Innovation

Over 60 Silicon Valley thought leaders gathered in the downtown San Francisco offices of frog design on Friday to brainstorm ideas for NPR's digital future.

The "Digital Think In"—perhaps one of the largest collections of tech brain power outside of the usual conferences (and the Google offices)—originated over coffee last spring between Kinsey Wilson, NPR's senior vice president and general manager of digital media, and Roland Smart, a San Francisco-based Marketing 2.0 consultant. Wilson wondered if it might be possible to get some of the folks working on cutting edge technology to help NPR think about how to move into the digital world. Smart started making calls, and the result was the daylong event.

The conclave generated over a 100 ideas for things NPR could do online to "create a more informed public." Wilson said NPR will probably post many of those on the Digital Think In Web site, so anyone who's interested can help further refine them.

Wilson speaks to the group, while NPR CEO Vivian Schiller stands to the side.

More pix, after the jump.

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BayNewser is at TechCrunch50 this week, taking a gander at some of the most promising new startups in media and advertising.

According to Thoora, the world is ready for a new news aggregator—one that not only tells you what's happening in the world, but that also tells you what stories people are most talking about.

To that end, Thoora, one of the startups that presented at TechCrunch50's News & Media Discovery panel today, is a news aggregator version of Twitter's Trending Topics.

Thoora continually scans 82 million news sources—blogs as well as professional media outlets. But it doesn't just look at what content is being generated. It also looks at how many comments and tweets stories are actually generating.

"It's the most efficient way to discover the news the world is talking about," said CEO Mike Lee.

Thoora's algorithms might be working as well as they say they do. In today's demonstration of the site, which is in private beta, the overall number-one story was the death of Patrick Swayze. The number-two story concerned voting fraud in Afghanistan. That might not be the way the New York Times would order the news, but it's probably an accurate reflection of where the buzz is.

Lee says Thoora's focus on buzz will help users not only discover the most relevant stories, it will also help them discover the most relevant communities interested in similar topics. Over the weekend, Lee said he searched Thoora for "Serena Williams"—following the tennis player's controversial U.S. Open loss—and discovered a tennis pro's blog that was one of the most active sites discussing the issue. "I could never have found that community of interest any other way," Lee said.

Why the panel's expert judges, including Twitter COO Dick Costolo and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, think Thoora has a tough road ahead, and BayNewser's verdict, after the jump.

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BayNewser is at TechCrunch50 this week, taking a gander at some of the most promising new startups in media and advertising.

Remember that line from that movie where that guy said that thing about that girl?

No?

If AnyClip has its way, you will.

AnyClip, one of the startups that presented at TechCrunch50's News & Media Discovery panel today, is creating a service where you can find any clip from any movie ever made.

That means you can search for—and relive—the lines that you love. (The gentlemen from AnyClip confessed to being particularly fond of a John Turturro moment in The Big Lebowski.) But you could also find clips from movies where someone said "I love you" or "You can take that X and shove it."

"We need to be able to let people find any moment any way they want to find it," said AnyClip CEO Aaron Cohen.

It seems like an obvious idea—a highly focused YouTube, if you will. And it is one more example of the "atomization" trend in media—the fact that emerging technologies are making bits and pieces of content as potentially valuable as entire wholes.

Watching clips on a service like AnyClip, for example, would likely likely reinvigorate demand for older movies as people updated their Netflix cues after viewing certain clips. Cohen himself confessed to BayNewser that re-watching clips from Titanic has even put that film back on his to-watch list. Well, OK.

Why Napster founder Sean Parker thinks AnyClip has an uphill battle and BayNewser's verdict, after the jump.

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The New York Times has a piece on how San Francisco-based Fwix, a self-described local newswire, is releasing an iPhone app this week in the hopes of driving more user contributions.

The year-old Fwix, which the Times says operates in 85 markets, creates its wire out of links to stories on local news sites and blogs and updates from regular folks. It's more relevant that something like Twitter, for example, because it adds a layer of filtering: algorithms rank submissions based on whether other users submit similar items and on whether the submitter was at the scene (which it can figure out using the GPS module in the submitter's iPhone).

The Times says Fwix "hopes to fill the growing void in professionally reported local news by recruiting citizens armed with iPhones as reporters."

Here's our take: Fwix is a great tool. Anything that expedites the process of enabling the folks out there to funnel in news and information is a worthy endeavor.

But on its own, Fwix.com is not likely to become a great news desitination. It's one thing to have a tool. It's another thing to make folks want to use it.

Readers sent Talking Points Memo random items that, combined, painted the picture that led to the attorneys general scandal because they respected TPM's editor Josh Marshall and trusted that if they sent him interesting tidbits, TPM would go to work on them. People submit reviews to Yelp because it's already a great destination. People send tips to Michael Arrington and crew at TechCrunch because they know it's one of the most closely watched tech blogs.

A tool on its own does not engender the desire to use it. And as such, does not a news organization make. Unless the Fwix team works at making their site a great destination, Fwix will ultimately become a tool that other news organizations license and embed, rather than a standalone news operation.

If you've tooled on over to NBCBayArea.com recently, you've noticed they've got this big honkin' mood meter thingy sitting next to all of their articles. And then on their home page, under the "Bay Area" masthead, they've got automated tag lines like "is thrilled about San Francisco commercial shoot" or "is furious about HP slashing salaries."

We thought all this messy emotion stuff unbeffitting of a news site and wondered if they'd soon have unicorns and fluffy clouds dancing across the pages.

So we picked up the phone and called former Valleywag and now editorial director of NBCBayArea.com Owen Thomas, who told us the ratings are part of a larger strategy at NBC Local Integrated Media to more thoroughly mesh the voice of the audience into their Web sites.

"When you create media, you're no longer creating media and handing it to your audience," Thomas told us. "You're creating media with your audience. This just makes that vision real."

BayNewser: Explain.

Thomas: We've always had comments. Almost as long as the Web has been around, people have developed some kind of system that lets readers post their reactions to a story. Before that there were letters to the editor. There have always been systems for reader feedback. But they've mostly been text-based, and they've been cumbersome, and they favor windbags and blowhards.

Mood ratings let the reader who just wants to register a quick reaction to the story, in an emotional way without having the burden of putting it into words—it allows them to do that.

Continued, after the jump.

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So Mountain View-based Plastic Logic—the company that's developing the e-Reader for Barnes & Noble's bookstore—has also developed a flexible electronic screen, one that you could in principle roll up, like a newspaper.

The thing is, they're not sure they're actually going to bring the thing to market because, as an article in the Times of London put it, "research showed that consumers don't want that flexibility." "People worry that it will break if they roll up a device and dump it in their bag," vice president of technology Martin Jackson told the newspaper.

We're not going to argue with the fact that people interviewed imagined it breaking in their bags. We're not even going to argue that their research "showed" that consumers don't want flexibility.

What we are going to say is that this sounds a lot like that famous quote IBM chairman Tom Watson purportedly made back in 1943: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

In other words, the future uses of a particular product often aren't immediately apparent, especially if you're thinking of implementing it as a direct replacement to something that already exists. Like, "Flexible screen? Oh, we should use that for a newspaper."

Indeed, one of the commenters to the FT article proved this very point: "I think these technologies will be especially useful in a business context. In an office environment, one of the biggest barriers to going paperless is the casual print-out that you make when you want to take a document or screenshot over to a colleagues desk so that he or she can see exactly what you are seeing and you can both discuss it. Its still a bit awkward to do this when you are looking at something that can't be easily transferred to your colleague except as a print out. If you could instead place one of the above mentioned screens at each workspace, then each user could simply transmit their document or screenshot to it, instead of to the printer, and take that over to their colleagues desk. This would reduce casual printer usage tremendously in my opinion."

So, dear readers, we're putting it to you: What can you imagine using a flexible electronic screen for? Comments are now open.

Image: Plastic Logic