposed to support complex polling and brainstorming--enough for the nuance in financial due diligence, for example. This is an enterprise play.

Wookah is a multi-engine search tool, pitched … Read more

Still more from Always On: Advertising and Services

Somebody's got to help all these Web 2.0 darlings make a few bucks. Here at the Always On Stanford Summit, several advertising and service companies pitched concepts to help companies make money, or save it through more efficient operations.

Spiceworks is a network monitoring product. It looks like Network Magic, in that it automatically detects what's on your network. Except it's built for business, not home. What's interesting about this IT product: It's free, supported by sponsors and advertisers. I have to try this.

Baynote is a service that monitors what users do on … Read more

The Future of Virtual Worlds

At the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit 07, the virtual world was under scrutiny. Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier led a panel with Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs (Second Life); Irving Wladawksy-Berger of IBM; Chris Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online and Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer at Sun.

The big question was whether virtual worlds would be a real business. "Meetings, learning and training may be killer apps of virtual world. Don't underestimate any technologies that help us do that in a more human way," said Wladawsky-Berger.

See the full report over at ZDNet.

Start-up Baynote taps the silent majority on the Web

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Baynote wants to eliminate the power of the blowhard on the Internet.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has come up with software that allows shopping sites or media outlets to better determine what their customers want by how people interact with their site.

If customers click on the specifications on a road bike offered on a sports site more than the specs of competing bikes, that extra bit of attention is an indication that the bike in question might be a bigger seller, Baynote says. The next time a customer comes to that site, that bike might … Read more

Video demo: Startforce, a new Web OS

Here's the video demo I promised earlier on Startforce, a Web OS that's not yet in open beta in the United States. While not a new idea, this implementation is especially clean. It apes the Windows look and feel, which may not be a great thing from an aesthetic perspective, but it does mean that the system is very easy for new people to get in to.

I find products like this technically stunning, yet it's still an open question as to whether we actually need them. Developers won't build apps for platforms that don't … Read more

More startups from Always On: Consumer sites

Here are consumer Web sites from the Always On Stanford Summit.

Retrevo is a consumer reviews site we've covered briefly before. The CEO says that with all the reviews that are online, there's "no one to trust." So Retrevo's solution: assume the crowd is right even if individuals are not. It aggregates all of the (untrustworthy) reviews into a single review and score. The site also collects how-to info and PDF manuals on products. A new version of the site, Retrevo Snapshot, is coming soon, but the CEO ran out of time before he could … Read more

Pitch overload at Always On Summit. First up: Web services

I am at the Always On Stanford Summit today. There are two full days of conference in a cool Stanford auditorium, which you can watch live, and down the hall, 68 CEOs pitching their startups in a small, overheated room. I'm the latter. I won't be covering all 68 startups, but I did want to pick out some of these guys.

Cleverset is a service that "delivers relevance across the Web." It's a system that monitors what users do on various sites, so that when they go to another it can predict what you'll … Read more