evenrain's soup

Last week we posted a video that presented LivePlace, a 3D world with an incredible amount of detail. The impressive technology behind it is called OTOY, a streaming platform that allows developers to generate movie-quality renders “in the cloud”, which can then be streamed to more modestly-powered computers and even mobile phones. For more information on OTOY, see our intro post here.

The video was available to the public at LivePlace.com alongside the ambiguous headline “Live or Virtually Live?”, but apparently nobody was supposed to find it. Soon after we published the post, LivePlace removed the video from its servers. Brad Greenspan, the entrepreneur behind MySpace who owns LivePlace, says that the site was never meant to be seen by the public, explaining that it was for internal mockups, viral videos, and “something similar to a Funny or Die episode.” That explanation doesn’t sit well with me, but it’s unlikely we’re going to get anything more substantial out of Greenspan.

So what about that 3D virtual world - is it a sham?

Jules Urbach, founder of OTOY, explains that while he can’t comment on what Liveplace is doing (or why they released the video), virtual worlds running on the rendering engine in the video are on the way. He says this video isn’t representative of his system’s capabilities (which have actually improved since the footage was shot), and is actually just a number of random clips spliced together by Liveplace:

“The 14 mins of real time rendering in this material is streaming live to a Treo 700 at 240 kpbs. This was captured on March 2007, the server was running an ATI RX 1900 GPU. The tech has improved massively since then (as has the HW we now run on). There was never intention to show any part of this to the public until we could include voxel rendering and Lightstage based characters. I think anyone who liked what they saw, will find the final project much more impressive.

The whole aim of our work last month on the Ruby demo for AMD was to show that the quality of offline and real time work is identical starting with this generation of GPUs. The following presentations this month are just introducing Lightstage and how it makes characters (or any CG object) look 100% real in those real time environments.

The virtual worlds these technologies are going to be applied to was not meant to be discussed until later this year, after one further announcement regarding the server side platform being developed for OTOY.

We had nothing to do with editing or leaking this video and can’t comment on anything other than the OTOY technology, since this project is still under NDA.”

One concern readers had beyond the lack of consistency seen in the video is the possibility that it contains material pirated from other artists. The video begins with a brief clip of cars that is apparently taken from a artists’ portfolio and was originally created years ago. As it turns out, the footage is old, but Jules Urbach explains that the artist is now part of the OTOY team:

“JJ has been working with OTOY/JulesWorld on almost all of our major projects over the past 3 years (some of which are still under NDA). I couldn’t be prouder to count him as a great friend and partner.

JJ’s studio, BLR, is always properly accredited on all videos that our clients let us put our logos on, whether it is a for a real time project or linear VFX work. You can see the BLR logo on the real time Transformers OTOY clip that was on Techcrunch a few weeks back (originally from Daily Variety), and you will see it again in a November print ad campaign featuring our work.

Note: The VW beetle you see in the very beginning of the BCN street scene was is one of JJ’s first CG models and is his ‘baby’. It has appeared in nearly everything we’ve done together - from our ‘Bumblebee’ Transformers ad for Paramount, to our most recent Ruby voxel demo for AMD (you can find it on the right side of the street). It is also in one of the images from the TechCrunch piece on OTOY last month (rendered in real time on 512 Mb R770, pre-voxel renderer).

So what’s the bottom line? LivePlace doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the video provided or the city described, and shouldn’t have posted the footage in the first place. The impressive OTOY technology behind it is real, but we will have to wait to see what products will be taking advantage of it.

Here are more technical details Jules has provided:

- We sore voxel data in several ways, including geometry maps (see our Siggraph or Iceland presentations, where we show this method applied to the Ligthstage 5 structured light data, courtesy Andrew Jones ICT/Graphics lab)

- The datasets from the BCN and Ruby city scenes contain up to 64 data layers per voxel, including diffuse albedo, fresnel reflectance values, irradiance data, UV coordinates (up to 8 sets), normals, and, for static scenes, look up vectors for 1-20 bounces of light from up to 252 evenly distributed viewpoints (it is important to note that this data is always 100% optional, as the raycaster can do this procedurally when the voxels are close and reflection precision is more important than speed; however, with cached reflectance data, you might see the scene rendering at 100s-1000s of fps when the scene isn’t changing).

- A note on raytracing vs. rasterization: amplifying the tree trunk in Fincher’s Bug Snuff demo to 28 million polys using the GPU tessellator turned out to be faster than rendering a 28 million voxel point cloud for this object. So there is a threshold where voxels become faster than rasterziation at about 100 million polys. At least in our engine, on R7xx GPUs, using full precision raycasting at 1280×720. Below that point, traditional rasterization using the GPU tessellator seems to be faster for a single viewport.

- The engine can convert a 1 million poly mesh into voxel data in about 1/200th second on R770 (60 fps on R600 and 8800 GTX). This is useful for baking dense static scenes that are procedurally generated once, or infrequently, on the GPU. That is why some of the OTOY demos require the GPU tessellator to look right.

- Hard shadows in OTOY were done using rasterization until we got R770 in May. Now hard shadows, like reflections, can be calculated using raycasting, although shadow masks are still very useful, and raycasting with voxel data can still give you aliasing.

- We can use the raycaster with procedurally generated data (perlin generated terrain or clouds, spline based objects etc.). At Jon Peddie’s Siggraph event, we showed a deformation applied in real time to the Ruby street scene. It was resolution independent, like a Flash vector object, so you could get infinitely close to it with no stair stepping effects, and likewise, the shadow casting would work the same way.

- The voxel data is grouped into the rough equivalent of ‘triangle batches’ (which can be indexed into per object or per material groups as well). This allows us to work with subsets of the voxel data in the much the same way we do with traditional polygonal meshes.

- The reflections in the march 2007 ‘Treo’ video are about 1/1000th as precise/fast as the raycasting we now use for the Ruby demo on R770/R700.

- One R770 GPU can render about 100+ viewports at the quality and size shown in the ‘Treo’ video. When scenes are entirely voxel based, the number of simultaneous viewports is less important than the total rendered area of all the viewports combined.

- The server side rendering system is currently comprised of systems using 8x R770 GPUs ( 8 Gb VRAM, 1.5 Kw power per box).

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Later this evening Songbird, the open source web-integrated media player, will the unveil the .7 beta release of its software that introduces scrobbling to Last.fm, speedier track importing, and a more polished interface among a number of other features. The resulting application is a marked improvement over the last release we covered, but still has a few rough edges that continue to make it ideal for early adopters in the music scene rather than the general consumer.

Songbird is looking to provide users an alternative to the closed, DRM-laden music stores offered by Apple and a number of other companies. The software behaves like a mix between iTunes (it now features nearly identical icons) and Mozilla’s Firefox (it uses the same engine as the web browser). The software also supports plugins for portable devices like the iPod, and even slightly modified Firefox extensions. The result may be a bit confusing at first, but the interface is familiar enough that it only takes a few moments to adjust to combination.

Songbird allows web developers to integrate a very professional music store on their sites by tapping into the application’s API. After browsing to a supported site, Songbird will display a list of available songs at the bottom of the application in a manner that is strongly reminiscent of iTunes. While we’ve seen other interfaces that look equally professional, replicating the iTunes UI which users are already familiar with is likely to help boost sales.

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I have no idea what these guys actually do to pull in revenue, but God love ‘em. Jackson Fish Market, the ex-Microsoft team that brought us They’re Beautiful and Tafiti, launched Elmore City Dance Club earlier today.

The application, which was conceived, designed and built by the company’s summer interns (Tyler, Luke and Alex) lets anyone create and share a new dance. The TechCrunch! (TM) is embedded below (and I believe it is physically impossible to actually do).

(Quick Note: Their actual business model is site design and creation for clients, just kidding about the first sentence above)

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Editor’s note: The following on-the-ground report comes from Don Dodge, who blogs at The Next Big Thing and is a business development executive for Microsoft. He is in Boulder, Colorado today attending TechStars demo day. Much like Y Combinator (which had its own demo day last week) and LaunchBox (which also had a recent demo day), TechStars is a startup incubator that selects 10 teams and provides funding of about $15,000 per team, as well as free office space, operational support, and mentoring from former entrepreneurs and business leaders.

This is the second year for TechStars, and they have already had an acquisition. SocialThing was recently acquired by AOL. The teams presented today to about 100 VCs and Angel investors for the first time. These companies are three to six months old and have two or three founder employees. Here are Don’s notes on each of the ten startups to present at TechStars today.

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Gyminee -A fitness social network for detailed tracking, online accountability, and motivation. With Gyminee, you can find workout programs and track your progress, track your food and nutrition, and set goals for whatever is important to you. On the social side of things, you can find GymBuddies to keep you accountable towards your goals and participate in fitness challenges. They already have over 35,000 users and over 1.2M page views. On the nutrition side they have a database of 50,000 food items complete with nutritional information that you would find on the label. You can track your diet, calories, and nutritional value. Freemium business model. Free service where you can upgrade to premium services for $5 per month. Looking to raise $300K in seed funding.
Ignighter - Wish dating could be as fun and easy as going out with your friends? Ignighter is group to group dating. Meet people the way you do in real life…like you did in college. Ignighter is about hooking you and your friends up with someone else and their friends. They believe group socializing is safer and less intimidating than one to one blind dating, and leads to personal dates. Ignighter has elements of Facebook for groups and Match.com for dates. They have an iPhone app that uses GPS to find other groups close to your current location. They have over 10,000 registered users. Business model; premium services like better search placement, and of course advertising. Looking to raise $300K.

Peoples Software - WhozAround? from People’s Software takes the pain out of making plans with your friends with planning and scheduling tools that plug right into your Facebook account, your contact list, or your mobile phone directory. Lightweight and location-aware, WhozAround sorts your friends, makes plans with one click, and outputs your events into a clean feed that can go right to your calendar, email, or your phone.

Peoples Software founders are Susan Mernit formerly a VP at Yahoo and AOL, and Lisa Williams, a founder of several companies, and formerly at Boston.com. It is great to see two women founding a cool new startup. Business model; locally targeted advertising. They believe they can get $7 to$10 CPM rates because of the local targeting, and by partnering with regional media companies. They are seeking $225K in seed funding.

Devver - Takes the tools that developers already use on their desktops and turns them into cloud-based services. Currently focused on Ruby tools and testing suites. Strong emphasis on test suites. They will add PHP, Python, and Java later. They will also have an open API so that developers can add other languages.

By putting developer tools in the cloud, they can execute them more quickly, reduce setup and configuration time, enable easy scheduling, display rich reports, and make it simple to share data between team members. The dev tools and environment is set up once on a cloud based server, then team members can be added quickly and have all the same tools, projects, and code.

Business model; subscription fee of $100 per developer per month. Sales channel - seems to be word of mouth through the Ruby development community. Seeking $200K in seed funding.

The Highway Girl - is a traveling music show for the digital age. Hosted by singer songwriter Samantha Murphy, the show educates artists on how to manage their careers in the digital age while also giving fans a true behind the scenes look inside the life of a singer / songwriter on tour. It is initially based on Samantha Murphy, but soon will include other artists. TheHighwayGirl.com will sell exclusive content from the artists they feature, as well as act as a liaison between artist and fan on non-traditional transactions that connect them.

Samantha delivered one of the most unusual startup pitches I have seen. She sang a song about raising money and building a business. Wow! Samantha is an incredibly talented singer /songwriter. Business model; Exclusive content, tours, merchandise, and a traveling music tour called The Highway Girls. Also partnering with TopSpin. Seeking $500K in seed funding.

Application Experts provides Software as a Service (SaaS) to venture capital and private equity fund managers and to the pensions, endowments and other parties that invest in venture capital and private equity. Based in Denver, Boston, and Chicago. The founders were in private equity firms prior to founding the company.

The idea is to build a social network of private equity and venture capital investors to share best practices and information. They also provide a deal-tracking dashboard to help manage the pipeline of investment deals in progress.

Their target audience has plenty of money and is willing to pay. They charge $3k per person with a minimum of $15K.

Occipital - Photography has evolved over the years, but the ways we interact with digital photos are still decidedly primitive. Occipital is using artificial intelligence to organize your photo stream, enabling vivid recollection with groundbreaking visualizations.

They can stitch photos together into a panorama, automatically label and tag photos, and construct 3D scenes from your photos. They can zoom in, fly over, step inside buildings…all based on simple photos stitched together into a 3D presentation. They find objects in your photos and link them to the same or similar objects in other photos and stitch them together. This is hard to explain with words, but the visual demo was amazing.

BuyPlayWin.com - Combines online shopping with tournament games. Buy products, play games, win a refund for the product. Every shopper gets a chance to win full refunds for everything they purchase by playing fun games against other shoppers. For example, buy a $120 college text book. Compete with six other people who are also buying the book. Win the game and you get the book for free. They use the profit margin in the product to pay for the winners purchase. If a product has a 33% profit margin they need three players to break even. With 10 purchasers they make a very nice profit. They are seeking $400K in seed funding.

Foodzie - An online marketplace where consumers can discover and buy food directly from small artisan producers. The Foodzie technology makes it simple for small producers to sell their products online and aggregate all these products within a marketplace that makes it easy for “foodies” to discover the very best food. They focus on gourmet foods and organic health foods. These are high-end and high-margin products. Foodzie takes a 20% commission on every sale. Traditional retailers take 50% margin, while a distributor takes another 10%. The food supplier only ends up with 40%. So, with Foodzie the producers get to keep 80% of each sale. They are seeking $350K in seed funding.

Travelfli -Helps frequent flyers maximize the full potential of their loyalty programs and discover the value in this hidden currency. They help users manage their award programs in one centralized and secure place, find ways to get free travel using their miles, and book award travel online. TravelFli allows you to aggregate frequent flyer miles and hotel points from family members and keep track of all the various rewards programs. They help you keep track of when miles expire, or when there are special promotional programs for your miles.

There are over 120M people in frequent flyer programs, and trillions of frequent flyer miles that never get used. There are 17M elite flyers that account for 43% of all flights. These elite flyers are a very lucrative market for airlines, hotels, rental car agencies, etc.

Business model; commissions on all sales. Advertising - CPMs for travel are very high. They will also sell aggregate data on flights, hotels, and car rentals. They are seeking $500K in seed funding.

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Six months ago, OpenSocial was nothing but a list of promised partnerships. But the social network application platform backed by Google has made a lot of progress since then as those partners started to go live with their OpenSocial Apps. First there was MySpace and Orkut, then Hi5, and most recently Friendster. All told, if you add up the various social networks that are now live with OpenSocial, it reaches a total of 350 million users. And it will soon reach 500 million, as four more social networks and services prepare to launch by the end of of September (see chart above).

Google’s Joe Kraus gave me an update today on OpenSocial’s progress. He wouldn’t say which partners would launch next, but by the size of that pink bar in the graph above, one of them is relatively large—about the same size as Orkut. (My guess is that it will be either Bebo or Six Apart). He also mentioned some partners, such as imeem, launched without ever contacting Google (thanks to Apache Shindig) and that at this point only 10 percent of the engineers hashing out the OpenSocial specifications are from Google.

So how many OpenSocial apps are actually being used? There are about 4,500 different apps so far, which have been installed more than 150 million times. I couldn’t get daily active user numbers across all OpenSocial partners, but for Hi5 about 50 percent of members use an OpenSocial app at least once a day. There are 1,800 OpenSocial apps on hi5 alone, which have been installed 66 million times, so that may be representative of OpenSocial usage in general.

In contrast, Facebook, which is open-sourcing its own platform for developers, has nearly 37,000 apps, which have been installed 715 million times. RockYou’s apps alone have been installed 124 million times on Facebook.

Despite the strides it’s made in such a short time, OpenSocial still has alot of catching up to do.

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Intel and Yahoo have announced plans for a new “Widget Channel”, a widget platform for consumer electronic devices running on Intel’s hardware. The platform will support a number of current technologies, including JavaScript, HTML, XML, and mostly notably Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash, which many current platforms on CE devices don’t support.

The two companies envision a library of small widgets that will be included alongside standard television content. For example, a user could use an eBay widget to monitor the current prices of their active auctions, or a sports widget to keep track of current scores.

The TV Widgets Channel continues to blur the line between a television and a computer with a big screen - it probably won’t be long before the distinction no longer exists. And while I could see some of the widgets coming in handy, they might also turn off a lot of users. For many people, television is an escape from the constant alerts and messages of today’s society. Interactive TV is a neat idea, but sometimes people just want to kick up their feet and relax.

If the new announcement does pique your interest, you probably won’t be seeing it in action any time soon. The widget platform makes use of the Intel Architecture, which isn’t integrated with current TVs. You’ll need to wait until you can get your hands on a device with the Media Processor CE 3100, which was also announced today. The system-on-chip solution will enable 3D graphics and a “fusion of Internet and TV experiences” on cable boxes and TV’s, along with other consumer devices.

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SocialMedian founder Jason Goldberg wrote a Twitter message moments ago letting people know that they are raising a new round of funding, up to $500k, and to contact him if you’re interested. Great way to get investors, right? Exactly not - the whole purpose of the Securities Act of 1933 is to prohibit public offerings like these unless accompanied by a registration statement and a valid prospectus approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission (the fun stuff is in Section 5). The Twitter also violates various state laws.

The good news - enforcement is unlikely, my lawyer tells me. But investors who find out down the road that they’ve lost money are in for a treat - they could almost certainly rely on the offering to get their money back via a rescission right. Of course, by the time they realize they want their money back there may not be any money left to get.

Most venture financings are excluded from Securities Act registration via a private offering exemption. But the key to these exemptions are that they aren’t disclosed publicly and the investors must all be high net work individuals.

In other words, this is exactly the kind of offering the law is designed to stop in order to protect individuals. I wonder how long the Twitter will be left up.

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