QuickieURL

AMEE, the US/UK-based startup that aims to build the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions, has secured a $5.5m series B financing lead by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside existing investors, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. AMEE will use the funding to expand its geographic reach and platform.

The prize AMEE is aiming for, known in the sector as “enterprise carbon management”, is expected to reach $4 billion by 2017 because of government and consumer pressure to address climate change. AMEE’s engine is now being used by companies offering carbon accounting or business intelligence software, as well as governments, multi-nationals and SMEs.

A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn’t know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and had a profound effect on the quality of Internet search. Suddenly (and it really was that sudden), we couldn’t imagine going back to AltaVista and searching pages of results for the thing that Google gave us immediately.

For a good history of search, get John Battelle’s book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.

The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.

Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I’ve got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, status updates on Facebook and Twitter, and videos on YouTube. Etc. I’ve got dozens of social graphs on dozens of sites, and trying to remember which friends puts his or her pictures on which site is a huge challenge.

And the amount of spam and just general nonsense that is flooding all of these services is crippling. As a user, I spend far too much time weeding it all out to find the few gems of real content from people I care about.

And I end up missing a lot of important content that I want to know about.

Someone will eventually help us make sense of all these various types of services, and help us separate the noise and spam from the real signal. I don’t know who’s going to do it, and I certainly don’t know how (if I did, I’d be doing it, not writing about it). But at some point soon, one of the Internet giants, or some new startup we’ve never heard of, is going to fix this mess for us.

I hope it comes sooner rather than later. Because social today looks a lot like search a decade ago. It’s broken, and just waiting for someone to fix it.

Wikia, a for-profit group of user generated wiki sites that was founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales in 2004, is now a profitable company. CEO Gil Penchina says the company’s revenues grew 4x in 2009 while they kept costs in check. Late last year the company reported strong financial results, but hadn’t yet reached true profitability.

He won’t disclose what revenues are, but the company currently has 40 employees and has open spots for a dozen more, he says (although I only count eight positions on their jobs page).

Wikia sites attracted about 21 million unique worldwide visitors in December (Comscore), and those visitors racked up over 2.7 billion page views. The company attracts around 8 million U.S. visitors monthly, they say.

The site makes money on ads surrounding content. They have a direct sales team and also pull ads from networks and Google.

Their largest site is lyrics.wikia.com, with over a million lyrics pages. answers.wikia.com, which launched a year ago, has 600,000 user generated questions and a million monthly visitors. A couple of months later the company ended its attempt to build a search engine that could challenge Google.

The company has raised $14 million over two venture rounds.

Back in July 2008, Tapulous released a music game for the iPhone called Tap Tap Revenge (TTR). The game proved to be a massive hit, growing to 1 million users within its first few weeks.  Over the last year and a half, TTR and its sequels have become the most popular series on the App Store, with over 25 million installs. And tonight, Tapulous is ready to release an entirely new music-focused gaming series: Riddim Ribbon (iTunes link), featuring the Black Eyed Peas.

Riddim Ribbon is a fusion between racing, popular songs, and to some extent, remixing music. After choosing a song, the game throws you into a hyper-colorful racetrack, where you pilot a futuristic spherical vehicle. The track is filled with small orbs (which are good) and obstacles (which are not), and there’s a path showing you where you should be driving. To control your vehicle, you tilt your iPhone from side to side. Most of this is standard fare for racing games, but Riddim Ribbon comes with a twist: you actually can modify the music you’re listening to during the race depending on how you navigate the course.

It’s easier than it sounds. At multiple points in each track, you’ll find yourself at a crossroads, where each route will play a different segment of the song you’re listening to. So, for example, in the track for ‘Boom Boom Pow’, there’s a point midway through the track where you can choose to listen to either remixes by DJ Will.I.Am or Zuper Blahq (they sound different, but they’re still the same song). In effect, with every race you’re stitching together multiple song segments to create your own custom mashup. Of course, if you happen to leave the track for more than a second, the music starts to become scratchy and slowed down (it returns to normal once you steer back to the track).

This initial version of the game features three songs by the Black Eyed Peas for $2.99, with additional levels available for a dollar each (including a section for content by other artists). CEO Bart Decrem says that this game was actually inspired by a conversation he had with will.i.am, who has been involved in the development of the game.  And while Decrem declined to comment on any specific future versions, Tapulous will almost certainly be releasing followups, including a generic Riddim Ribbon game (where most of the content is obtained through in-app purchases). Future releases will also include more features, including multiplayer support and more social functionality.

You can expect Riddim Ribbon to be at the top of the App Store’s bestseller lists very soon, and not just because the game is fun. Tapulous will be able to to cross-promote the new application through its install base of 25 million Tap Tap Revenge users, which Decrem says is the largest distribution channel on the entire App Store.

Decrem is very optimistic about the game’s ability to monetize through the App Store’s in-app purchases, which allow developers to upsell new virtual goods, songs, and features after a user has installed an application. Decrem says that in-app downloads have become the biggest revenue stream for Tapulous (as opposed to selling premium apps), and that the company has noticed a big uptick in in-app purchases since the holiday season.

Also see the Zune HD game Audio Surf, which has a lot of similarities to Riddim Ribbon.

As predicted, Hell has indeed frozen over. Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sent a tweet hinting at something most people probably never expected to see: a Google Super Bowl ad. But the contents of the ad, and even the product it would be promoting, remained a mystery. Moments ago some 90 million Americans watched as Google showed off the search functionality that it’s famous for, in an ad called Parisian Love. We’ve embedded the ad below.

Yesterday, John Battelle correctly predicted that the ad would be running during the Super Bowl.

Amid dozens of ads focused on cars, beer, and busty women, the Google spot definitely took a different approach: it tells a love story through a series of search queries. The tale begins with a query for “study abroad paris france”, moves on to “impress a french girl” and eventually makes it all the way to “how to assemble a crib”, showcasing Google’s technology in a way that pretty much everyone can relate to.

Yesterday, California’s Chief Technology Officer, P.K. Agarwal, wrote that the government is using a crowdsourcing tool, IdeaScale, to get a consensus on the ideas to spur IT innovation around the California’s IT systems. IdeaScale, which is a crowdsourcing tool produced by startup Survey Analytics, is gaining serious traction as a crowdsourcing tool for government agencies. Currently, 23 agencies in the U.S. Federal Government are using IdeaScale to power crowdsourcing initiatives.

IdeaScale’s technology allows citizens to submit ideas to a site and then vote on their favorite ideas via a Digg-like voting system. The ideas that have the most favorable votes bubble to the top. Agencies can also participate in the discussion by commenting on ideas and posting updates, effectively creating a community around this ideation.

For example, the U.S. Department of State is using IdeaScale to crowdsource ideas and suggestions on policy. The Obama administration also used IdeaScale to solicit ideas from government agencies on its Open Government initiative last year. Of course, IdeaScale’s tool can be used for non-government initiatives as well. According to its website, the platform has been used by Microsoft, RedHat, Navteq and others.

President Obama’s government has been a fan of crowdsourcing, and has used similar tool Google Moderator to power citizen participation on Change.gov, and Town Hall meetings.