Mediagazer: Techmeme Launches Memetracker for Media News

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera just launched Mediagazer, a new memetracker for topics related to media news. This new site will be based on the same technology as Techmeme, memeorandum, the gossip site WeSmich and the baseball memetracker Ballbug. The content on Mediagazer will be edited by Megan McCarthy.

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As McCarthy notes in her announcement, "media business is in tumult" and this is a news vertical that lends itself to memetracking. Not only are there lots of interesting news stories from a large variety of sources, but these sources all tend to link to each other a lot, which makes it easier for the algorithm to find related stories.

Mediagazer is the first new service that Rivera's team has launched in four years. As both Rivera and McCarthy note, the team has spent the last four years learning about what works (and what doesn't). Based on this experience, the team has "outfitted the site with the latest iteration of our automation engine, and have launched it from the outset with a dedicated human editor."

It will be interesting to see how Rivera's team will manage the overlap between the tech news and media news sites. Currently, for example, this VentureBeat story - which is about both the tech and the media business - is featured on both sites.

Unlike Techmeme, Mediagazer doesn't feature a leaderboard, but there are mobile sites for smartphones and feature phones.

Judging from what we have seen so far, Mediagazer will surely become another must-read site for anybody interested in the media business, be it blogging, e-book or the state of the newspaper industry.

For more information about the role of the human editors at Techmeme, also have a look at our interview with Megan McCarthy.

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Titanium 1.0 Launches: Build Native Apps for Desktop, Mobile & iPad

Today Appcelerator is launching version 1.0 of their Titanium app-building system which allows developers to build mobile and desktop applications using standard web technologies like HTML, JavaScript and CSS. In addition to supporting desktop platforms like PC, Mac, and Linux, the new version of Titanium now supports both iPhone and Android with RIM Blackberry and Apple iPad support just around the corner.

Unlike other DIY toolkits that promise mobile apps without needing to know code, Titanium lets web developers leverage their existing skills to build native mobile applications that do anything any app built using that platform's specific technologies could, like access the phone's camera or stream video, for example.

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What's New

Titanium's code base has been improved over the past few months resulting in a number of upgrades to performance. Notes the company, "load times are under 3 seconds, down from 10-20 seconds, transitions between pages are instantaneous and processing speed has improved five-fold." They've additionally added more features to offer over 100 native UI controls, native 2D/3D animation capabilities and data and media presentation capabilities. With these new improvements, developers can now build branded apps, casual games and augmented reality applications that run on any of the supported platforms.

Why Titanium?

When asked to explain what really made Titanium different than the other app-building services out there, the company's VP of Marketing, Scott Schwarzhoff explained that many of its competitors were simply offering web apps disguised as native apps as opposed to offering the real deal. Every other offering is not even close, he says. "Native user interface (over *100* native APIs)? We're the only provider. Push notifications? We're it. Native maps? Same thing. Facebook Connect? We're the only one. Application analytics? That's us. Augmented reality? Ditto. The list goes on and on."

Since June of last year, the Titanium platform has attracted over 27,000 developers thanks to what the company has dubbed their "native advantage." Described here on the company's website, this includes support for things like native controls, location-based services, social sharing, HTML5, online or on-device databases, integrated analytics, rich multimedia and more.

With the launch of the iPad only weeks away, Appcelerator is promising support for Apple's new slate device by the third week of March. Blackberry support will follow in May/June. Appcelerator is available now in three editions: "Community," an ad-supported version, "Indie," an ad-free version for a single developer ($499) and "Professional," which includes premium support and analytics ($199 per developer per month).

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Chatroulette Creator Coming to America?

It seems the 17-year-old truant who created Chatroulette has applied for a visa.

The youngster, be he lucky or brilliant, has indicated he might want to transition to the American scene at some time in the near future. With all the media attention he and his service have received and the explosion of traffic - and monetization potential - on his site, his application further opens the can of worms we've been discussing tonight: Where's the best place to raise your startup?

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In December 2009, Chatroulette had 500 users. Today, just four months later, the site sees 1.5 million daily visitors. That statistic alone is enough to inspire investors to beat down the door of its creator, Russian high school student Andrey Ternovskiy.

But what's much more interesting to many is the mechanics of the site itself. "It's video 4chan. Unbeatable formula," said Muhammad Saleem, considered by many to be an excellent authority on engineering virality. Others have called it "brilliant," "the purest form" of the Internet and its userbase, and "a great way to kill time," one of the most common uses of the social web.

I've frequently described it as a box of game pieces with no rules. Users are invited to create any kind of experience they choose given a simple set of constraints. It's inherently viral, addictive, imaginative and essentially human.

Here's the rub: The site is currently unfinanced and non-commercial. The site's creator, a teenaged school kid, has been placed at the crux of nationalistic, capitalistic and technological debates by being asked to choose between Russian financing and a yellow brick road to Silicon Valley. According to one site, the Russian investors involved are seeking to "break the American hegemony in cyberspace - an ambitious plan, particularly as the United States is home to many of the market leaders in the Internet economy.

"The combined value of Google, Microsoft and Facebook amounts to roughly $500 billion, or about a third of the Russian economy's annual output. So if Russia - which has more than 50 million Internet users and boasts one of the fastest-growing markets - hopes to catch up, then it will need to keep talents like Ternovskiy at home."

The Russian investors who have contacted Ternovskiy also invest in Facebook and Zynga; clearly, they have an eye for social virality and profit and see a great deal of potential in Chatroulette. But Ternovskiy, a longtime hacker, dreams of founding a Silicon Valley startup of his own.

Will this young man reinforce the American idiom of Silicon Valley by relocating his seemingly overnight success to the Bay Area? Or will he prove that the startup economy is truly becoming global by accepting Russian financing and remaining in north Moscow?

A more interesting question: Can Ternovskiy sustain this wild success? Or has he simply become lucky with Chatroulette? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

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Getting Away From it All... And Taking it With You

You've probably heard that ReadWriteWeb has just announced the 2010 Mobile Summit, which – judging by last fall's real-time web summit – is going to be a bang-up event. (With Kaliya Hamlin facilitating, how can it be otherwise?)

This one's in honor of the summit... and in honor of all of us for whom ubiquitous connectivity means you're never really 100% present in physical space.

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Oh, sure, it has its drawbacks - the car accidents, the walking into parking meters, the wedding that got called off because you just had to Twitpic a photo of the moment to your tweeps, which was awkward as you were the bride.

But let's admit it: We're part of the hive mind, and we're proud of it. Onward to Mountain View!

More Noise to Signal.

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