Robert writes: "Oh, heck, I just posted some photos of a B-17 that’s been buzzing Silicon Valley, too."
That was a B-24, not a B-17. Twin tails. Four engines. Passed over my house about six times this weekend, at about a thousand feet.
At one point I thought I saw a B-25 as well (twin engines, twin tails) but I may have been mistaken.
I had a thoroughly mis-spent youth as a WWII airplane geek, and occasionally it pops through. How mis-spent, you might ask? How many nine-year-olds do you know that listened to their record player on an original B-26 pilot's flight helmet instead of earphones?
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Steve Ballmer: Market Capitalism Doesn't Work
I found this quote on Donna Bogatin's Digital Markets blog. Regarding Google:
Um... free markets? Invisible hand? Hello, Steve.
I don't want to beat on Mr. Ballmer too hard, because it's always been a peculiar tension of capitalism and a thorn for its most fervent (market fundamentalist) adherents that the macrofauna and apex predators of capitalism, public companies, work nothing like free markets internally, and in fact strongly resemble the command-and-control economies that capitalism is supposed to supersede.
Nonetheless, a very funny quote.
“I don’t really know that anyone has proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value,” [said] Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.
Um... free markets? Invisible hand? Hello, Steve.
I don't want to beat on Mr. Ballmer too hard, because it's always been a peculiar tension of capitalism and a thorn for its most fervent (market fundamentalist) adherents that the macrofauna and apex predators of capitalism, public companies, work nothing like free markets internally, and in fact strongly resemble the command-and-control economies that capitalism is supposed to supersede.
Nonetheless, a very funny quote.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
No wonder the country is a mess
The NY Times notes some interesting results of financial disclosure forms by presidential candidates:
Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, reported assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars but also said he owed more than $30,000 in car loans and more than $75,000 in credit card debt.
There are two ways to read this:
a) for a decade Congress has been run by people like Duncan Hunter who are too dumb to understand that $75K in credit card debt is a financial disaster, and equally too dumb to understand that pile-driving the budget into the ground by combining an expensive war, a moronic new Medicare benefit, and giant tax cuts is a financial disaster.
b) is even more depressing. For a decade Congress has been run by people who don't care about running debts up while in office, because they know their special-interest buddies will lavish them with rewards for their toadying once they've done their duty and graduate to the private sector.
The Times being the Times, of course they focused the article on the fact that some of the candidates are rich.
Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, reported assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars but also said he owed more than $30,000 in car loans and more than $75,000 in credit card debt.
There are two ways to read this:
a) for a decade Congress has been run by people like Duncan Hunter who are too dumb to understand that $75K in credit card debt is a financial disaster, and equally too dumb to understand that pile-driving the budget into the ground by combining an expensive war, a moronic new Medicare benefit, and giant tax cuts is a financial disaster.
b) is even more depressing. For a decade Congress has been run by people who don't care about running debts up while in office, because they know their special-interest buddies will lavish them with rewards for their toadying once they've done their duty and graduate to the private sector.
The Times being the Times, of course they focused the article on the fact that some of the candidates are rich.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Hand Wringing About Education
It seems to be our national pastime to worry that today's kids are kind of dumb compared to some ideal representation of past glory. One of the key ways this is expressed is bloviating articles about dumb high school kids that come out every time some national test result is published.
The New York Times is the latest perpetrator of this meme. Despite generally positive results versus earlier years, the entire spin of their article is dumb kids, dumb kids, dumb kids. But the remarkable point to me is what an incredibly high standard they need to invent in order to garner a suitable quotient of worry.
They write:
I am in the tiny fraction of humans who enjoyed and excelled at history so much as to enter a PhD program at a top tier university in the subject, and I don't view either of those items as "basic facts". A "basic fact" is something like, "What was the outcome of the Korean war for Korea?" (answer: Partition along the demilitarized zone between North and South).
"Causes of the Korean War" is really quite complicated, especially when subjected to the incredibly imprecise testing method of multiple choice, with questions designed to trick. It's only because I was a very serious war history geek that I knew much about the occupation of Korea by Japan from 1905 through World War II when I was in high school, and any attempt to address the causes of the Korean War which ignores the post-colonial impact of Japan's departure is laughable.
I also happened to study the history of science and technology in grad school, and I find the claim that "impact of the cotton gin on slavery" is a "basic fact" to be downright silly. I suppose that the answer to the question is that the cotton gin made the refinement of cotton into cloth cheaper and faster, driving down its overall price and putting demand-driven market pressure on the South to vastly expand the institution of slavery in order to grow more cotton to process with cotton gins; but I would be extremely impressed with any high school kid who could come up with that; so impressed as to probably offer them a summer internship at my startup.
The reporter, Sam Dillon, closes his piece with an example multiple choice question, which is a rhetorical hook designed to let your typical upper-middle-class, highly-educated New York Times reader walk away from the article shaking their head about those dumb kids:
You've got to be kidding me. That is the trickiest wording imaginable for that question; the right answer is wishy-washy and vague, and the three wrong answers are precise sentences about the key issues of the civil war, with the key word "not" either missing or present to make them false. Knowledgeable is not logical, and logical is not diligent and precise, and I am dubious that this question answers anything more than whether high school seniors are highly logical, diligent, and precise in their test-taking. No. Shock, surprise.
Parents have been griping about the fallen morals and depressed intellect of their children since at least the introduction of that social scandal, the waltz, into England in 1820. Get over it, everyone. Your kids are going to be fine.
The New York Times is the latest perpetrator of this meme. Despite generally positive results versus earlier years, the entire spin of their article is dumb kids, dumb kids, dumb kids. But the remarkable point to me is what an incredibly high standard they need to invent in order to garner a suitable quotient of worry.
They write:
...more than half of the nation’s high school seniors still showed poor command of even basic facts like the impact of the cotton gin on the slave economy or the causes of the Korean War...
I am in the tiny fraction of humans who enjoyed and excelled at history so much as to enter a PhD program at a top tier university in the subject, and I don't view either of those items as "basic facts". A "basic fact" is something like, "What was the outcome of the Korean war for Korea?" (answer: Partition along the demilitarized zone between North and South).
"Causes of the Korean War" is really quite complicated, especially when subjected to the incredibly imprecise testing method of multiple choice, with questions designed to trick. It's only because I was a very serious war history geek that I knew much about the occupation of Korea by Japan from 1905 through World War II when I was in high school, and any attempt to address the causes of the Korean War which ignores the post-colonial impact of Japan's departure is laughable.
I also happened to study the history of science and technology in grad school, and I find the claim that "impact of the cotton gin on slavery" is a "basic fact" to be downright silly. I suppose that the answer to the question is that the cotton gin made the refinement of cotton into cloth cheaper and faster, driving down its overall price and putting demand-driven market pressure on the South to vastly expand the institution of slavery in order to grow more cotton to process with cotton gins; but I would be extremely impressed with any high school kid who could come up with that; so impressed as to probably offer them a summer internship at my startup.
The reporter, Sam Dillon, closes his piece with an example multiple choice question, which is a rhetorical hook designed to let your typical upper-middle-class, highly-educated New York Times reader walk away from the article shaking their head about those dumb kids:
The test asked students, “What did Abraham Lincoln mean in this speech?” and listed four possible answers.
a) The South should be allowed to separate from the United States.
b) The government should support slavery in the South.
c) Sometime in the future slavery would disappear from the United States.
d) Americans would not be willing to fight a war over slavery.
Fifty four percent of the fourth graders given the test failed to pick the correct answer, letter c). “These are very worrisome results,” Mr. Rabb said.
You've got to be kidding me. That is the trickiest wording imaginable for that question; the right answer is wishy-washy and vague, and the three wrong answers are precise sentences about the key issues of the civil war, with the key word "not" either missing or present to make them false. Knowledgeable is not logical, and logical is not diligent and precise, and I am dubious that this question answers anything more than whether high school seniors are highly logical, diligent, and precise in their test-taking. No. Shock, surprise.
Parents have been griping about the fallen morals and depressed intellect of their children since at least the introduction of that social scandal, the waltz, into England in 1820. Get over it, everyone. Your kids are going to be fine.
Monday, April 23, 2007
The Best and the Brightest
David Halberstam died yesterday. I am currently reading his outstanding book, 'The Best and the Brightest' which is a extraordinary series of portraits of the men who made up the Kennedy administration, and who led us in to Vietnam. I discovered from the New York Times that he lived in the Bay Area and died in an auto accident in Menlo Park.
He wrote of people who were so close to greatness, but created tragedy. I'm fascinated at how this small tragedy has revealed to me how close to this great author I was, and never even realized it.
His book has one core message, which applies to startups as much as politics: Don't waste your opportunity to make a difference by being arrogant, narrow-minded, or dogmatic about reality. Adjust and thrive. Deny and die. Even the best and the brightest can blow it.
He wrote of people who were so close to greatness, but created tragedy. I'm fascinated at how this small tragedy has revealed to me how close to this great author I was, and never even realized it.
His book has one core message, which applies to startups as much as politics: Don't waste your opportunity to make a difference by being arrogant, narrow-minded, or dogmatic about reality. Adjust and thrive. Deny and die. Even the best and the brightest can blow it.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Negotiating for Minority Rights with Car Bombs
It's a horrific scene, and an even more horrific number of deaths. No, not in Virginia -- in Baghdad. Again. 115 die in a single gigantic explosion.
This is really quite simple, and it's based on the diffusion of technology, in the form of high explosives. The Sunnis are a minority in Iraq, and to make their position even worse, they're the deposed former nasty overlords and oppressors of the Shiites. The Shiites are, not surprisingly, highly enthusiastic about massacring the Sunnis as soon as the Americans get out of the way.
But wait, say the Sunnis. You may massacre us -- there's frankly not much we can do to prevent it, since you've got lots of guns and explosives of your own, plus control of government and an advantage of numbers -- but we're certainly not going to go quietly, and you're not going to get anything like peace. In fact, you'll get fear and chaos and random death which will make any massacre-based future social order carry the distinct and unpleasant taste of spoiled victory. We'll mostly be dead, but we'll keep blowing you up, too.
So let's negotiate about this whole massacre thing, OK?
That's why 115 people just died in a single gigantic explosion in Baghdad today. To send a simple message -- "Let's talk."
Iraq is very far gone, and it's almost entirely due to widespread availability of guns and high explosives, which make conversations like this quite a bit more percussive and destructive than they otherwise would be. So what do the gun nuts recommend for our society? More of that recipe, please!
This is really quite simple, and it's based on the diffusion of technology, in the form of high explosives. The Sunnis are a minority in Iraq, and to make their position even worse, they're the deposed former nasty overlords and oppressors of the Shiites. The Shiites are, not surprisingly, highly enthusiastic about massacring the Sunnis as soon as the Americans get out of the way.
But wait, say the Sunnis. You may massacre us -- there's frankly not much we can do to prevent it, since you've got lots of guns and explosives of your own, plus control of government and an advantage of numbers -- but we're certainly not going to go quietly, and you're not going to get anything like peace. In fact, you'll get fear and chaos and random death which will make any massacre-based future social order carry the distinct and unpleasant taste of spoiled victory. We'll mostly be dead, but we'll keep blowing you up, too.
So let's negotiate about this whole massacre thing, OK?
That's why 115 people just died in a single gigantic explosion in Baghdad today. To send a simple message -- "Let's talk."
Iraq is very far gone, and it's almost entirely due to widespread availability of guns and high explosives, which make conversations like this quite a bit more percussive and destructive than they otherwise would be. So what do the gun nuts recommend for our society? More of that recipe, please!
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Product Review: Moka Junior Express Coffee Maker
I've now raved about this little coffee maker to a couple of people, so I'm writing a review that I can point everyone to instead of repeating myself. This is a stove-top coffee maker that looks (and works) a lot like those little camping espresso makers you saw back in college:
It takes about a cup of water and about two scoops of coffee. The water steams up through the grounds as you heat it on the stove, and the results are dark, rich, and utterly fabulous. It's coffee that is halfway to espresso - I cut it about 50/50 with milk -- and the taste is out of this world. For $20 at Target or Amazon, it's a real winner.
The back story on this is interesting: My friends Matt and Jen swear by this coffee maker, and have been using it (and its larger sibling) for years. They bought me one about three years ago, and somehow I never got around to using it -- force of habit with the drip coffee maker, I guess. We have a friend, Ophelia, who travels lightly through life -- she's biked across the U.S., and is currently camping out in the Bay Area post grad school at M.I.T. When she recently showed up to stay with us, carting her approximately 40 pounds of worldly possessions, lo and behold, a Moka had made the cut. After she made me some coffee from it (which Matt and Jen did years ago -- mea culpa, guys, I was young and foolish!) I was hooked. I dusted their old gift off and have been avidly using it ever since. I now plot how to get a first cup of Moka coffee in me before I head to the office -- a real behavioral change. For the cost of three drinks at Starbucks, you've gotta try it.
It takes about a cup of water and about two scoops of coffee. The water steams up through the grounds as you heat it on the stove, and the results are dark, rich, and utterly fabulous. It's coffee that is halfway to espresso - I cut it about 50/50 with milk -- and the taste is out of this world. For $20 at Target or Amazon, it's a real winner.
The back story on this is interesting: My friends Matt and Jen swear by this coffee maker, and have been using it (and its larger sibling) for years. They bought me one about three years ago, and somehow I never got around to using it -- force of habit with the drip coffee maker, I guess. We have a friend, Ophelia, who travels lightly through life -- she's biked across the U.S., and is currently camping out in the Bay Area post grad school at M.I.T. When she recently showed up to stay with us, carting her approximately 40 pounds of worldly possessions, lo and behold, a Moka had made the cut. After she made me some coffee from it (which Matt and Jen did years ago -- mea culpa, guys, I was young and foolish!) I was hooked. I dusted their old gift off and have been avidly using it ever since. I now plot how to get a first cup of Moka coffee in me before I head to the office -- a real behavioral change. For the cost of three drinks at Starbucks, you've gotta try it.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Concierge selling services: Reverse your model!
There are a ton of people in the business of packaging up your stuff to sell on eBay. AuctionDrop are the ones that come first to my mind, but this article lists about a dozen.
The basic premise is that a local business can provide a service involving listing, packaging, shipping, and managing the paper trail for used goods and make plenty of money. All these people have focused on sellers thus far -- I suppose on the theory that the motivation to clean our your garage is stronger than the motivation to buy some shiny object in a faraway place.
This is silly, because attraction to shiny objects is deeply human. In my previous post, I discussed a multi-city search for a Performax sander. I'm a woodworker, and I've decided it's time that I had a sander in the shop because I'm tired of two-week gaps in projects while I take a pile of panels to the mill. In my quick survey of Craigslist, I found broadly similar sanders that I would buy in cities ranging from Boston to Los Angeles -- at prices ranging from $850 to $2800. Now, guess which one I want to buy? But do I even want to deal with the hassle of trying to arrange buying something remotely and shipping it to myself? Unlikely. I may even have a tough time having a serious conversation with the seller, given that what I want to do bears a strong resemblance to some well-established scams.
AuctionDrop and others should step in to this market. "Listing, packaging, shipping, and managing the paper trail for used goods" can work with the causality arrow pointed in both directions -- or, said another way, as a post-purchase rather than pre-purchase option. I want to be able to get an approximate quote from AuctionDrop to drive to zip code 90210, pick up a purchase weighing 300 pounds, put it in a box, and send it to me in 94025. I want to be able to loop them in to the email chain after I buy something in Boston and have them deal with the details. Inspection of the goods at a basic level would be great, too -- there would have to be some significant liability waivers, but "I plugged it in and it ran" is certainly something that they could indemnify. This could be very lucrative. In order to get the $850 sander vs. the $1800 sander, it's easily worth it to me to pay someone $500, and I can't imagine that shipping costs from LA are more than about $200. There's a fat margin in there waiting to be exploited by... someone.
The basic premise is that a local business can provide a service involving listing, packaging, shipping, and managing the paper trail for used goods and make plenty of money. All these people have focused on sellers thus far -- I suppose on the theory that the motivation to clean our your garage is stronger than the motivation to buy some shiny object in a faraway place.
This is silly, because attraction to shiny objects is deeply human. In my previous post, I discussed a multi-city search for a Performax sander. I'm a woodworker, and I've decided it's time that I had a sander in the shop because I'm tired of two-week gaps in projects while I take a pile of panels to the mill. In my quick survey of Craigslist, I found broadly similar sanders that I would buy in cities ranging from Boston to Los Angeles -- at prices ranging from $850 to $2800. Now, guess which one I want to buy? But do I even want to deal with the hassle of trying to arrange buying something remotely and shipping it to myself? Unlikely. I may even have a tough time having a serious conversation with the seller, given that what I want to do bears a strong resemblance to some well-established scams.
AuctionDrop and others should step in to this market. "Listing, packaging, shipping, and managing the paper trail for used goods" can work with the causality arrow pointed in both directions -- or, said another way, as a post-purchase rather than pre-purchase option. I want to be able to get an approximate quote from AuctionDrop to drive to zip code 90210, pick up a purchase weighing 300 pounds, put it in a box, and send it to me in 94025. I want to be able to loop them in to the email chain after I buy something in Boston and have them deal with the details. Inspection of the goods at a basic level would be great, too -- there would have to be some significant liability waivers, but "I plugged it in and it ran" is certainly something that they could indemnify. This could be very lucrative. In order to get the $850 sander vs. the $1800 sander, it's easily worth it to me to pay someone $500, and I can't imagine that shipping costs from LA are more than about $200. There's a fat margin in there waiting to be exploited by... someone.
Craigslist: Please Innovate!
I spent some time using Craigslist this weekend. It works spectacularly well for many things, such as local searches for stuff to buy with a specific keyword. My example of the day is Performax sander, and yup, there is one. I can even grab an RSS feed of this search and dump it in to Bloglines as a way of watch-listing newly posted items -- probably the #1 most useful feature on Craigslist for me.
But I can't search for similar sanders in Los Angeles, or even Sacramento, without going to those separate city instances -- and I have to click through the miserable front page (apparently designed as a one-time picker for your home city, and little else) to get to each of those cities. None of the listings have any structure to them -- which means that when there isn't a handy keyword, I have to go through thousands of listings by hand with almost no tools to help me narrow my focus. Aargh! And where are the maps, or at least the easy tools for people to include maps from 3rd party providers? I get about a 50% hit rate on map connections for real estate listings, so something is clearly broken there.
Ironically, I end up doing Craigslist cross-metro searches on Google by default. This Google search for "Supermax sander for sale" returns listings in Boston, Madison, Los Angelss, and San Jose -- all on Craigslist. Is it really that hard for Craigslist to do this? And do they really want this business going to Google by default?
Being free and basic is great. But the world needs something more than basic, and is willing to pay for it. Oodle, Vast, and others are trying to make this work -- with limited success thus far. Craigslist can innovate, and it should.
But I can't search for similar sanders in Los Angeles, or even Sacramento, without going to those separate city instances -- and I have to click through the miserable front page (apparently designed as a one-time picker for your home city, and little else) to get to each of those cities. None of the listings have any structure to them -- which means that when there isn't a handy keyword, I have to go through thousands of listings by hand with almost no tools to help me narrow my focus. Aargh! And where are the maps, or at least the easy tools for people to include maps from 3rd party providers? I get about a 50% hit rate on map connections for real estate listings, so something is clearly broken there.
Ironically, I end up doing Craigslist cross-metro searches on Google by default. This Google search for "Supermax sander for sale" returns listings in Boston, Madison, Los Angelss, and San Jose -- all on Craigslist. Is it really that hard for Craigslist to do this? And do they really want this business going to Google by default?
Being free and basic is great. But the world needs something more than basic, and is willing to pay for it. Oodle, Vast, and others are trying to make this work -- with limited success thus far. Craigslist can innovate, and it should.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Demise of the Music Industry: Rookies Competing with Babe Ruth
In a great article today, the Wall Street Journal reported that music (CD) sales are plummeting:
But there's hope -- consumers haven't abandoned music entirely, reports the Journal:
Well, as a guy who has recently gotten back into music after a long hiatus, I can report the not-so-startling fact that while there are a lot of great bands out there, there are very, very few that can possibly compare to the murderer's row of the greatest hits of the past six decades of rock n' roll, and even fewer that can defeat the combined forces of rock, jazz, blues, classical, baroque, and whatever else I've forgotten -- all of which is sitting in my iPod, waiting to be played.
You're a rookie pitcher. You've made the major leagues. Your first game arrives, and you face the following lineup, all in their prime:
Ozzie Smith
Willie Mays
Ted Williams
Hank Aaron
Babe Ruth
Barry Bonds
Lou Gehrig
Joe DiMaggio
George Brett
What are you going to do? Maybe take up cricket. Maybe take up golf.
That's the sort of situation that faces your average rock band today. You write some nice lyrics and some clever hooks, and you get your block knocked off by Arethra Franklin or Frank Sinatra or The King Himself or a goddamn Foreigner greatest hits, and you ask yourself, what's a hard-working musician gotta do to get some sales? If Oasis had been started in the 60s, we'd talk about them like we do the Rolling Stones, or at least Eric Clapton -- but they were 30 years too late, so we forget how great they were for those two awesome albums.
iPods are the problem with new music sales -- there sits 30GB of music, some of which, with normal human diligence I haven't gotten to in a year, and yet shuffle play brings it up in queue to me, and keeps me from buying new stuff, unless that new stuff is so irredeemably awesome that I would kill myself if I didn't.
This doesn't mean that a great band can't carve out a niche for itself. It can play live gigs, it can engage with its fans, it can politic for the starving of Africa, it can do all the things that dead icons can't quite pull off. But primary on the list of things it *can't* do better is move CDs through Wherehouse, which is the problem that the music industry must face.
Some clever person pointed out a few years back that Microsoft's biggest remaining competitor in the OS and desktop application was its own installed base. Hello, music business: Steve Jobs didn't kill you with iTunes, he destroyed you with shuffle play of the vast, awesome archive of your past success.
Babe Ruth wins, rookie. Now whatcha gonna do?
In a dramatic acceleration of the seven-year sales decline that has battered the music industry, compact-disc sales for the first three months of this year plunged 20% from a year earlier, the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music.How bad are we talking? Really bad.
This year has already seen the two lowest-selling No. 1 albums since Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks music sales, was launched in 1991. One week, "American Idol" runner-up Chris Daughtry's rock band sold just 65,000 copies of its chart-topping album; another week, the "Dreamgirls" movie soundtrack sold a mere 60,000. As recently as 2005, there were many weeks when such tallies wouldn't have been enough to crack the top 30 sellers. In prior years, it wasn't uncommon for a No. 1 record to sell 500,000 or 600,000 copies a week.
But there's hope -- consumers haven't abandoned music entirely, reports the Journal:
Apple Inc.'s sale of around 100 million iPods shows that music remains a powerful force in the lives of consumers.What's going on here?
Well, as a guy who has recently gotten back into music after a long hiatus, I can report the not-so-startling fact that while there are a lot of great bands out there, there are very, very few that can possibly compare to the murderer's row of the greatest hits of the past six decades of rock n' roll, and even fewer that can defeat the combined forces of rock, jazz, blues, classical, baroque, and whatever else I've forgotten -- all of which is sitting in my iPod, waiting to be played.
You're a rookie pitcher. You've made the major leagues. Your first game arrives, and you face the following lineup, all in their prime:
Ozzie Smith
Willie Mays
Ted Williams
Hank Aaron
Babe Ruth
Barry Bonds
Lou Gehrig
Joe DiMaggio
George Brett
What are you going to do? Maybe take up cricket. Maybe take up golf.
That's the sort of situation that faces your average rock band today. You write some nice lyrics and some clever hooks, and you get your block knocked off by Arethra Franklin or Frank Sinatra or The King Himself or a goddamn Foreigner greatest hits, and you ask yourself, what's a hard-working musician gotta do to get some sales? If Oasis had been started in the 60s, we'd talk about them like we do the Rolling Stones, or at least Eric Clapton -- but they were 30 years too late, so we forget how great they were for those two awesome albums.
iPods are the problem with new music sales -- there sits 30GB of music, some of which, with normal human diligence I haven't gotten to in a year, and yet shuffle play brings it up in queue to me, and keeps me from buying new stuff, unless that new stuff is so irredeemably awesome that I would kill myself if I didn't.
This doesn't mean that a great band can't carve out a niche for itself. It can play live gigs, it can engage with its fans, it can politic for the starving of Africa, it can do all the things that dead icons can't quite pull off. But primary on the list of things it *can't* do better is move CDs through Wherehouse, which is the problem that the music industry must face.
Some clever person pointed out a few years back that Microsoft's biggest remaining competitor in the OS and desktop application was its own installed base. Hello, music business: Steve Jobs didn't kill you with iTunes, he destroyed you with shuffle play of the vast, awesome archive of your past success.
Babe Ruth wins, rookie. Now whatcha gonna do?
Monday, March 19, 2007
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Political season comes early: I shook Barack Obama's hand
A group of us went to the Barack Obama rally in Oakland yesterday. Jodi, the sister of my college roommate Mark, works on the campaign, so we ended up getting very good seats near the podium. I got a bunch of great pictures which are up on Flickr, and SFGate got a great photo of me and Barack right before I shook his hand:
Click on the photo to see my whole set on Flickr.
I'm still undecided between Hillary and Barack, and I wish a decent Republican candidate would emerge to really push whichever Democratic candidate takes the nomination. It was great to see him speak in person, and hear how he played to a very liberal crowd without pandering. It's going to be an interesting 20 months of politics.
I think that democracy is working better because of the Internet -- six or eight years ago, this sort of posting and communication about candidates simply was not part of normal conversation.
Click on the photo to see my whole set on Flickr.
I'm still undecided between Hillary and Barack, and I wish a decent Republican candidate would emerge to really push whichever Democratic candidate takes the nomination. It was great to see him speak in person, and hear how he played to a very liberal crowd without pandering. It's going to be an interesting 20 months of politics.
I think that democracy is working better because of the Internet -- six or eight years ago, this sort of posting and communication about candidates simply was not part of normal conversation.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Eyetracking study proves men are... men
This is completely sad and completely predictable. Men of the world, be warned -- increasingly sophisticated consumer research technology is exposing just how silly we actually are.
From the Annenberg Online Journalism Review:
From the Annenberg Online Journalism Review:
Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.I'm going to go watch the Discovery Channel now.
Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Where is the Amazon birthday present planner?
This is a billion-dollar idea that I hereby give to Amazon for free. Why? Because they have everything it takes to make it happen, and I want it now.
My sister Meg in Philadelphia has four children -- Connor, Nick, Lucy, and Bea. They're all less than eight years old, and somehow their birthdays seem to show up more than once a year.
But it's not just family members who are multiplying my chances to give. My local friends have all apparently gotten a secret telegraph signal to breed; at our recent ski weekend in Tahoe, there were 13 adults, 7 children under 3, one in the oven, and one on the, er, drawing board. Drawing bed? :-)
That's a lot of presents! Clearly, I need help. Let me make my motive clear. I am not just looking to buy these chillun' any old present out of some misplaced social urge crossed with good old American excess consumption. There are particular gifts that I want to get them -- great books I read as a kid, cool science toys, that sort of stuff. But I'm always frantic and behind the curve when their birthday comes, and the timing of me having a great present idea never seems to correlate with a suitable birthday.
I want the present planner from Amazon.
They've already built most of it. They already have most of my friends' shipping addresses in their system, a legacy of gifts past. They have a huge catalog of stuff. All they need to do is allow me to enter the name and birthday of the kids at each address, and create a special shopping cart / present pool that I can throw stuff into at any time during the year. Then, either prompted or un-prompted, they mail an appropriate, pre-chosen gift out a week in advance, gift-wrapped from Unka Ethan.
It's yet another instance of ERP for people.
That's version 1.0.
Version 2.0 is for the harried person who really doesn't know what to get his nephew. For this to work, Amazon only needs to collect one additional piece of information -- the age of each kid. Then, they will begin to learn what 5 year olds in zip code 44691 are getting for their birthdays. At scale, they can use this to make awesome recommendations -- "here's what her friends are getting from their uncles."
I can't believe this hasn't been done yet. It's a logical explosion of the PIM into verticals. Amazon already stores task-specific address book information, and it should start providing task-specific calendaring as well.
Heck, they should provide an Outlook upload feature -- I'd add a bunch of people to their address pool if they built this.
I can't wait. Please hurry, Amazon. Make yourselves a billion dollars.
My sister Meg in Philadelphia has four children -- Connor, Nick, Lucy, and Bea. They're all less than eight years old, and somehow their birthdays seem to show up more than once a year.
But it's not just family members who are multiplying my chances to give. My local friends have all apparently gotten a secret telegraph signal to breed; at our recent ski weekend in Tahoe, there were 13 adults, 7 children under 3, one in the oven, and one on the, er, drawing board. Drawing bed? :-)
That's a lot of presents! Clearly, I need help. Let me make my motive clear. I am not just looking to buy these chillun' any old present out of some misplaced social urge crossed with good old American excess consumption. There are particular gifts that I want to get them -- great books I read as a kid, cool science toys, that sort of stuff. But I'm always frantic and behind the curve when their birthday comes, and the timing of me having a great present idea never seems to correlate with a suitable birthday.
I want the present planner from Amazon.
They've already built most of it. They already have most of my friends' shipping addresses in their system, a legacy of gifts past. They have a huge catalog of stuff. All they need to do is allow me to enter the name and birthday of the kids at each address, and create a special shopping cart / present pool that I can throw stuff into at any time during the year. Then, either prompted or un-prompted, they mail an appropriate, pre-chosen gift out a week in advance, gift-wrapped from Unka Ethan.
It's yet another instance of ERP for people.
That's version 1.0.
Version 2.0 is for the harried person who really doesn't know what to get his nephew. For this to work, Amazon only needs to collect one additional piece of information -- the age of each kid. Then, they will begin to learn what 5 year olds in zip code 44691 are getting for their birthdays. At scale, they can use this to make awesome recommendations -- "here's what her friends are getting from their uncles."
I can't believe this hasn't been done yet. It's a logical explosion of the PIM into verticals. Amazon already stores task-specific address book information, and it should start providing task-specific calendaring as well.
Heck, they should provide an Outlook upload feature -- I'd add a bunch of people to their address pool if they built this.
I can't wait. Please hurry, Amazon. Make yourselves a billion dollars.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Comments still not working - Help!
So I'm still not seeing comments. Here are my current comment settings on Blogger:
I can't figure out what should be different. If you have any ideas, please click through to Flickr and leave comments there -- they seem to have commenting figured out!!
I can't figure out what should be different. If you have any ideas, please click through to Flickr and leave comments there -- they seem to have commenting figured out!!
Personal Information: Beware the search session
The New York Times has an article on a new service, StolenIDSearch.com, sponsored by TrustedID. You can search for your social security or credit card numbers to see if they're already floating about the Internet:
A problem with the modern world is that databases are everywhere, forever, and creating an a-->b-->c-->d linkage when you've got highly distinct key values (like these ID numbers) is just way too easy. Even with the best will in the world toward TrustedID, I don't think I'll hand them that particular linkage on a whim and implicit trust of the NYTimes.
This same fact is, of course, at least half the reason the modern world works so well -- but it's important that we're all aware that the downside has teeth, too.
As an aside -- this demonstrates the continuing value of journalistic trust. If I'd read that article on RandomInternetNewsSite, I wouldn't have clicked through and entered my SSN at all. I assume the Times has checked these guys out, and that they're fairly legit.
Of course, I assumed that the Times had checked out Dick Cheney and WMDs in Iraq, too :-(
I went there and typed in my SSN -- according to them, it hasn't been hacked. I was going to type in my credit card number for a similar check, when I stopped and thought, "they have a search session ID on me -- and if I type that number in now, they'll have associated that CC number with that SSN. This is Not A Good Thing."TrustedID, a company that sells services to consumers to give them more control over who sees their credit reports, has compiled a database of compromised numbers that could already be traded or sold on the Internet.
It has created an online search tool, StolenIDSearch.com, where people can check at no cost to see if their number is one that is in a too-public domain.
TrustedID said that about 220,000 people have tested their numbers in the three weeks since the site has been open to the public.
The Social Security number remains the personal identifier not only for government documents, but for credit applications and medical records, as well as video and cellphone stores.
A problem with the modern world is that databases are everywhere, forever, and creating an a-->b-->c-->d linkage when you've got highly distinct key values (like these ID numbers) is just way too easy. Even with the best will in the world toward TrustedID, I don't think I'll hand them that particular linkage on a whim and implicit trust of the NYTimes.
This same fact is, of course, at least half the reason the modern world works so well -- but it's important that we're all aware that the downside has teeth, too.
As an aside -- this demonstrates the continuing value of journalistic trust. If I'd read that article on RandomInternetNewsSite, I wouldn't have clicked through and entered my SSN at all. I assume the Times has checked these guys out, and that they're fairly legit.
Of course, I assumed that the Times had checked out Dick Cheney and WMDs in Iraq, too :-(
Please comment!
Zoli has been nudging me to turn on comments. I finally (with his input) figured out how. Yes, I do run a software company, and yes, *your* user interface is probably more obscure than you realize.
This is a test to see of comments show up. Thanks, Zoli!
This is a test to see of comments show up. Thanks, Zoli!
But Fred, maybe you *belong* on top of the Google charts...
Fred Wilson is perturbed that he's got Google Juice.
* He posts about music often.
* His posts are very timely - many of them are about pre-release albums, release parties, and real breaking news.
* He posts widely -- gems from the archive, brand-new stuff, top-10 lists.
* He has a theme - I'd call it "classic rock meets new music."
* And he posts about the range of musical activities -- listening to albums, going to concerts, playing Guitar Hero, analyzing Last FM and Pandora, etc.
I recently decided that I needed to stop being passive and out of touch about music, and Fred was one of a few key sources that I used to seed my search -- I also talked to a couple friends, and then took their recommendations and fed them into Amazon, Last FM, and a few other good sources of "related stuff." I've bought about 20 CDs in the past month, and am really happy with all these new tunes.
"Someone I trust enough to buy CDs based on their recommendation" is exactly who should be at the top of a Google search, I think. And the band itself doesn't qualify.
So enjoy your Google juice, Fred. You've earned it.
"I got 36 visits (about 1% of all my visits yesterday) from searches on "we were dead before the ship even sank". That's a lot of words to write in a Google search so those people were clearly looking for the new modest mouse record of the same name...The implication of Fred's post is that there's something wrong with a system that puts him ahead of Amazon, and ahead of the band he's writing about. I disagree. From my perspective, Fred is a perfect example of a highly authoritative source on music.
...Number one is Wikipedia, the owner of more Google Juice than any other website in the world. Number two is this blog. Amazon gets the third spot... Modest Mouse's own website barely made the first page.
...Google Juice is not a perfect system by a long shot. Everytime I see this effect and I see it a lot, I think... there's a lot more headroom in search."
* He posts about music often.
* His posts are very timely - many of them are about pre-release albums, release parties, and real breaking news.
* He posts widely -- gems from the archive, brand-new stuff, top-10 lists.
* He has a theme - I'd call it "classic rock meets new music."
* And he posts about the range of musical activities -- listening to albums, going to concerts, playing Guitar Hero, analyzing Last FM and Pandora, etc.
I recently decided that I needed to stop being passive and out of touch about music, and Fred was one of a few key sources that I used to seed my search -- I also talked to a couple friends, and then took their recommendations and fed them into Amazon, Last FM, and a few other good sources of "related stuff." I've bought about 20 CDs in the past month, and am really happy with all these new tunes.
"Someone I trust enough to buy CDs based on their recommendation" is exactly who should be at the top of a Google search, I think. And the band itself doesn't qualify.
So enjoy your Google juice, Fred. You've earned it.
Friday, February 16, 2007
The empowerment of open-source innovation
Smaller. Cheaper. Lighter. More effective. Opens new vistas of usage, allowing people formerly reliant on expensive, centralized solutions to express themselves more freely.
The PC?
The cell phone?
Browser-based apps?
Nope. IEDs.
Andrew Cockburn has a nice piece in the LA Times about "explosively formed penetrators," the subject of much dinosauric rhetoric from our Dear Leader.
The punchline:
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld...bequeathed the Army the Future Combat Systems, a $168-billion extravaganza of computers, sensors and robots... Rumsfeld's mentor, defense intellectual Andrew Marshall, marketed the phrase "revolution in military affairs" as a justification for high-tech programs such as Future Combat Systems. But those copper disks [of EFP IEDs] represent the real revolution in military affairs, and it is not in our favor.
Are you a startup guy? Open source stack? Commodity servers? VOIP provider? Sneer at the old, the slow, the walnut-brained, who you're rapidly replacing with your clever new widget?
News flash: the nation-state you rely upon for the stability, social mobility, and capital that makes your life possible is fighting people just like you. And those people are winning.
I see the Bat Signal in the sky. After we make sure that we're the good guys, how are we going to help the good guys win?
The PC?
The cell phone?
Browser-based apps?
Nope. IEDs.
Andrew Cockburn has a nice piece in the LA Times about "explosively formed penetrators," the subject of much dinosauric rhetoric from our Dear Leader.
The punchline:
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld...bequeathed the Army the Future Combat Systems, a $168-billion extravaganza of computers, sensors and robots... Rumsfeld's mentor, defense intellectual Andrew Marshall, marketed the phrase "revolution in military affairs" as a justification for high-tech programs such as Future Combat Systems. But those copper disks [of EFP IEDs] represent the real revolution in military affairs, and it is not in our favor.
Are you a startup guy? Open source stack? Commodity servers? VOIP provider? Sneer at the old, the slow, the walnut-brained, who you're rapidly replacing with your clever new widget?
News flash: the nation-state you rely upon for the stability, social mobility, and capital that makes your life possible is fighting people just like you. And those people are winning.
I see the Bat Signal in the sky. After we make sure that we're the good guys, how are we going to help the good guys win?
Monday, February 12, 2007
PowerSchwag from PowerSet
I went to the PowerSet funding party on Saturday. It was the best party I can remember since that Scient/Viant guy flew in a 747 full of flowers, rented out Treasure Island, and shot off fireworks in February 2000. I was having a housewarming party in the Berkeley hills that same evening, and we got a great aerial lights show for free.
Click the photo for schwag commentary. Here was the haul:
By far the most memorable event was one of their investors (Peter Thiel?) reading a lengthy poem about the history of search - which was surprisingly inclusive, mentioning Altavista, Inktomi, Excite, Yahoo, Ask, etc. Lots of mockery of the dropped ball of Yahoo and the failed NLP promise of Ask; and the punch line to the whole thing, which I am doing no poetic justice to whatsoever, was something like,
"We'll know we've succeeded when Google's best guess,
will be to say I don't know, so go ask PowerSet."
I'm assuming that their codebase will be better than their rhymes.
Mike Arrington posted and linked to some video, and for more flava, I am sure there are tons of action shots on Flickr.
Click the photo for schwag commentary. Here was the haul:
By far the most memorable event was one of their investors (Peter Thiel?) reading a lengthy poem about the history of search - which was surprisingly inclusive, mentioning Altavista, Inktomi, Excite, Yahoo, Ask, etc. Lots of mockery of the dropped ball of Yahoo and the failed NLP promise of Ask; and the punch line to the whole thing, which I am doing no poetic justice to whatsoever, was something like,
"We'll know we've succeeded when Google's best guess,
will be to say I don't know, so go ask PowerSet."
I'm assuming that their codebase will be better than their rhymes.
Mike Arrington posted and linked to some video, and for more flava, I am sure there are tons of action shots on Flickr.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
A shout-out to Marc Canter
Marc dropped an "emotional outburst" (his words) on the blogosphere last night, after Om Malik wrote a post on white-label social networks that didn't mention Marc's company PeopleAggregator.
The first person I ever heard say "social networks are a feature, not a product" is Paul Martino, who brought Marc in to advise Tribe Networks back when the whole world temporarily didn't care about the Internet. Marc has been thinking and building this stuff for years, and not only is he defining the white-label social network space, he's been an essential thinker for me and plenty of other entrepreneurs with his concept of "digital life aggregators" combined with vertical web services. Vertical web services like, ah, events.
Thanks, Marc. Keep leading the charge. And occasionally wearing your heart on your sleeve is way OK with me.
The first person I ever heard say "social networks are a feature, not a product" is Paul Martino, who brought Marc in to advise Tribe Networks back when the whole world temporarily didn't care about the Internet. Marc has been thinking and building this stuff for years, and not only is he defining the white-label social network space, he's been an essential thinker for me and plenty of other entrepreneurs with his concept of "digital life aggregators" combined with vertical web services. Vertical web services like, ah, events.
Thanks, Marc. Keep leading the charge. And occasionally wearing your heart on your sleeve is way OK with me.
Friday, January 26, 2007
The bad guys are hackers, too
The world has reached a certain fascinating state when the New York Times, the gray lady herself, writes a bemused and almost laudatory article (no, wait, it's a blog post!!) about a pseudonymous hacker who's broken the content industry's latest quixotic attempt at copy protection. I can think of no better proof that the hacker culture of freedom has deeply affected our modern culture.
Unfortunately, a lot of innovation is done by bad guys, too. Spam, phishing, and box cutters + airliners = -skyscrapers are all great examples of brilliant hacks, and they've made our lives measurably worse. The latest example comes from John Robb -- apparently some guerilla hacker has figured out how to block GPS signals with readily available, cheap tech. This does not bode well for the maintenance of structure and order that is so important for the fragile capitalist economy.
Every time you celebrate innovation, the open-source spirit, and radical change, ask yourself, "do I disproportionately benefit from the status quo, and am I at risk?" Much more often than you realize, the answer is yes.
Unfortunately, a lot of innovation is done by bad guys, too. Spam, phishing, and box cutters + airliners = -skyscrapers are all great examples of brilliant hacks, and they've made our lives measurably worse. The latest example comes from John Robb -- apparently some guerilla hacker has figured out how to block GPS signals with readily available, cheap tech. This does not bode well for the maintenance of structure and order that is so important for the fragile capitalist economy.
Every time you celebrate innovation, the open-source spirit, and radical change, ask yourself, "do I disproportionately benefit from the status quo, and am I at risk?" Much more often than you realize, the answer is yes.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
The second most sincere form of flattery...
...is a Google ad against your name.
Zvents says thanks, guys.
Some other names you might consider buying ads against:
Denver Post
Boston.com
San Jose Mercury News
Freedom Communications
Zvents says thanks, guys.
Some other names you might consider buying ads against:
Denver Post
Boston.com
San Jose Mercury News
Freedom Communications
Monday, January 22, 2007
Coming Soon: The American Democratic Revolution
From today's New York Times:
Needless to say, if you've paid a fixed sum for something from which you can derive variable income, your motivation is to squeeze every last nickel from your franchise.
Needless to say, this can be hard on the populace, when your authority is backed up by the state.
And pointedly, fermiers were among the significant causes of the revolt that became the French Revolution, and many of them ended up under the guillotine.
Lotteries are demonstrably a disproportionate tax on the less-well-educated, less-well-off members of society. That they are voluntary is no excuse. State involvement in gambling has always been papered over with false moral rebates like "it will be used for education" or other nonsense.
Now, Illinois is skipping past all the fake morality, and simply grabbing cash to pay its operating deficit while casually mortgaging its residents' future expenses.
It terrifies me that every possible measure of indebtedness in this country is rising, while every possible future income is being packaged and peddled. After we're done mortgaging our last remaining free cash flows and fully selling our souls to the false twin gods of excess consumption and no new taxes, maybe it will be time, again, for the American Democratic Revolution.
Illinois Is Putting Lottery on Block for Quick PayoffThe first thing that sprang to my mind was the pre-Revolutionary practice in France of the Fermiers. According to this convenient website, "The fermiérs paid a fixed sum of money every year to the King. It was then their responsibility to collect the taxes for their region - taxes on the tobacco, the salt, the materials that come and go from each city."
The state of Illinois yesterday took the first steps in selling its state lottery system, hoping to attract as much as $10 billion from investors who, in return, would own a monopoly that could turn out to be the biggest jackpot yet.
Needless to say, if you've paid a fixed sum for something from which you can derive variable income, your motivation is to squeeze every last nickel from your franchise.
Needless to say, this can be hard on the populace, when your authority is backed up by the state.
And pointedly, fermiers were among the significant causes of the revolt that became the French Revolution, and many of them ended up under the guillotine.
Lotteries are demonstrably a disproportionate tax on the less-well-educated, less-well-off members of society. That they are voluntary is no excuse. State involvement in gambling has always been papered over with false moral rebates like "it will be used for education" or other nonsense.
Now, Illinois is skipping past all the fake morality, and simply grabbing cash to pay its operating deficit while casually mortgaging its residents' future expenses.
It terrifies me that every possible measure of indebtedness in this country is rising, while every possible future income is being packaged and peddled. After we're done mortgaging our last remaining free cash flows and fully selling our souls to the false twin gods of excess consumption and no new taxes, maybe it will be time, again, for the American Democratic Revolution.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Owning local search results - and avoiding the "Google back button tax"
Don Dodge has a great post on the big gap in local -- newspapers, yellow pages, and the big search portals have thus far all failed to own local search results. I think that Don is right that papers need to do a much better job of exposing (largely through SEO) their content to the major engines; but they have an equally important task, which is to retain the user through value once the user arrives at their sites, by offering them parallel navigation, related content, useful search tools, and appealing options to explore and expand on the initial query that brought them to the site.
While papers have to live in a world that starts with Google first, they have to maximize their value in that world -- which means attempting to avoid the "Google back button tax" of the user clicking back to Google after every search that lands them on a newspaper content page, to give Google first crack at the targeted ad dollars on each subsequent search.
This requires serious product thinking, user testing, and technology on behalf of newspapers and other local content owners. It will hopefully surprise no one that Zvents, my company, is heavily engaged in all three. We're going to be at the NAA conference in Las Vegas, and I'd be delighted to speak with papers about how they can not just compete, but win, in the local search market.
While papers have to live in a world that starts with Google first, they have to maximize their value in that world -- which means attempting to avoid the "Google back button tax" of the user clicking back to Google after every search that lands them on a newspaper content page, to give Google first crack at the targeted ad dollars on each subsequent search.
This requires serious product thinking, user testing, and technology on behalf of newspapers and other local content owners. It will hopefully surprise no one that Zvents, my company, is heavily engaged in all three. We're going to be at the NAA conference in Las Vegas, and I'd be delighted to speak with papers about how they can not just compete, but win, in the local search market.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Calling YouTube: Michael Oher
I've just finished reading Michael Lewis' excellent new book The Blind Side, which details the evolution of the left tackle position in the NFL, and traces the extraordinary personal story of a gifted young left tackle, Michael Oher. The book begins with the tale of a grainy videotape of an extraordinary block by Oher being sent to a national football scout, and the book describes many other such plays during his high school senior year. But there's nothing on YouTube for Oher. Why hasn't someone posted this? Why hasn't Michael Lewis posted this?
I've gone from never having heard of the guy, to wanting to watch a 5-minute highlight reel. Isn't this what the user-created, on-demand economy is about?
Maybe I'm just kidding myself -- or maybe I'm just years ahead of the "extended conversation" that I envision emerging around all media. Oher is supposedly a latter-day Orlando Pace, the fantastic Ohio State player and current NFL all-star, whose amazing play from the mid-90s helped Eddie George win the Heisman. There's nothing on YouTube under "Orlando Pace" either.
I dug around and (apparently) found some Oher video -- but I have to subscribe to a prep football scouting site to view it.
How Web 1.0.
I've gone from never having heard of the guy, to wanting to watch a 5-minute highlight reel. Isn't this what the user-created, on-demand economy is about?
Maybe I'm just kidding myself -- or maybe I'm just years ahead of the "extended conversation" that I envision emerging around all media. Oher is supposedly a latter-day Orlando Pace, the fantastic Ohio State player and current NFL all-star, whose amazing play from the mid-90s helped Eddie George win the Heisman. There's nothing on YouTube under "Orlando Pace" either.
I dug around and (apparently) found some Oher video -- but I have to subscribe to a prep football scouting site to view it.
How Web 1.0.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Google is not evil. But what are the rules?
Well, it seems that I've put my name right in the middle of the latest Silicon Valley tempest in a teapot. I'm right there, in the un-deleted comments on the original post, full name in view. Just to be clear, since three points [3] can be construed to make a curve, I don't think Google is evil. I actually think Google is full of smart, sincere people trying really hard to create the future, and breaking a few eggs while making their omelettes. What really worries me is that the future is full of unintended consequences, and none of us have fully thought those consequences through.
On the one hand, all of us users of hosted software are trusting -- implicitly and absolutely -- that we won't be wrecked by the removal of that software. How many people trust their personal lives and/or their businesses to Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail? Hundreds of millions. How many people trust their businesses to Salesforce, SocialText, JotSpot, or JigSaw? Tens of thousands. In the very near future, how many independent producers and actors will trust YouTube to bring them their daily bread? This doesn't even begin to touch on blog platforms, eBay, and Second Life.
Leaving aside all the basic issues -- terrorists, power failures, hackers; your basic Bruce Schneier territory -- there is a huge, dark continent of social mores and best practices around this emerging reality that has yet to be explored or mapped. Much of common case law, as painfully built up over the past several centuries, deals with the delicate ways that property rights can be ascertained in various bizarre situations. Aside from the occasional Congressional meat cleaver, we have no such body of thought or practice built up in this new new world. What is the right answer to Kevin and JotSpot, to downtime by YouTube or PayPal, to the downtime that some Zvents customer may well suffer sometime in the future? How should we guard ourselves against this in advance, defend ourselves against it in the present, and adjudicate around it in the past? I don't know. It worries me that no one is talking about this issue. Where is the council of SaaS? The W3C for ASP? If we're going to build this future, in all its wild entrepreneurial frenzy, someone has to lay out a few ground rules, so that the market can do its magic.
Who will lead? And how can I help?
On the one hand, all of us users of hosted software are trusting -- implicitly and absolutely -- that we won't be wrecked by the removal of that software. How many people trust their personal lives and/or their businesses to Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail? Hundreds of millions. How many people trust their businesses to Salesforce, SocialText, JotSpot, or JigSaw? Tens of thousands. In the very near future, how many independent producers and actors will trust YouTube to bring them their daily bread? This doesn't even begin to touch on blog platforms, eBay, and Second Life.
Leaving aside all the basic issues -- terrorists, power failures, hackers; your basic Bruce Schneier territory -- there is a huge, dark continent of social mores and best practices around this emerging reality that has yet to be explored or mapped. Much of common case law, as painfully built up over the past several centuries, deals with the delicate ways that property rights can be ascertained in various bizarre situations. Aside from the occasional Congressional meat cleaver, we have no such body of thought or practice built up in this new new world. What is the right answer to Kevin and JotSpot, to downtime by YouTube or PayPal, to the downtime that some Zvents customer may well suffer sometime in the future? How should we guard ourselves against this in advance, defend ourselves against it in the present, and adjudicate around it in the past? I don't know. It worries me that no one is talking about this issue. Where is the council of SaaS? The W3C for ASP? If we're going to build this future, in all its wild entrepreneurial frenzy, someone has to lay out a few ground rules, so that the market can do its magic.
Who will lead? And how can I help?
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Was YouTube downtime scheduled?
YouTube has been down for about 24 hours now:
I don't exactly hang out there, but I wasn't aware this was scheduled. That's a very long downtime, and I haven't seen any commentary -- was it unexpected?
Expected or not, it raises an interesting point about the new distributed badge/widget ecosystem emerging on the web. It's not just enough to fail gracefully at your main URL -- you have to fail gracefully in the thousands, or millions of places where your functionality has been spread. How many websites would be affected if Adsense went down, and would they all fail gracefully? Would "Adsense is down, sorry" appear everywhere? Or just blank holes? I first became aware of YouTube's burp when a friend told me that there was no video at a link I'd forwarded -- the page was just blank.
I don't exactly hang out there, but I wasn't aware this was scheduled. That's a very long downtime, and I haven't seen any commentary -- was it unexpected?
Expected or not, it raises an interesting point about the new distributed badge/widget ecosystem emerging on the web. It's not just enough to fail gracefully at your main URL -- you have to fail gracefully in the thousands, or millions of places where your functionality has been spread. How many websites would be affected if Adsense went down, and would they all fail gracefully? Would "Adsense is down, sorry" appear everywhere? Or just blank holes? I first became aware of YouTube's burp when a friend told me that there was no video at a link I'd forwarded -- the page was just blank.
What would I do with a newspaper? Fix it!
Kevin Maney at USA Today apparently was wandering around the Web 2.0 conference talking to Silicon Valley folks about how to fix newspapers. I wish we'd had a chance to talk, since Zvents is partnering with major newspapers to reinvent local media.
First let's examine the problem. Newspapers have no online pageviews. That means that they can't make any money online, and their offline revenue-generating ability is cratering. What's a useful measure of online vs. offline? How about physical print pages (one sheet of paper in one newspaper) vs. one online pageview? Here are 10 major papers compared:
Now keep in mind that an online pageview in no way compares to an offline page. An offline page has perhaps 3 articles and some big ads; an online pageview is perhaps 1/3 of an article and some small ads. Add in a "like to like" impact/influence factor of 10X, and you've got the leading online papers (NYTimes) in the 5% range of replacing their offline traffic, and others (Tribune) at less than 1% of where they need to be. Maybe that's why Tribune is for sale, while the NYTimes is making smart web acquisitions like About.com?
So how do you get traffic up? The best answer is, "build a compelling product that people want to use." Here I am flabbergasted that Maney's techie interviewees totally missed the boat. He writes, "No one, for instance, proposed that newspaper websites, which generally look more crowded than a Mumbai flea market, pare down to a single, clean Google-esque local search box."
OK, Kevin, I'll bite: The navigation and presentation metaphor of newspaper websites is totally broken, and it's a big reason why their products don't get enough usage. There are dozens of subtle clues in a physical paper that tell you that there's lots inside -- the size and heft, the number of pages, the fact that your periperhal vision is picking up page 3 while you're reading page 2, the fact that the sports section falls out when you pick up the front section. None of these clues exist in a website, and thousands of great pieces of editorial content posted on newspaper sites get a fraction of the traffic they'd see if *anyone could find them*. This doesn't just mean Google-like active search -- it means passive discovery mechanisms like Memeorandum or Google News (which already drives about 30% of total newspaper pageviews -- yes, you read that right!) and it also means "sidways navigation" mechanisms like Aggregate Knowledge. Solving this problem is crucial to the future of newspapers online.
And then there's the content. Newspapers have created their content to match the physical and economic constraints on their business. The length, detail, and volume of news stories they create -- and their focus on text first, pictures second, audio and video never -- are deeply driven by their dead tree tradition. Even more importantly, their emphasis on data and the long tail has been very curtailed by their inability to publish a phone book every day. Zvents focuses on events, where newspapers cover perhaps 2% of what's actually going on in a metro area -- but there are dozens, hundreds, of other areas where newspapers have been forced by past realities to curtail the breadth and depth of their coverage. All those constraints have been blown away, and suddenly the entire shape and structure of their news-gathering, sorting, polishing, and dissemination has to change.
I haven't even touched the advertising side. That's food for another post.
There's a lot more... but that's a primer on how I'd fix newspapers. To find out more about how my company, Zvents, can help newspapers in this transition process, visit our site.
First let's examine the problem. Newspapers have no online pageviews. That means that they can't make any money online, and their offline revenue-generating ability is cratering. What's a useful measure of online vs. offline? How about physical print pages (one sheet of paper in one newspaper) vs. one online pageview? Here are 10 major papers compared:
Now keep in mind that an online pageview in no way compares to an offline page. An offline page has perhaps 3 articles and some big ads; an online pageview is perhaps 1/3 of an article and some small ads. Add in a "like to like" impact/influence factor of 10X, and you've got the leading online papers (NYTimes) in the 5% range of replacing their offline traffic, and others (Tribune) at less than 1% of where they need to be. Maybe that's why Tribune is for sale, while the NYTimes is making smart web acquisitions like About.com?
So how do you get traffic up? The best answer is, "build a compelling product that people want to use." Here I am flabbergasted that Maney's techie interviewees totally missed the boat. He writes, "No one, for instance, proposed that newspaper websites, which generally look more crowded than a Mumbai flea market, pare down to a single, clean Google-esque local search box."
OK, Kevin, I'll bite: The navigation and presentation metaphor of newspaper websites is totally broken, and it's a big reason why their products don't get enough usage. There are dozens of subtle clues in a physical paper that tell you that there's lots inside -- the size and heft, the number of pages, the fact that your periperhal vision is picking up page 3 while you're reading page 2, the fact that the sports section falls out when you pick up the front section. None of these clues exist in a website, and thousands of great pieces of editorial content posted on newspaper sites get a fraction of the traffic they'd see if *anyone could find them*. This doesn't just mean Google-like active search -- it means passive discovery mechanisms like Memeorandum or Google News (which already drives about 30% of total newspaper pageviews -- yes, you read that right!) and it also means "sidways navigation" mechanisms like Aggregate Knowledge. Solving this problem is crucial to the future of newspapers online.
And then there's the content. Newspapers have created their content to match the physical and economic constraints on their business. The length, detail, and volume of news stories they create -- and their focus on text first, pictures second, audio and video never -- are deeply driven by their dead tree tradition. Even more importantly, their emphasis on data and the long tail has been very curtailed by their inability to publish a phone book every day. Zvents focuses on events, where newspapers cover perhaps 2% of what's actually going on in a metro area -- but there are dozens, hundreds, of other areas where newspapers have been forced by past realities to curtail the breadth and depth of their coverage. All those constraints have been blown away, and suddenly the entire shape and structure of their news-gathering, sorting, polishing, and dissemination has to change.
I haven't even touched the advertising side. That's food for another post.
There's a lot more... but that's a primer on how I'd fix newspapers. To find out more about how my company, Zvents, can help newspapers in this transition process, visit our site.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Andy Sack: Reality a Luxury Good
Andy Sack is CEO of Judy's Book and a blogger whom I read regularly. He recently posted some thoughts about sending and receiving physical notes in this digital age that fit nicely with my previous post about reality being a luxury good -- though in this case, the reality is not presence at a physical event, but delivery of a physical good (the note).
I am reminded of Neal Stephenson's superb second novel The Diamond Age, where in the futuristic neo-Victorian Hong Kong community, the same news is delivered electronically to most people, and in hand-printed, hand-delivered newspaper form to the very wealthy few.
I am reminded of Neal Stephenson's superb second novel The Diamond Age, where in the futuristic neo-Victorian Hong Kong community, the same news is delivered electronically to most people, and in hand-printed, hand-delivered newspaper form to the very wealthy few.
Friday, November 17, 2006
Reality is becoming a luxury good
My personal definition of luxury goods is that they are exclusionary -- if one person owns them, then another person can't. Original works of art. Wineries in Napa. Antique Ferraris. Houses in Atherton. All exclusionary goods.
I was chatting with Brian Smith this morning about Second Life -- and it hit me that a lot of what goes on in Second Life is people expressing very human creative urges in virtual reality, because doing so in reality is (often) too expensive. In Second life, you can build a house, an orchard, furniture, a boat... owning the land and the machinery and taking the time to do all that in reality is simply beyond the means of most people.
I don't spend any time in 2nd life, because in real life I'm building a company, and I have a 2-car garage full of woodworking machinery which I use to make furniture, in my very limited time. I've also been working to create a citrus orchard on our patio. If I lived in an apartment in San Francisco, I wouldn't be able to do that last 2; and anywhere but Silicon Valley, the first would be vastly more difficult. Luxuries all. Exclusion runs on a personal timelie as well -- I have spent several decades of my life learning how to work in wood, and time is the ultimate exclusionary good. My ability to build furniture is inversely correlated to my ability to play the piano, hit a fastball, or any of a number of other ways I might have invested large slices of my life.
Tonight at 11:30pm, I am flying to Columbus, Ohio to watch the latest iteration of the awesome Ohio State - Michigan football rivalry. Thanks to my ex-OSU faculty father, my brother Ben and I have tickets at face value(score!), but I'm still spending 48 hours and nearly a thousand dollars to be at the game. Meanwhile, 500,000 people voted in an ESPN poll on who will win the game, and millions will watch it on television.
Reality is luxury, indeed.
Oh, and Ohio State wins, 16-9.
I was chatting with Brian Smith this morning about Second Life -- and it hit me that a lot of what goes on in Second Life is people expressing very human creative urges in virtual reality, because doing so in reality is (often) too expensive. In Second life, you can build a house, an orchard, furniture, a boat... owning the land and the machinery and taking the time to do all that in reality is simply beyond the means of most people.
I don't spend any time in 2nd life, because in real life I'm building a company, and I have a 2-car garage full of woodworking machinery which I use to make furniture, in my very limited time. I've also been working to create a citrus orchard on our patio. If I lived in an apartment in San Francisco, I wouldn't be able to do that last 2; and anywhere but Silicon Valley, the first would be vastly more difficult. Luxuries all. Exclusion runs on a personal timelie as well -- I have spent several decades of my life learning how to work in wood, and time is the ultimate exclusionary good. My ability to build furniture is inversely correlated to my ability to play the piano, hit a fastball, or any of a number of other ways I might have invested large slices of my life.
Tonight at 11:30pm, I am flying to Columbus, Ohio to watch the latest iteration of the awesome Ohio State - Michigan football rivalry. Thanks to my ex-OSU faculty father, my brother Ben and I have tickets at face value(score!), but I'm still spending 48 hours and nearly a thousand dollars to be at the game. Meanwhile, 500,000 people voted in an ESPN poll on who will win the game, and millions will watch it on television.
Reality is luxury, indeed.
Oh, and Ohio State wins, 16-9.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Google launches event search
Tyler noticed a "search public events" button in his Google calendar this morning, and now the official Google blog has a post about the launch.
As noted on GigaOm in their discussion of Google's announcement, my company Zvents announced a $7m funding round last week for our local events search product.
Event search is a great market. Welcome, guys.
-- Ethan
As noted on GigaOm in their discussion of Google's announcement, my company Zvents announced a $7m funding round last week for our local events search product.
Event search is a great market. Welcome, guys.
-- Ethan
Friday, November 10, 2006
Memo to Job Seekers Everywhere (PS to Entrepreneurs!)
Since our recent funding announcement at Zvents, we have been flooded with job applications. Thank you, and those of you who fit our current needs will be hearing back from us soon. This flood has inspired me to write down something I figured out during my own job-applying days:
When you send your resume to a company in MSWord format, the title of the document should NOT be "Resume.doc". I understand that in your own personal PC world, utterly centered around you, "Resume" is a self-obvious description. But in MY inbox, resumes folder, etc., it utterly fails to differentiate you. Call it MyNameResume.doc. Or better yet, MyNameResumeMonthYear.doc. Since this naming issue is a complete failure to think from the perspective of your "customer", I view marketing applicants that make this mistake with a particularly high level of dubiousness.
PS to Entrepreneurs: Exactly the same is true of your pitch deck. I *know* that VCPitch.ppt makes sense to you. Do you think it helps Mike Moritz tell your file from the 300 other ones on his laptop?
When you send your resume to a company in MSWord format, the title of the document should NOT be "Resume.doc". I understand that in your own personal PC world, utterly centered around you, "Resume" is a self-obvious description. But in MY inbox, resumes folder, etc., it utterly fails to differentiate you. Call it MyNameResume.doc. Or better yet, MyNameResumeMonthYear.doc. Since this naming issue is a complete failure to think from the perspective of your "customer", I view marketing applicants that make this mistake with a particularly high level of dubiousness.
PS to Entrepreneurs: Exactly the same is true of your pitch deck. I *know* that VCPitch.ppt makes sense to you. Do you think it helps Mike Moritz tell your file from the 300 other ones on his laptop?
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Dilbert's Creator is a Brain Surgeon
I read this amazing story about Scott Adams tinkering with his own brain, and all I can say is, the number of things we know about our minds is a tiny fraction of what we have yet to discover.
Fantastic. Hat tip, Evan Williams.
Fantastic. Hat tip, Evan Williams.
Monday, October 02, 2006
Matt Marshall on PowerSet: "Search has largely been solved"
Matt Marshall writes in VentureBeat on stealth search startup PowerSet:
"As much as some people want to deny it, search has largely been solved by Google and others, at least for the average person."
Matt, I hope for your sake that this quote doesn't become one of those "everything has been invented" c. 1895 or "the world needs three computers" c. 1950 kind of quotes. Today's search is miraculous by the standards of what's come before, and disastrous by the standards of what is yet to be done. Search has a tremendous distance yet to travel, and as I have written prevously, there are several distinct lines of search innovation that each will yield great consumer benefits. My company, Zvents, falls into category #1; PowerSet falls into category #3.
Barney is a friend of mine and I have known about PowerSet for quite some time, so I'll refrain from commenting on them other than to say they are very smart, very serious, and will either succeed or fail in an interesting and spectacular way.
"As much as some people want to deny it, search has largely been solved by Google and others, at least for the average person."
Matt, I hope for your sake that this quote doesn't become one of those "everything has been invented" c. 1895 or "the world needs three computers" c. 1950 kind of quotes. Today's search is miraculous by the standards of what's come before, and disastrous by the standards of what is yet to be done. Search has a tremendous distance yet to travel, and as I have written prevously, there are several distinct lines of search innovation that each will yield great consumer benefits. My company, Zvents, falls into category #1; PowerSet falls into category #3.
Barney is a friend of mine and I have known about PowerSet for quite some time, so I'll refrain from commenting on them other than to say they are very smart, very serious, and will either succeed or fail in an interesting and spectacular way.
Friday, September 01, 2006
You know you're too geeky when...
I was putting some paper in our recycling bin this morning and I stuck in in the container bin. As I realized this and reached to move it to the other bin, "Ctrl-Z" popped into my head.
I need to get away from the laptop more.
I need to get away from the laptop more.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
The complicated "Liberal thug-wimp" meme
Nothing delights the frothing portion of the Right more than an opportunity to paint liberals (and the one remaining American centrist) as wimps. They're wimps because they fail to "Support our Troops and President Bush."
Of course. They're wimps like this:
On the other hand, no outrage or indignity supposedly perpetrated by liberals must go un-reported, because it's all about hate, hate, hate, right?
So, in breaking news (and I apologize to the future that I know very few facts beyond the initial report as I write this) it appears that a National Guardsman has been attacked by persons unknown in Seattle, and Michelle Malkin and other feral pundits are in full cry that thuggish liberal wimps must be to blame.
Um... guys? A word to the wise. "Thug-wimp" is going to be very, very hard to maintain as a useful meme for misleading and enraging your electoral base. Because, you know, thugs are tough and scary. You might want to re-think this one, though your now-dwindling success with "Iraq, the central front in the war on terror" suggests that even this ludicrous extreme might get you at least a week's worth of gullibility from some folks.
Of course. They're wimps like this:
On the other hand, no outrage or indignity supposedly perpetrated by liberals must go un-reported, because it's all about hate, hate, hate, right?
So, in breaking news (and I apologize to the future that I know very few facts beyond the initial report as I write this) it appears that a National Guardsman has been attacked by persons unknown in Seattle, and Michelle Malkin and other feral pundits are in full cry that thuggish liberal wimps must be to blame.
Um... guys? A word to the wise. "Thug-wimp" is going to be very, very hard to maintain as a useful meme for misleading and enraging your electoral base. Because, you know, thugs are tough and scary. You might want to re-think this one, though your now-dwindling success with "Iraq, the central front in the war on terror" suggests that even this ludicrous extreme might get you at least a week's worth of gullibility from some folks.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Terrorism <> Iraq
The single biggest anti-terrorist success since 9/11 happened over the past few days, as the British, U.S., and Pakistani governments rolled up an apparently widespread conspiracy.
Latest Headline: "19 Suspects Are Identified in Britain"
How was this success achieved? Police work and international cooperation.
Iraq is the single biggest disaster since 9/11.
Latest Headline: "Blast Kills 35 Iraqis at Shiite Shrine in Najaf"
How was this failure achieved? Traditional military force and unilateralism.
The future is all about networks and fourth-generation warfare. When we recognize this, we win. When we don't we fail.
Why is Israel so determined to fail in Lebanon?
Latest Headline: "Israel Expands Offensive in Lebanon"
The Iraq model is a failure. The entire right-wing war machine that promoted it is now focused on justifying a lost cause.
Meanwhile, fighting terrorism works. And there are many important, obvious, sensible, anti-terrorist policies to be pursued, revolving around police work, international cooperation, and creating networks of peace and stability.
Let's get to work.
Latest Headline: "19 Suspects Are Identified in Britain"
How was this success achieved? Police work and international cooperation.
Iraq is the single biggest disaster since 9/11.
Latest Headline: "Blast Kills 35 Iraqis at Shiite Shrine in Najaf"
How was this failure achieved? Traditional military force and unilateralism.
The future is all about networks and fourth-generation warfare. When we recognize this, we win. When we don't we fail.
Why is Israel so determined to fail in Lebanon?
Latest Headline: "Israel Expands Offensive in Lebanon"
The Iraq model is a failure. The entire right-wing war machine that promoted it is now focused on justifying a lost cause.
Meanwhile, fighting terrorism works. And there are many important, obvious, sensible, anti-terrorist policies to be pursued, revolving around police work, international cooperation, and creating networks of peace and stability.
Let's get to work.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Kevin Burton: The Numbers Don't Lie
Kevin has an awesome post on blogosphere growth up today. I encourage you to go read it -- it's a great example of how hype can be deflated by applying a little math to the numbers at hand. All credit to Dave Sifry for what he's built at Technorati, but I strongly suspect he got trapped in this "doubling every six months" thing about two years ago, and now he can't get out of it without the entire punditocracy falling on his head.
There were some other guys who got caught in that kind of hype cycle, too, but they were running a public company. The guys at WorldCom -- several of whom are now in jail for their lies -- were possibly more responsible than anyone else for the inflation of Bubble 1.0 with their made-up claim of "Internet traffic doubling every 100 days."
Web 2.0 is all about disruption of the existing media and creation of the new. It doesn't require magical thinking or puffery. The revolution really is here.
There were some other guys who got caught in that kind of hype cycle, too, but they were running a public company. The guys at WorldCom -- several of whom are now in jail for their lies -- were possibly more responsible than anyone else for the inflation of Bubble 1.0 with their made-up claim of "Internet traffic doubling every 100 days."
"It was an essential ingredient of dotcom business plans and conference slide-shows: Internet traffic, went the industry's favorite statistic, doubles every 100 days. The claim assumed unimpeachable status when it appeared in a report published by America's Department of Commerce in April 1998. Unfortunately for the telecoms firms that rushed to build networks to carry the reported surge in traffic, it wasn't true. So where did the claim come from?..."folks from WorldCom”, typically Bernie Ebbers, its recently departed chief executive, or John Sidgmore, his replacement."
Web 2.0 is all about disruption of the existing media and creation of the new. It doesn't require magical thinking or puffery. The revolution really is here.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Zoli: Informed Comedy. Readable, Too!
Zoli Erdos posted a hilarious and informative follow-up to my earlier post about Microsoft and Nortel's press release. Zoli, I had never heard of the Gunning-Fog Readability Test, but now I am a better man. Thanks!
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Microsoft: Crimes Against the English Language
It's not just humanities PhDs who write incomprehensible tripe...
Nortel and Microsoft Form Strategic Alliance to Accelerate Transformation of Business Communications: Shared vision for unified communications to drive new growth opportunities for both companies.
The title of that press release has 25 words and 171 characters, for an average word length (aka bullsh*t index) of 6.84. The first paragraph, complete with obligatory soulless handshake photo:
scores a slightly-better-but-still-horrific 6.07.
Contrast that to the gold standard for communicating meaning without baloney, Winston Churchill. The famous final paragraph of his 1940 "We shall fight on the beaches" speech scores a 4.3. Recalling that the word 'the' scores a 3, that's astonishing.
Microsoft, you still have a lot of work to do. Nortel, I'm surprised to discover you're still in business.
Back to the revolution...
Nortel and Microsoft Form Strategic Alliance to Accelerate Transformation of Business Communications: Shared vision for unified communications to drive new growth opportunities for both companies.
The title of that press release has 25 words and 171 characters, for an average word length (aka bullsh*t index) of 6.84. The first paragraph, complete with obligatory soulless handshake photo:
scores a slightly-better-but-still-horrific 6.07.
Contrast that to the gold standard for communicating meaning without baloney, Winston Churchill. The famous final paragraph of his 1940 "We shall fight on the beaches" speech scores a 4.3. Recalling that the word 'the' scores a 3, that's astonishing.
Microsoft, you still have a lot of work to do. Nortel, I'm surprised to discover you're still in business.
Back to the revolution...
Monday, July 10, 2006
Zvents powers San Jose Mercury News
Today the first enterprise customer for my startup, Zvents, goes live. At Zvents, we've always had the vision of powering the complete local events ecosytem, from individual venues all the way through to major local media. This launch is a major step toward realizing that goal.
One of the constant worries of the startup experience is what I call "360 degree vision" -- the possibility that at any given time, you could be working on *anything*; and the related concern that whatever you're focused on at the moment might be 180 degrees opposed from what you should actually be working on.
It's a considerable effort to create the organization, the relationships, and the codebase to make an event like this partnership with the Mercury News possible, and I'm incredibly proud of how our team has not only made this huge deal happen, but managed to keep several other balls in the air as well. Zvents is really on a roll.
Check out the Zvents blog announcement for more details.
One of the constant worries of the startup experience is what I call "360 degree vision" -- the possibility that at any given time, you could be working on *anything*; and the related concern that whatever you're focused on at the moment might be 180 degrees opposed from what you should actually be working on.
It's a considerable effort to create the organization, the relationships, and the codebase to make an event like this partnership with the Mercury News possible, and I'm incredibly proud of how our team has not only made this huge deal happen, but managed to keep several other balls in the air as well. Zvents is really on a roll.
Check out the Zvents blog announcement for more details.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
The Sociology of the Sociology of Science
Before I dove into the startup life in '96, I was a PhD student at UC Berkeley in the history of science program. I overlapped there for a year or two with a smart guy named Alex Pang, who now works at the Institute for the Future and writes a blog called Relevant History.
As opposed to his regular interesting posts, Alex recently made a [thankfully rare] comment on academic sociology of science, which caused him to quote this passage:
Ye Gods. That's just painful to read. I don't know who wrote that, but they're never, ever going to be able to communicate with normal human beings unless they start speaking English. I thought it would be interesting to do a quantitative comparison between that ...stuff... and actual prose. Alex is a fully trained SoS practitioner who's broken free from his chains to rejoin the human race, so I compared the academic passage to one of his recent posts that I consider a favorite:
I don't have to tell you which is better by any rational measure. But here's a numeric measure:
* Passage 1: 509 characters, 77 words, average word length 6.6 letters.
* Passage 2: 1625 characters, 337 words, average word length 4.8 letters.
Winner: Alex.
Social science grad school: Add 37% to your word length and remove 99% from your prospective audience. And it only takes away four, er, six years of your life.
As opposed to his regular interesting posts, Alex recently made a [thankfully rare] comment on academic sociology of science, which caused him to quote this passage:
[C]onstructivist sociology of science offers case-based analysis celebrating contingency and locality, favors archival and ethnographic methods, emphasizes agency over structure, and often focuses on issues related to epistemology and knowledge. Neo-institutionalism, on the other hand, searches for patterns over time and space, is more enthusiastic about using statistical and quantitative methods, emphasizes how structure can constrain actors, and returns in part to a sociology of scientists and organizations that was more characteristic of the pre-constructivist, Mertonian era.
Ye Gods. That's just painful to read. I don't know who wrote that, but they're never, ever going to be able to communicate with normal human beings unless they start speaking English. I thought it would be interesting to do a quantitative comparison between that ...stuff... and actual prose. Alex is a fully trained SoS practitioner who's broken free from his chains to rejoin the human race, so I compared the academic passage to one of his recent posts that I consider a favorite:
As an historian interested in Silicon Valley, I'm fascinated by Castilleja. More than any other place, it's given me a sense of just how tightly-knit the area's elites are: for all its global reach and influence, the Valley is still a bunch of small towns, knit together by schools, churches, volunteer organizations, and all the things that turn groups of people into communities. I come to events here, and the parents include people who were recently on the cover of Business Week or Wired. The real power scene isn't Stanford or Sand Hill Road; it's the line of parents waiting to pick up their kids from Menlo or St. Joseph's or Casti.
The students are in their dress whites this morning. Since they're normally in dress blue, it actually isn't that much of a step up in sartorial splendor, but it's a nice gesture. It's hard to raise a bar that's already high. Friedman is pretty high-profile, but the school has a constant parade of Macarthur genius prize-winners, Nobel laureates, people who used to have Secret Service details, and other generally fascinating people who come and speak to the students. (It's hard to raise the bar....) If, as I've sometimes heard, middle school here is like high school in most other schools, the speaker series rivals that of many colleges.
Introduction.... actually being done by one of the students. That's cool. She started an NGO that does relief work in Africa. Okay, that beats my vice presidency of my high school chess club (two years in a row). Would my high school record even get me into community college today?
Friedman's up now. Some anecdotes... why the world is flat... some more anecdotes... references to Lexus and the Olive Tree... I've posted the rest of the talk on Future Now.
Q&A is restricted to students. Love it: I recognize half a dozen CEOs and VCs, people who normally are the center of attention, and they're sitting in the back, listening. And not grumbling. Here, they're just parents.
I don't have to tell you which is better by any rational measure. But here's a numeric measure:
* Passage 1: 509 characters, 77 words, average word length 6.6 letters.
* Passage 2: 1625 characters, 337 words, average word length 4.8 letters.
Winner: Alex.
Social science grad school: Add 37% to your word length and remove 99% from your prospective audience. And it only takes away four, er, six years of your life.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Zlango: Didn't we solve this problem 3000 years ago?
Techcrunch is reporting on the launch of Zlango, an SMS icon service from Israel. According to Mike:
Didn't the Phoenicians solve this problem 3000 years ago by inventing the incredibly flexible and efficient symbolic alphabet? Because it sure looks like hieroglyphics to me.
Zlango's millenium-busting innovation:
State of the Art:
"Zlango...has created a very interesting new language...that could change the SMS landscape. The language is based on icons, or pictures. Each icon has a specific meaning - a person pointing to himself for 'me' or a heart for 'love'. There are over 200 icons included in the Zlango language today."
Didn't the Phoenicians solve this problem 3000 years ago by inventing the incredibly flexible and efficient symbolic alphabet? Because it sure looks like hieroglyphics to me.
Zlango's millenium-busting innovation:
State of the Art:
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Zvents 2.0 is launching today
By the time you read this, Zvents 2.0 should be up and running.
Right now, hitting our site gives you this message, a portent of good things to come:
What's new and improved about this version of Zvents?
* Improved search relevance -- when you've got thousands of events in a metro area, relevance becomes a key to happy users. Our results are materially better than before, and we're committed to continuous improvement for relevance.
* Category navigation - refine or browse to events by category, reducing time and effort to find what you're looking for.
* Embeddable calendars are now CSSable version 2, vastly improved - a live example of a 1.5 version is Visit Marin.
* Much faster, lighter code -- less than 1/2 the size -- means faster response times.
* Improved navigation and look and feel
You'll also notice that we've got less features, not more -- we're running against the "features are king" silliness of Web 2.0 here, but we think that great design means focusing on what matters most.
Coming in the next 30 days - major customer announcements, plus bonus fun stuff!
Right now, hitting our site gives you this message, a portent of good things to come:
What's new and improved about this version of Zvents?
* Improved search relevance -- when you've got thousands of events in a metro area, relevance becomes a key to happy users. Our results are materially better than before, and we're committed to continuous improvement for relevance.
* Category navigation - refine or browse to events by category, reducing time and effort to find what you're looking for.
* Embeddable calendars are now CSSable version 2, vastly improved - a live example of a 1.5 version is Visit Marin.
* Much faster, lighter code -- less than 1/2 the size -- means faster response times.
* Improved navigation and look and feel
You'll also notice that we've got less features, not more -- we're running against the "features are king" silliness of Web 2.0 here, but we think that great design means focusing on what matters most.
Coming in the next 30 days - major customer announcements, plus bonus fun stuff!
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Lunch 2.0 at Zvents -- the aftermath!
We got a huge turnout for Lunch 2.0 at Zvents on Wednesday - thanks to Mark Jen and the guys at Plaxo for creating this cool event. I would guess that about 40 people turned out - we bought burgers and sausages for 44, and the last two people to eat had to split the final one! sorry, guys :-( But aside from a slight demand-supply mismatch on the grilling front, it was a great place to meet folks, chat about startups, and enjoy the awesome weather and great back yard of our friendly incubators, NetService Ventures.
All the pictures are here.
All the pictures are here.
Zvents powers Palo Alto Daily News
My startup, Zvents, has some cool media partnership news. Check it out!
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Dear Google: Arabic Gmail to estock is spam
I like Gmail, and I use it as a personal account for this blog and other purposes. One of the things I like best about Gmail is the one-click ease of reporting spam and having it vanish from my inbox, with the sense of accomplishment that due to my small contribution, the Google anti-spam terrier is getting sharper teeth and a nastier disposition.
Except the terrier seems to be sleeping. Unless I am blind to some subtle i18n character set issues, it should be really, really easy for the Bayesian filtering algorithms over at Google spam central to figure out that hey, *every single* Arabic email that estock has received, he's classified as spam! And look, *every single* cyrillic and Mandarin character set email he's received, he's classified as spam as well! Hmmm. What could we do with this information? I think that just possibly, entropy could be reduced a little by incorporating it.
Ten or so of these a day, every day, get old. No, I do not want to hire any stock brokers from Dubai, even when they write to me in English -- and especially when they write in Arabic. Really. Hey, spam terrier -- bite 'em!
Except the terrier seems to be sleeping. Unless I am blind to some subtle i18n character set issues, it should be really, really easy for the Bayesian filtering algorithms over at Google spam central to figure out that hey, *every single* Arabic email that estock has received, he's classified as spam! And look, *every single* cyrillic and Mandarin character set email he's received, he's classified as spam as well! Hmmm. What could we do with this information? I think that just possibly, entropy could be reduced a little by incorporating it.
Ten or so of these a day, every day, get old. No, I do not want to hire any stock brokers from Dubai, even when they write to me in English -- and especially when they write in Arabic. Really. Hey, spam terrier -- bite 'em!
Lunch 2.0 at Zvents -- Wednesday, May 31st noon
Come join us for BBQ in the back yard of Zvents / NetService Ventures -- part of the Lunch 2.0 series started by Mark Jen and the guys at Plaxo. Read about the whole Lunch 2.0 series here.
RSVP by commenting on the Lunch 2.0 web site, or by adding a comment to the zLunch event page:
Parking will be tight, so please carpool, or park at the Sharon Heights Safeway, which is about a 5 minute walk west on Sand Hill Road (turn at the light at Sharon Park Dr.)
We'll provide all the food and drink, you provider the conversation!
RSVP by commenting on the Lunch 2.0 web site, or by adding a comment to the zLunch event page:
Parking will be tight, so please carpool, or park at the Sharon Heights Safeway, which is about a 5 minute walk west on Sand Hill Road (turn at the light at Sharon Park Dr.)
We'll provide all the food and drink, you provider the conversation!
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" - History of Oil
I was chatting with one of my self-identified libertarian friends tonight (he started out the conversation with "were you referring to me in that last blog post?") and I ended the evening by recommending Daniel Yergin's fabulous book The Prize to him. It's a history of oil from its discovery in 1850 through to the first Gulf War in 1990, and it won a well-deserved Pulitzer. It's a huge tome (800 pages, I think) but an outstanding history of the single most important factor in world history during the past century and a half. If you read it, you'll be amazed how the thread of oil runs through the waning days of imperialism, both World Wars, and the Cold War... it really has been the fulcrum of power in modern times. Highly, highly recommended.
Airlines vs. Fuel Costs = Dirigibles?
I just read a fascinating article in the New York Times about Boeing, Airbus, and the future of commercial aviation. Boeing, as airplane geeks will know, has bet heavily on the 787 'Dreamliner', a highly fuel-efficient midsize plane designed to serve point-to-point international routes -- San Francisco to Shanghai, Athens to Boston. Airbus, on the other hand, is building the massive A380, a plane designed to carry 500+ passengers on core 'hub and spoke' routes such as New York to Tokyo, with smaller planes serving as 'feeders' to these routes.
This multi-billion-dollar faceoff between two different philosophies and infrastructures is reminiscent of so many other distributed-vs.-centralized battles. FedEx created a business by going with centralized hubs. "Mesh" networking is supposed to be more efficient and resilient by getting rid of hubs. However, it's clear in this case that one simple calculus will decide the fate of Boeing vs. Airbus:
Fuel cost vs. customer happiness.
As recently as 12 months ago, I would argue with friends about 'peak oil' and what an economy looks like as it slides down the back side of a bell curve of production; and I would get signficant pushback that we were anywhere close to such a circumstance. The more libertarian-minded were fond of citing the famous Simon-Ehrlich bet on commodities as a supporting point.
And here we are. Massively rising demand for oil from China and India; potential disruption of significant sources of production ranging from Venezuela and Bolivia, Nigeria and Sudan, Iraq and Iran, to the Khazak basin in the former Soviet Union. No massive new sources of oil discovered, and few likely to come on line soon. And wild cards such as the Canadian tar sands are predicated on... high oil prices to make them relatively cost-efficient to produce.
Which got me to thinking: If the tradeoff for airlines is fuel efficiency vs. customer satisfaction, why not dirigibles or blimps? Right now it takes about 10 hours to fly the 6000 miles from SF to London, at about 600 miles per hour. An appropriately designed dirigible could do it in 24 hours at 250 miles per hour, at a vastly (90%?) reduced fuel cost -- since a dirigible would benefit both from the cubic reduction in power-required vs. speed flown, and the absence of the need to expend power to keep the aircraft up in the air, which accounts for a large percentage of airplane fuel cost. Imagine that, instead of spending 10 hours on a cramped, noisy, EXPENSIVE airplane, you spent a full day and a full night on a quiet, spacious, dirigible? Broadband internet access would be essential -- not only could you make crystal-clear phone calls, but you could transfer any volume of data. You'd get nice meals from a large kitchen. You could walk around and exercise. You could sleep in a real bed. And in a world of $70 - $140 a barrel oil costs, all of this might be CHEAPER to provide than a miserable 10-hour flight.
The key, of course, is making the experience as business-like for business travelers, and as vacation-like for vacation travelers, as possible. Without doing some considerable aeronautical math, I can't estimate at what fuel price point dirigibles would start to make sene. But it's certainly fascinating to consider.
This multi-billion-dollar faceoff between two different philosophies and infrastructures is reminiscent of so many other distributed-vs.-centralized battles. FedEx created a business by going with centralized hubs. "Mesh" networking is supposed to be more efficient and resilient by getting rid of hubs. However, it's clear in this case that one simple calculus will decide the fate of Boeing vs. Airbus:
Fuel cost vs. customer happiness.
As recently as 12 months ago, I would argue with friends about 'peak oil' and what an economy looks like as it slides down the back side of a bell curve of production; and I would get signficant pushback that we were anywhere close to such a circumstance. The more libertarian-minded were fond of citing the famous Simon-Ehrlich bet on commodities as a supporting point.
And here we are. Massively rising demand for oil from China and India; potential disruption of significant sources of production ranging from Venezuela and Bolivia, Nigeria and Sudan, Iraq and Iran, to the Khazak basin in the former Soviet Union. No massive new sources of oil discovered, and few likely to come on line soon. And wild cards such as the Canadian tar sands are predicated on... high oil prices to make them relatively cost-efficient to produce.
Which got me to thinking: If the tradeoff for airlines is fuel efficiency vs. customer satisfaction, why not dirigibles or blimps? Right now it takes about 10 hours to fly the 6000 miles from SF to London, at about 600 miles per hour. An appropriately designed dirigible could do it in 24 hours at 250 miles per hour, at a vastly (90%?) reduced fuel cost -- since a dirigible would benefit both from the cubic reduction in power-required vs. speed flown, and the absence of the need to expend power to keep the aircraft up in the air, which accounts for a large percentage of airplane fuel cost. Imagine that, instead of spending 10 hours on a cramped, noisy, EXPENSIVE airplane, you spent a full day and a full night on a quiet, spacious, dirigible? Broadband internet access would be essential -- not only could you make crystal-clear phone calls, but you could transfer any volume of data. You'd get nice meals from a large kitchen. You could walk around and exercise. You could sleep in a real bed. And in a world of $70 - $140 a barrel oil costs, all of this might be CHEAPER to provide than a miserable 10-hour flight.
The key, of course, is making the experience as business-like for business travelers, and as vacation-like for vacation travelers, as possible. Without doing some considerable aeronautical math, I can't estimate at what fuel price point dirigibles would start to make sene. But it's certainly fascinating to consider.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Portfolio Management, the Yale Way
Jason Zien over at Spotsearch recently wrote a post about Yale's asset allocation strategy, which has garnered amazing results - read Jason's post for the details. In about 2001, I read a book by David F. Swensen, the Chief Investing Officer of Yale University, called Pioneering Portfolio Management. It is one of the better investment books that I've ever read, and I highly recommend it. Swensen apparently has a new (2005) book out, "Unconventional Success," which is also well recommended on Amazon.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Ponytail Sweepstakes: Ted Waitt, Gateway
I've gotten a few emails based on yesterday's post about Jonathan Schwartz. It has been brought to my attention that Gateway founder and ex-CEO Ted Waitt was ponytailed for much (or all) of his tenure at Gateway:
There's a great quote on Waitt in a recent Fortune article, that foreshadows Sun's challenge:
The race is on, Jonathan!
There's a great quote on Waitt in a recent Fortune article, that foreshadows Sun's challenge:
"But while Waitt, the ponytailed visionary, was looking toward the future, boring old Michael Dell was obsessing over efficiency, thinking about how quickly a PC could be assembled rather than how fast it ran. As it turned out, execution was everything."The ability of the Internet to quickly and easily answer idle historical questions such as "what was the market cap of Gateway during Waitt's tenure" is still limited, but a quick scan of the stock price suggests that it may have been as high as $28 billion circa 2000. This would significantly eclipse Sun's current $17B number under Schwartz.
The race is on, Jonathan!
Monday, April 24, 2006
"What's a Blog?" - Six Apart at Maker Faire
This was my absolute favorite sign at Maker Faire. I promised Elizabeth (the girl in this picture) that I'd blog about it, so here it is.
There was lots of other cool stuff at Maker Faire, including awesome mathematical castings from Bathsheba, which embarassingly I failed to photograph. Oh, and I-Wei Huangs's steam robots!
There was lots of other cool stuff at Maker Faire, including awesome mathematical castings from Bathsheba, which embarassingly I failed to photograph. Oh, and I-Wei Huangs's steam robots!
Scott out, Ponytail in, shares up!
Sun send Scott McNealy off into the sunset today, after a run of 22 years at the helm. I can't think of too many other CEOs who have run a company that long -- though I bet Michael Dell will get close.
In related news, Jonathan Schwartz is CEO -- does anyone out there know of a CEO of a company larger than Sun run by a ponytail-sporting guy? He may have the market-cap record for that particular feature.
I know a lot of guys rooting for him to hold the "return on shareholder equity" record for ponytails, too.
In related news, Jonathan Schwartz is CEO -- does anyone out there know of a CEO of a company larger than Sun run by a ponytail-sporting guy? He may have the market-cap record for that particular feature.
I know a lot of guys rooting for him to hold the "return on shareholder equity" record for ponytails, too.
Search Trends: The Search For User Intent
There are several interesting trends afoot in the world of search. As I have previously written, concepts as disparate as editorial news and personalization are simply different ways to get to a better search answer. I'm now ready to extend this thesis a bit further, and claim that the next big leap in search is going to be driven by a superior ability to acquire and understand user intent.
In any query:response system, the quality of the output is fundamentally limited by the information contained in the query. In a mathematical sense, it's impossible to have more significant digits in your answer than you had in your input data. No matter how well you tune your response algorithm, not only will "Garbage In, Garbage Out" always hold true, but the more general case of "lack of precision in, lack of precision out" will limit how good your results can be.
On a general search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc.) an inbound user query can, quite literally, be about anything. Presented with a blank box that can encompass anything, the user then types in an average of 2.4 words, and the search engine must give back an ordered list of 10 relevant results (having worked very hard to remove spam, porn, etc.) that may approximate what the user is looking for. Suppose the user types in "Peru". Is the user a 4th grader writing a report for school? A college student planning a backpacking trip? A consultant searching for economic data related to a project? A Peruvian looking for things related to their home country in their local area? All these, and many more, are possible.
It's a very tough problem, and a key reason that search quality has ground to a halt, or at least stopped improving dramatically, is that in this completely general context, it's very hard to understand more about the user's intent than they grudgingly give you in their 2.4 words.
So how can search engines solve this problem of paucity of intent?
Answer #1 is to verticalize. Zvents, my startup, is an example of this trend -- as are Simply Hired, Kosmix, and many others. When someone types Peru into Zvents, we know -- simply because we're a search engine for local events, and nothing else -- that the user is looking for something to do in their local area having to do with Peru. In order for Google to get that kind of intent, the user would have had to type, "something to do in my local area having to do with Peru" or a similarly complex query. Zvents gets a great deal of intent information simply by being a specialist. When someone shows up in our search interface -- either directly, or via a media partner -- we can be confident they're looking for stuff to do. Simply Hired, similarly, would know that the user was looking for jobs either in Peru, or related to it; and Kosmix, under its healthcare filter, could infer that the user cared about health issues related to Peru.
Answer #2 is to personalize. Google is the most interesting case emerging at the moment. Go to the Google homepage and in the upper right you'll find a link to the new personalized home. It's a HUGE departure for Google -- who has built a multi-billion dollar business on a purely "visitor" experience -- to be moving to a registered user experience. It's likely that Google is doing this is to get a much clearer sense of search intent, based on personal past search history. At least one very senior technical person involved in the Google personalized home page has a background in mining extremely large log files to extract business intelligence -- exactly the kind of resume you'd want if you were attempting to derive intent from search history. I've also had some discussions with folks at Yahoo (who are also very happy to let you log in while searching) about the extremely sophisticated state information that Yahoo maintains as you move through the Yahoo portal; all aimed at improving the targeting both of ads and products.
Answer #3 is to get more intent directly from users. Many of you might recall the original concept of Ask Jeeves, which was to "answer your questions in plain English". In a recent conversation with some folks at Ask, they mentioned that one of the reasons they'd retired Jeeves was that delivering on this "brand promise" was nearly impossible - but that because of that historical promise, the length of their typical search query was vastly greater than comparables at the other big search engines. That begs the question -- what if you could successfully parse natural language English like "something to do in my local area having to do with Peru"? It's an incredibly hard problem, but the ability to accurately extract enough user intent to deliver a truly better search result would yield enormous market benefits. I know of at least one current serious search startup that is taking exactly this approach -- building a general-purpose search engine that can better parse complex intent, and accurately respond to it. If they succeed in their quest, and establish a "brand promise" similar to the original Jeeves, they'll have a significant advantage in actually giving users what they want.
There are other answers, but they look less and less like search. Aggregate Knowledge, for instance, is a matching engine for supplementary navigation based on heterogenous item:item matching in a "people who viewed this, also viewed that..." sense. At scale, AgKnow can derive intent from the cumulative behavior of multiple users who were exposed to similar information -- and as their scale increases further, they could slice even more finely to begin to distinguish path dependencies as well. I think we'll see an explosion of search alternatives in addition to advances in all three categories mentioned above, as dozens of companies large and small strive to crack the problem of too much information, not enough user intent.
In any query:response system, the quality of the output is fundamentally limited by the information contained in the query. In a mathematical sense, it's impossible to have more significant digits in your answer than you had in your input data. No matter how well you tune your response algorithm, not only will "Garbage In, Garbage Out" always hold true, but the more general case of "lack of precision in, lack of precision out" will limit how good your results can be.
On a general search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc.) an inbound user query can, quite literally, be about anything. Presented with a blank box that can encompass anything, the user then types in an average of 2.4 words, and the search engine must give back an ordered list of 10 relevant results (having worked very hard to remove spam, porn, etc.) that may approximate what the user is looking for. Suppose the user types in "Peru". Is the user a 4th grader writing a report for school? A college student planning a backpacking trip? A consultant searching for economic data related to a project? A Peruvian looking for things related to their home country in their local area? All these, and many more, are possible.
It's a very tough problem, and a key reason that search quality has ground to a halt, or at least stopped improving dramatically, is that in this completely general context, it's very hard to understand more about the user's intent than they grudgingly give you in their 2.4 words.
So how can search engines solve this problem of paucity of intent?
Answer #1 is to verticalize. Zvents, my startup, is an example of this trend -- as are Simply Hired, Kosmix, and many others. When someone types Peru into Zvents, we know -- simply because we're a search engine for local events, and nothing else -- that the user is looking for something to do in their local area having to do with Peru. In order for Google to get that kind of intent, the user would have had to type, "something to do in my local area having to do with Peru" or a similarly complex query. Zvents gets a great deal of intent information simply by being a specialist. When someone shows up in our search interface -- either directly, or via a media partner -- we can be confident they're looking for stuff to do. Simply Hired, similarly, would know that the user was looking for jobs either in Peru, or related to it; and Kosmix, under its healthcare filter, could infer that the user cared about health issues related to Peru.
Answer #2 is to personalize. Google is the most interesting case emerging at the moment. Go to the Google homepage and in the upper right you'll find a link to the new personalized home. It's a HUGE departure for Google -- who has built a multi-billion dollar business on a purely "visitor" experience -- to be moving to a registered user experience. It's likely that Google is doing this is to get a much clearer sense of search intent, based on personal past search history. At least one very senior technical person involved in the Google personalized home page has a background in mining extremely large log files to extract business intelligence -- exactly the kind of resume you'd want if you were attempting to derive intent from search history. I've also had some discussions with folks at Yahoo (who are also very happy to let you log in while searching) about the extremely sophisticated state information that Yahoo maintains as you move through the Yahoo portal; all aimed at improving the targeting both of ads and products.
Answer #3 is to get more intent directly from users. Many of you might recall the original concept of Ask Jeeves, which was to "answer your questions in plain English". In a recent conversation with some folks at Ask, they mentioned that one of the reasons they'd retired Jeeves was that delivering on this "brand promise" was nearly impossible - but that because of that historical promise, the length of their typical search query was vastly greater than comparables at the other big search engines. That begs the question -- what if you could successfully parse natural language English like "something to do in my local area having to do with Peru"? It's an incredibly hard problem, but the ability to accurately extract enough user intent to deliver a truly better search result would yield enormous market benefits. I know of at least one current serious search startup that is taking exactly this approach -- building a general-purpose search engine that can better parse complex intent, and accurately respond to it. If they succeed in their quest, and establish a "brand promise" similar to the original Jeeves, they'll have a significant advantage in actually giving users what they want.
There are other answers, but they look less and less like search. Aggregate Knowledge, for instance, is a matching engine for supplementary navigation based on heterogenous item:item matching in a "people who viewed this, also viewed that..." sense. At scale, AgKnow can derive intent from the cumulative behavior of multiple users who were exposed to similar information -- and as their scale increases further, they could slice even more finely to begin to distinguish path dependencies as well. I think we'll see an explosion of search alternatives in addition to advances in all three categories mentioned above, as dozens of companies large and small strive to crack the problem of too much information, not enough user intent.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
What does Web 2.0 mean to me?
I was asked this question for a podcast at the recent Under the Radar conference where Zvents presented. You can test my memory by hunting up the actual podcast, but I am pretty sure this is the same answer I gave:
It means two things -- one technological, and one social.
Socially, it's the return of hope and enthusiasm to Silicon Valley. People may mock "bubble 2.0" and naysayers can always point to some particular point of excess, but the reason we entrepreneurs are here is to change the world, and a lot of dreams lay dormant from 2001 to 2005. Those dreams are being knit into reality today, and many of us can see that we'll be able to make the world a very different, and hopefully better place, soon.
Technologically, it's about data as a platform (just like Tim O'Reilly said) and more importantly, it's about fast and simple integration of that data. Mashups may occasionally be dorky, but they demonstrate a level of interoperability that is simply astonishing when compared to 1999. We've all seen network effects accelerate change and growth to warp speed -- what we're seeing now is kind of Metcalfe's Law of web functionality, where the value of every interoperable web service is the square of the number of other services to which it can be connected.
Hmmm. I know I didn't say that one in the podcast. It may actually be worth its own post.
But, back to work. Big customer meeting tomorrow...
...Web 2.0 means the return of customers. Yee Hah!
It means two things -- one technological, and one social.
Socially, it's the return of hope and enthusiasm to Silicon Valley. People may mock "bubble 2.0" and naysayers can always point to some particular point of excess, but the reason we entrepreneurs are here is to change the world, and a lot of dreams lay dormant from 2001 to 2005. Those dreams are being knit into reality today, and many of us can see that we'll be able to make the world a very different, and hopefully better place, soon.
Technologically, it's about data as a platform (just like Tim O'Reilly said) and more importantly, it's about fast and simple integration of that data. Mashups may occasionally be dorky, but they demonstrate a level of interoperability that is simply astonishing when compared to 1999. We've all seen network effects accelerate change and growth to warp speed -- what we're seeing now is kind of Metcalfe's Law of web functionality, where the value of every interoperable web service is the square of the number of other services to which it can be connected.
Hmmm. I know I didn't say that one in the podcast. It may actually be worth its own post.
But, back to work. Big customer meeting tomorrow...
...Web 2.0 means the return of customers. Yee Hah!
Aggregate Knowlege launches at ETech
I may be busting the press embargo by 90 minutes or so, but I'm really excited about this one. e, Tomorrow at ETech, Paul Martino and Chris Law are taking the wraps off of Aggregate Knowledge, their fascinating new play on a recommendations web service.
Paul and Chris were formerly founders of Tribe Networks, and Paul (several lives ago) was a graph theory PhD student at Princeton. They've cracked the problem of providing user-specific recommendations across multiple data types in real time, thanks to some seriously fancy math under the hood. We've been using AgKnow at Zvents to power some of the "related events" content on our site (Disclosure: I am also an investor), and look forward to more customers joining their service so we can begin to benefit from further network-effect driven recommended content.
Most importantly in this mash-up world, it takes from minutes to a few hours to fully implement their service on your site. EAI is soooo dead.
I expect them to do very well in both the content recommendation and non-search navigation business. Rock the house, guys!
P.S. I previously mentioned these guys in November.
Technorati Tag: ETech
Paul and Chris were formerly founders of Tribe Networks, and Paul (several lives ago) was a graph theory PhD student at Princeton. They've cracked the problem of providing user-specific recommendations across multiple data types in real time, thanks to some seriously fancy math under the hood. We've been using AgKnow at Zvents to power some of the "related events" content on our site (Disclosure: I am also an investor), and look forward to more customers joining their service so we can begin to benefit from further network-effect driven recommended content.
Most importantly in this mash-up world, it takes from minutes to a few hours to fully implement their service on your site. EAI is soooo dead.
I expect them to do very well in both the content recommendation and non-search navigation business. Rock the house, guys!
P.S. I previously mentioned these guys in November.
Technorati Tag: ETech
Monday, March 06, 2006
The limitations of dynamic content creation
To confirm the spelling on the Latin phrase "casus belli," I typed it in to Google. eBay provided some serious unintended humor.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Ether *is* Keen 2.0: Old Wine, New Bottles
Over at TechCrunch, Mike just posted on Ether, a new company driven out of the pay-per-call innovators Ingenio. My immediate thought was, "is Mayfield funding this company?" because Mayfield is (in)famously trolling through old bubble business plans for ideas, and this sounds an awful lot like Keen.com.
Keen was funded by Benchmark around 1999. I first saw gigantic billboards on the Underground advertising Keen in 2000 when I was living in London, and I remember thinking, "Damn, that's a great idea," as I stared at them from the platform across the tracks. It may still be a great idea, but Keen was relegated to a fairly painful fate, morphing into a psychic hotline and not much else. And certainly nothing that could make back the bubble-zillions that got poured into it.
In poking around to check out the carcass of Keen, I discovered a most curious fact:
Ingenio (Ether) *is* Keen! Changed their name sometime in the last seven years. Look right down at the bottom: "Keen is a trademark of Ingenio, Inc."
What was old is new again...!
Keen was funded by Benchmark around 1999. I first saw gigantic billboards on the Underground advertising Keen in 2000 when I was living in London, and I remember thinking, "Damn, that's a great idea," as I stared at them from the platform across the tracks. It may still be a great idea, but Keen was relegated to a fairly painful fate, morphing into a psychic hotline and not much else. And certainly nothing that could make back the bubble-zillions that got poured into it.
In poking around to check out the carcass of Keen, I discovered a most curious fact:
Ingenio (Ether) *is* Keen! Changed their name sometime in the last seven years. Look right down at the bottom: "Keen is a trademark of Ingenio, Inc."
What was old is new again...!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)