AbleGrape: Superb new vertical search engine for wine

I love this story. It's what Web 2.0 is *supposed* to be about, but rarely is.

Here are some of the key themes of Web 2.0:
* Search is centric
* Open-source software makes starting up cheap
* People who lived and learned from Web 1.0 applying the lessons to succeed
* Increased internet usage makes niche sites possible and profitable
* New UI tools (AJAX etc.) make UI innovation possible again

So what do we actually get? A few great new companies, and a bunch of silly no-hope websites trying to make money off of each other's widgets. Uncov, we miss you already.

That's why I love AbleGrape, which my friend Doug Cook just launched earlier this week. AbleGrape is a vertical search engine for wine:



At launch, it supports English, French, and Italian; it has fully international content; it has really interesting new UI features for fast, sophisticated searching; and it's astonishingly relevant for even obscure wine queries.



The release email states:

We aim to be your first online stop for trustworthy, up-to-date wine information. Our public beta covers some 32,000 wine sites, with about 10 million pages of content, and we've put a lot of work into returning highly relevant results and providing an innovative, powerful user interface that helps you find things faster.

Doug Cook, the founder, coder, sole proprietor, and general polymath behind this achievement, was formerly a search engineer at Inktomi, and rose to VP of Engineeringat Yahoo! Search after the acquisition. He's also a world-class wine guy, who speaks several wine-useful languages fluently and has one of the better wine collections I've ever seen.

He has spent the past 2 1/2 years building AbleGrape himself from the ground up - coding, tuning the crawl and relevance, and engaging with the thousands of vineyards, negociants, appellation boards, government agencies, and other businesses and entities that make up the wine world. This has been a huge solo effort -- a personal memory I have of the process is watching Doug attempt to check the status of his crawl over a 9800 baud dial-up connection from a house in the Tuscan countryside of Italy - in August, 2006.

Let's walk through that supposed Web 2.0 stack again:
* Search is centric
--> AbleGrape a search engine. A damn fine one.

* Open-source software makes starting up cheap
--> Doug built AbleGrale with major pieces from the Lucene/SOLR/Nutch open source projects

* People who lived and learned from Web 1.0 applying the lessons to succeed
--> Inktomi to Yahoo to AbleGrape. Check!

* Increased internet usage makes niche sites possible and profitable
--> Let's hope -- for every wine question that you have, this is the first place you should go.

* New UI tools (AJAX etc.) make UI innovation possible again
--> Doug has a number of fast, clever, interactive features for search refinement based on his years of search experience that take a second to learn, but are really useful. Doug describes them better than I would.

Amidst all the baloney, hype, and general mediocrity of much of the Internet space, examples like this give me hope and happiness. This rocks. Great job, Doug!

Sadly, I have no financial interest in this company. But Doug does share superb wine with me from time to time.

TubeMogul's sweet new video distribution and analytics service launches at DEMO

Video distribution on the Internet is already a huge and fragmented market, with consumer traction spread across a host of destination sites and widgets from VideoEgg to Vimeo to YouTube. It's also a rapidly growing and evolving market, with potential big players like Hulu lurking in the wings.

So if you've got video to distribute, and understanding consumer uptake is the lifeblood of your business, what do you do?

One great answer is TubeMogul, which formally launched its distribution and analytics service at DEMO yesterday. I am proud to be an investor in TubeMogul via my partnership at NetService Ventures.



TubeMogul has a great product that's gotten significant initial traction, both with major users like CBS Interactive and with a long tail of more than ten thousand video creators. Their launch saw some great press commentary as well. Hats off to Brett and the team for a great job thus far!

I think that TubeMogul, as well as another NSV investment, SingleFeed, are representative of an emergent trend toward distinct buyer- and seller- focused analytic offerings as multiple Internet marketplaces evolve from their initial stages toward a more sophisticated bid/ask framework. I'll have a further post on that soon.

Google Newspaper Ads 2008 = CueCat 1998

Congratulations, Google. You've managed to revive one of the dumbest and most reviled companies of Web 1.0 Your new newspaper ad bar code plan smacks of nothing so much as CueCat, the ill-fated money pit that Forbes, Radio Shack, and others poured tens of foolish millions into. People really hated the CueCat.



Good luck with that.

Update: Commentary on this is breaking out into two distinct camps: Those who were grownups during Web 1.0 and paid attention, and those who were either younger than 12, or missed what went wrong.

I'm proud to be with the grumpy oldsters here, and Joel nails it with "it doesn't say much for the quality of those 150 people Google hires every week that they're now chasing some of the worst of the bad ideas of the fin de siecle."

Zvents launches federated local search

I try to keep the Zvents product announcements to a minimum, but I'm really excited about this one. As part of our ongoing expansion of focus on local search, we've launched a new federated local search page on Zvents.com. We've been live with dozens (now hundreds) of media partners for over 18 months, and we've observed behavior of both searchers and local merchants that strongly suggested that we should unify our search experience across events, venues, restaurants, and performers. As we add in additional categories of local merchants, this blended result becomes even more important.


Doing federated search well is a hard, open problem, and while I don't think we have the perfect answer yet, this is a huge step forward for us, and an indicator of many great things to come. I'm loving our role as the deep technology provider for local media, and looking forward to more cool things we'll be rolling out in 2008.

There are a couple of nice writeups from Chris Smith at the Natural Search Blog and Greg Sterling at Screenwerk.

Check it out!

Dear Hippies: Your cool car is starving poor people

I've always thought that biodiesel was a dumb idea. Maybe it's because I grew up on a farm in Ohio, where a yield of 180 bushels of corn to an acre of land is considered outstanding, on some of the richest farm land in the world, where water falls from the sky. 180 bushels of corn may sound like a lot (a bushel is about 9 gallons for you city types) but this site says you get a grand total of 2.7 gallons of ethanol from a bushel. At 25 miles per gallon, that will drive one car about 12,000 miles -- the average distance that most people drive in a year.

This other site (thanks, Google!) says that you get 134,000 food calories from that same bushel - which is enough to feed a person for 61 days.

So that's your tradeoff -- from a single acre of good farm land, enough food to feed 30 people for a year, or enough ethanol to support one single car, driven as we do today, for a year. 30 people vs. one car. Huh.

It is just about now, dear reader, that it should be dawning on you that the oil economy only works because the entire biomass of millions of years worth of extremely energy-rich plants and animals were compressed into this super-handy stuff we called oil. We have busily extracted this incredibly concentrated goodness from every convenient and many inconvenient places on earth, to the point where its future supply grows uncertain; and we frac it down into the gasoline we put into our cars, and kid ourselves that cleverness and progress is the root cause of our luxurious lifestyles, rather than the tapping of this one-time bonus from the geophysical history of the earth.



From Flickr: Originally uploaded by Michiel2005

And now, as the remaining loose change from that historic bonus starts to rattle around in our pocket, we're desperately casting around for alternatives - and wondering if the globe's yearly spread-out dose of agricultural sunshine can somehow support a lifestyle grown large and fat on the hyper-concentrated fossil extract, without negative consequence.

Um, no.

But don't just take my word for it. Bitter economic truth is exerting itself as we speak, as demand for biofuels grows due to a combination of dopey hippies, foolish politicians, and farmers who never saw a subsidy they didn't like -- I'm looking at you, Iowa-caucus-goers and your bizarre cartel to mis-direct the agenda of U.S. presidential politics. Here's a great article in the New York Times that lays out how globally,poor people are either paying more money for oils or eating less calories because of this trend.

I am a big fan of environmentalism, but at its core enviromentalism means that we must do more with less. Many big green trends today - can you say "carbon credits" for your sports car -- are attempts to deny reality and kid ourselves about the innovation or sacrifices that are yet required of us. Biodiesel is yet another of those false, self-indulgent dead ends.

But there's hope. "The do more" part of the honest environmental equations fires me up. One reason I love the business of computers and communication is that it drives incredible efficiencies in the physical world. I am wildly excited about the many opportunities for innovation - which is what drives TRUE progress - but in order to concentrate on what matters, we have to stop pretending that dumb farm subsidies can save us, and get to work.

Rich Democracts vs. Poor Republicans

The results of the Iowa caucuses presage the coming big shift in American electoral politics. The Democrats are going to become the party of money and modernity, and the Republicans are going to become the party of economic populism and social conservatism. Some interesting results:

* Mike Huckabee (economic populist, social conservative) won the Republican vote.
* John Edwards (economic populist) won the self-described conservative vote caucusing Democratic.
* Mitt Romney (A Democrat in spirit - the Bain Capital governor of Massachusetts) lost the Republican race big to Huckabee.

Obama is a candidate that can deliver the White House to the Democrats in a transitional phase from 2008 to 2016 -- in part because he will hold the votes of African-Americans, who otherwise favor both economic populism and social conservatism. Look for a Republican to win a surprising victory around 2020 in part by winning black votes, and look for increasing rejection of President Obama as "not a real black man" by the end of his second term.

Meanwhile, the Democrats become the party of business and trade. John Edwards may run for president again, but he'll do so as a Republican -- and the unions (the few that are left) will back him again, and vote a Republican ticket.

The Hispanic vote will become the new Democratic flank, replacing blacks - since "economic populism" will include anti-immigrant and anti-Spanish-speaking sentiment, expressed by both blacks and whites.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled technology.

Calculated Risk: Great finance analysis, great writing

Or, Uncov for the mortgage industry ;-)

Silicon Valley is as much about finance as it is about technology, and I appreciate great finance writing as much as I love great technology analysis. Silicon Valley is also a real-estate-obsessed place, so when that finance writing is about the greatest financial calamity to ever beset the housing market, the enjoyment is multiplied.

I'd like to call out Calculated Risk, a superb blog on the mortgage and housing industry, with two pseudonymous authors (CR and Tanta) who write with enormous knowledge and great flair about the debacle in progress on Wall Street and in Middle America right now.

In particular the recent post, "The Un-re-dis-inter-mediation Blues," is a scathing indictment of the sort of business model foolishness -- in this case carried out by Merrill Lynch -- that you may have thought was only the province of Web 2.0 startups. Highly recommended, and a good mental tonic when too many thoughts of advertising-supported business models and viral marketing are getting you down:

Aside from the idea of loan officers having sufficient spelling skills to play Scrabble, which is new to me, here we have the two same old dumb ideas that emerge in any mortgage downturn, with a delicious twist that it's Wall Street getting it instead of Main Street.

First, there's the old "let's retrain a bunch of subprime loan officers to be prime GSE loan officers." You civilians might think this should be fairly easy, but the fact is that training a lot of these people to be prime loan officers basically means training them to be loan officers. If they had any basic depth of understanding of the business they're in, they could move to prime origination by just reading that other rate sheet. The reality is that they've been doing no-doc no-down no-sweat stuff for so long--some of them have never done anything but--that they're sitting around with the PlayStation waiting for someone to tell them how a 30-year fixed rate loan with a down payment and verified income actually works...

Item the second causes a deep belly laugh in anyone who ever worked for a depository in a mortgage downcycle: "Why can't we just put the loans on the balance sheet?" I know it makes me a bad person, but the thought of Merrill getting this one from its mortgage people is floating me heavenward on a warm tide of schadenfreude...

That is--or once was--an old strategy for depositories: when you can't sell your loans, hunker down, stuff 'em on the books and wait for the tide to turn. We are seeing depository after depository shutting down its wholesale and correspondent lending divisions, meaning it will, as always, only allocate those portfolio dollars to keeping an expensive but much safer retail operation alive...

But Merrill really really wanted to be a retail originator in its own right. Welcome to the other side of the mortgage world, Mother Merrill, and try turning in some tiles. Maybe you'll get a vowel.

The power of traditional media: NPR and Kipling

I've gotten several phone calls from friends who heard my comment read on NPR's All Things Considered this evening. I was upset with their Tuesday story on a new Rudyard Kipling museum in Mumbai, and dashed off an email to the comment form on their site.

A few observations:

* I write on this blog at least weekly, and rarely hear from friends about its contents. The reach of traditional media and its broadcast/push format still have incredible power to communicate and persuade.

* I can write whatever I want on this blog, and yet I'm thrilled to get 30 seconds of airtime, edited and second-hand, on NPR. I can't quite express why that is; perhaps because it feels like I've passed some test.

* "Passing a test" is a very useful metric for writing. I actually crafted my comment carefully to be succinct and punchy, knowing that if I rambled I wouldn't get air time. Editors may sometimes be wrong, but they're direct; whereas if your audience doesn't like what or how you write, they just go away, typically without telling you.

* Don't offer up shallow interpretations of Kipling when I'm around, unless you've read a lot more of him and about him than I have, and are rhetorically fast on your feet.

Giga, Tera, Peta: Om on Google's Infrastructure

Om writes that Google's infrastructure is its strategic advantage. He lists "fiber networks, data centers, switches, servers and storage devices" as key components. He correctly identifies "Relevancy of results, Speed of search, and Cost of executing a search query" as key benefits of this infrastructure.

All true (and better ad targeting is a fourth key benefit).

My only beef: Where's the software?

A huge portion of Google's opex is people, and many of those people are the systems guys who built fundamental software infrastructure like UNIX, C, and TCP/IP. Those guys aren't there for their halo effect - they're there, despite Google's youth bias, to build software infrastructure.

Scan this Bell Labs alumni list, and see how many times Google comes up as a current gig. Answer: 21.

As Steve Jobs continues to demonstrate in the consumer device sphere, custom hardware + genius software yields magic. Google is the server-side doppelganger to Apple, and their platforms like GFS, BigTable, MapReduce, and Sawzall are core to their competitive advantage. For a great overview of how software and hardware work together at Google, check out this great 2006 presentation on Google internals by Toby DiPasquale.

Zvents also believes in great software infrastructure. More soon on that front.

Update: If you're showing up from TechMeme and you find this post interesting, there are plenty more on related topics. It's been a bit rich about Google here on the blog lately, but they are the dominant technological force of our times. Just click here and hit page down.

What Google hates and loves: Why Wikipedia is taking over search results

John Battelle recently posted a report which states that Wikipedia pages are taking over the organic search results of the major search engines: "Today 27% of Google’s results on the first link alone come from Wikipedia, as do 31% of Yahoo’s."

What magic power causes a free site like Wikipedia to own between a quarter and a third of results for the single most powerful page position at the world's two largest search engines?

It's simple. Money.

Google and Yahoo make more money by putting Wikipedia and sites like it first in their results.

Let's look at a scenario that Google hates. Christmas is coming, and a searcher puts a broad but valuable query term like HDTV into Google. The results that come back are clearly delineated between organic content and paid ads:


But here's what drives Google (and Yahoo) absolutely crazy. There in the third link position is CNET, with a feature called HDTV World. CNET is a media company which creates great, rich content about tech topics like HTDV. Google can hardly ignore them. But boy, do they wish they could! Because in two short clicks, a user goes from the organic results on Google to a highly monetized buying guide and store for Samsung HDTVs on CNET -- and Google makes exactly $0.


It's enough to cause heartburn at the 'plex.

Now let's walk through that scenario with a similar search for hearing aids. In passing, it's interesting to note that Google has no top-line ads for 'HDTV' (which I presume young, savvy people search for) and it displays three top-line ads for 'hearing aid' - which I presume older, less savvy searchers tend to type in. Nothing to see here, they're still not evil, just as long as they keep it below 49%.

Ahem. Back to our topic at hand, Wikipedia love.

Here's the paid/unpaid split for hearing aids:


We can see that like the HDTV search, Wikipedia is the first organic result, which means that it will collect the bulk of the clicks for unpaid traffic on the page. This delights Google, because there are no ads on Wikipedia. By displaying Wikipedia links in the most prominent free position, not only can they deliver a useful result to a searcher, they can't get into the CNET/HDTV situation which they hate - letting a searcher with strong commercial intent escape without the lucky advertiser paying the Google tax.

There's a further benefit to Google in promoting Wikipedia in organic results. Even within the context of a buying decision, searchers strongly type for commercial and non-commercial intent of a particular query. When a searcher is in the exploration and research phase of a hearing-aid buying decision, they want information, overview, context. When they have found out what they want, they switch to a transactional mode, and are ready to be marketed to. Over time, Google can use free, non-commercial content like Wikipedia to actively train searchers that they won't find commercial offers in the organic results:


...and over time, encourage them to look first in the paid ad positions when they want to buy something. Commercial nirvana.


That commercial nirvana is why Google and Yahoo love Wikipedia, and you'll continue to see more Wikipedia links in high organic positions over time.

Unless Jimmy Wales allows ads.

Update: I've just noticed Matt Cutts' new post on Google's efforts to nuke people who sell links with PageRank. Matt asks, rather piously, "Now, think about how you would feel if your medical search was influenced by pages like this," and points to a paid content page about the Gamma Knife, which is apparently a cancer treatment.

Hmm, Matt, I'd feel about the same as I do when Google influences my search by prominently showing a Gamma Knife ad on the first SERP:


Let's be clear - piety aside, Google isn't worried about your finding out about the Gamma Knife - they just want someone to pay them. That's why they are happy to prominently feature it in their ads at the same time that Matt is finger-wagging about it in his blog.

This battle is all about searcher differentiation, and paying the Google Tax on the way to commercial nirvana.


Note: For more on query-type differentiation, see my previous post, "Why Google owns your lunch."

Why Google owns your lunch: The "I'm feeling lucky" button

Google is a force of nature in global business today, in the same way that the Velociraptors ate everything in Jurassic Park, and Napoleon conquered everything non-frozen in Europe.

So I am bemused at Valleywags's credulous acceptance of Sergey Brin's statement that the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button costs Google $100+ million a year because they miss out on the advertising on the subsidiary pages when users click that button.

Yeah, right. Aren't you Valleywag guys supposed to be snarky?

News flash, Silicon Valley: Google is composed of some of the smartest machine-learning dudes to ever walk the planet. They have transcended their humble beginnings in web graph analysis to meet their true calling, which is to capture and analyze every single bloody user click, everywhere, ever, that they can get their hands on.

Within that context, if you think that the "I'm feeling lucky" button still exists because of some avatistic non-commercial motive within Google, get a clue. While a friendly grad-student impulse may have been the original source of the button, that button has long since proven its worth on a simple, highly commercial scale: query term type differentiation.

There are, broadly, three classes of queries on the Internet: discovery/information, navigation, and transaction. "Navigation" is of the type: "I need to know the URL for IBM, please take me there." A considerable amount of query-response and relevance angst is expended by most search engines on differentiating the three types of user intent, because users in each mode have vastly different expectations. Google, unlike others, gets at least half of this differentiation for free, because of that magic, friendly, 'Lucky' button.

Sergey, that's worth $110 million and more, and you know it.

That crucial differentiation makes Google search better; and better = more profitable. Scoreboard!

How and why does this work?

Because there is a strong predominance of searchers with navigational intent who click the 'Lucky' button. Users with informational (discovery) or transactional intent, on the other hand, tend to click the 'search' button. That distinction allows Google to build a dictionary which correlates a certain set of search terms with likely navigational intent -- for free, in machine learning terms. Voila! Google take a set of searchers with inherent low monetization potential -- after all, they only wanted to find their way to IBM's website -- and makes its insanely profitable search engine even better.

money...
...money...
...money

Sergey may pitch this as some charitable instinct on Google's part, but we know better.

Rock On, Google Borg!

Footnote: I talk a good game, but I only vaguely understand this stuff, and I am thrilled and humbled on a daily basis by the brilliance of the people who work with me and help me understand how much this sort of science and engineering matters. Thanks, Z Team!

Waiting for Virgin America...

I tried three times to do a flight search on Virgin America.



No dice.

JetBlue just got over $1000 of my business, because their web site works.

Web sites matter, people. Site performance and search performance are two of the most critical customer-service metrics you can measure, across an incredibly wide range of retail and commercial endeavors. They're hard to do well. Which is why they matter even more than you think -- because you can differentiate from your competitors, and delight your customers.

Higher-Performance Computing: Improving the Google File System

For those of you interested in high-performance computing, Doug Judd, our principal search architect at Zvents, has an awesome new post on the Zvents developers blog called "The Google File System - and How It Can Be Improved." Doug is leading our forthcoming Hypertable open-source project, which builds on top of distributed file systems like GFS, HDFS, and Kosmos, and he's got plenty of interesting thoughts on why GFS works well, and where it can be made better.

The market is winning: Google's ranking is under strain

It's an interesting philosophy question: When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, what happens?

Google has invested billions in computing and commercial infrastructure in order to secure its immovable dominance in search, which is fundamentally based upon parsing the web graph of links better than anyone else. It has a gigantic $210 billion market cap that is also fundamentally based upon its continued ability to generate reality-defying free cash flow from that search dominance.

That free cash flow creates an irresistible force -- the market, in all its insane brilliance, attempting to reverse engineer Google's map of the Web and modify the link domain to suit the commercial desires of thousands, millions, of individual participants.

Unless Google had an endless bag of tricks up its sleeve, this was never going to end well. And indications are increasing that it's going to end badly. As Peter suggests, fighting paid links is like fighting terrorism. I've got an even more terrifying analogy than that: Fighting paid links is like fighting spam. At best the forces of order are at stalemate in the spam war, and there "we" benefit from the fact that there's no single obvious beneficiary from the current borked email system, and so every major Internet company is motivated to work together to stem the tide. In search, MSN and Yahoo and Facebook are perfectly happy to see Google go down... so defeat is even more likely than what we've seen on the spam front, not less.

I am seriously unhappy with the extent of Google's current dominance... but the prospect of a chaos without center may actually be worse.

This is going to be fascinating to watch. Google has incredible resources to bring to bear, and as I've said before, they haven't even really been tested yet. But... my money is on the market. I'm not short Google, but I'm not long, either. They're priced to perfection, and there are plenty of signs that all is not perfect out there.

Facebook: Options pricing is no hiring hurdle

The Wall Street Journal has a lurking-schadenfreude story which suggests that the imputed $15 billion valuation of Facebook after the Microsoft investment will cause them hiring problems. I think not.

Firstly, I'd be shocked if the clever guys at Facebook haven't structured this deal so that part of the money that Microsoft is paying doesn't accrete to an imputed valuation - instead, it's payment for ad rights, or something similar. If the accounting only puts half of the $240m against the stock purchase, then Facebook's value for options purposes is more like $7.5 billion.

Secondly, the rule of thumb in the Valley is to grant common options at a strike price of about 10% of the preferred, since these shares have less rights which can theoretically decrease their future value in many downside scenarios. That handily locks in a 10X gain in the all's-well-that-ends-well scenario.

Thirdly, most option-motivated employees are looking for a 10X gain in the enterprise value while they work there -- given the built-in 10X from the strike price rule of thumb, that nets out to about 100X in actual return on options for four years of sweat, toil, and tears. On the scale that FB is playing (high stakes, win or lose) that 100X translates to millions in any 'win' case. Can FB get to $75 billion in enterprise value over the next four years? It will be hard, but it's not impossible.

But there's another factor at work. Given the scale of what FB is trying to accomplish, they're looking to hire successful, smart people who have done it before. And it's in this context that the M$ money is a huge win. At this point in the evolution of the web, there's a very large class of professionals - engineers, product people, managers, BD and marketing people - who have mortgages, kids in school, and gold-plated resumes loaded with relevant experience for building great companies. People who, say, went from Netscape '95 to CommerceOne '98 to PayPal '01, just to make up one arc. Hiring those people is tough for an under-funded startup, because they're at a clearly different point on the options-vs-salary & benefits curve, favoring the latter. Google has accelerated its business by being able to pay top dollar for people at this stage of life -- the cream of the crop of HP, Sun, Oracle, and a dozen other companies -- and Facebook can now go toe to toe in compensation package for both upside-motivated and cashflow-driven superstars. As Google has demonstrated, when you join the young, hungry and brilliant with the wiser, experienced and brilliant, seismic events can happen.

The schadenfreude may yet play out, but not this time.

Want to talk local at Web 2.0? Email me

I will be at Web 2.0 for most of the conference. If you are going to be there and want to talk about local, email me myfirstname at zvents.com. If there's enough interest, I might try to put together a dinner on Thursday night. We could go to one of the 732 restaurants within half a mile of the conference.

Internet Retail: Painfully slow still nets you $100K per hour

I'm buying some birthday presents for my nieces and nephews, so I did separate orders on Lands' End today - one package per kid. My first order, ID number xxx1398, went through at 12:31pm; my second order, xxx2206, went through at 12:51pm. That's one order every 1.4 seconds. If you assume an average order size of 40 bucks, mid-day on this particular Saturday, Lands' End has an Internet cashflow of about $100,000 per hour.

If their site didn't suck, they might be doing 5X that.

The reason I'm on the Lands' End site at all is that my sister (bless her) directed me there for appropriate gifties, and it's alluringly easy for a time-swamped entrepreneur to follow through on such highly targeted suggestions. I'm not there because the LE brand springs first to my mind; I'm not there because they show up highly in a Google search; and I'm certainly not there because the shopping experience is pleasant.

I would rate the functionality of their site as 'high' -- for the particular gift I got (monogrammed bath towels) they have a highly interactive AJAX configurator that shows the particular color, pattern, monogram, etc. But the responsiveness is HORRIBLE - so much so that I read several New York Times articles in another Firefox tab while waiting for basic tasks like the switch from the item page to the shopping cart to.... load. And it's no coincidence that it took 20 minutes between my orders -- that is the total start-to-finish time I went through on executing the second order. 20 minutes!! I could drive downtown and buy something in that time... and if I were buying for myself, I just might.

They've got to be losing customers in huge volume, who either abandon during the search process, or abandon during the ordering process, simply because they get frustrated with the lag. It genuinely feels like dial-up.

As GigaOm noted earlier today, Silicon Valley is all excited about Web 2.0 and consumer, advertising-focused businesses right now, but there's a fortune to be made by some smart new startups building modern, effective Internet software for enterprises like Land's End.

Update: Lands' End actually owns the #1 organic spot for 'embroidered towel' on Google, apparently thanks to smart use of GoogleBase catalog upload. That kind of prime distribution makes their execution even more frustrating -- all those people showing up, and each one having a crappy experience.

More on Google / IBM 'cloud computing' initiative: Tech journalism stinks

The New York Times has a near-verbatim repeat of the News.com story. Mention of IBM's open-source tools is added:

"The centers will run an open-source version of Google’s data center software, and I.B.M. is contributing open-source tools to help students write Internet programs and data center management software."

I particularly enjoyed this Palmasino quote, given my observation last night:

Mr. Palmisano noted that cooperation between the two companies was easier because Google is mainly a consumer company, while I.B.M. concentrates on the corporate market. “We’re more complementary than anything else,” Mr. Palmisano said. “We don’t really collide in the marketplace.”

The Wall Street Journal actually adds a little journalistic merit to its piece, mentioning Sun, HP, and Microsoft as other players in the massive datacenter business; and laid out Google and IBM's open-source rationale as an anti-Microsoft differentiator:

"Frank Gens, an analyst with market-research concern IDC in Framingham, Mass., said the companies also are united by a rivalry with Microsoft, and "they'd like to influence the future of online business before Microsoft extends its influence." IBM and Google stressed that much of the infrastructure will be open-source programs that are freely available, rather than proprietary software programs such as those sold by Microsoft."

There are a number of commentaries visible on Techmeme, none of which goes any deeper than the source articles; Donna Bogatin questions the neat "consumer/business split" but that's all the analysis I see. And none of the commentaries or source articles mention Amazon, who's done more in this area with EC2 and S3 than anyone.

Hopefully someone will start asking some useful questions soon.

UPDATE: The Google press release has key details:

"For this project, the two companies have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects. The servers will run open source software including the Linux operating system, XEN systems virtualization and Apache's Hadoop project, an open source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS)."

Key questions answered:
* No Google code open-sourced
* No advanced functionality (BigTable) -- just MapReduce/GFS as implemented in Hadoop.
* Yes, Kevin was wrong (sorry, Kevin :-)

This all fits quite nicely -- IBM gets a great new Open Source Java/Eclipse program to promote (Hadoop is all written in Java), and Google gets to promote its world-view without going through the hassle of open-sourcing any of its own code.

Google, IBM to fund 'cloud computing' data centers for open research

So says this article in news.com. Clearly, IBM and Google have agreed to divide the Microsoft universe between them -- IBM wants to own B2B, and Google wants to own B2C. We'll see whether Microsoft acquiesces to this plan

I'll be very curious to see if Kevin Burton was right about the open-source release of GFS, MapReduce, and BigTable. If he was, I'm never playing poker with him :-)

Questions:
* Is this just an open service, or open-source software?
* Is it separate storage and processing (like S3 and EC2) or linked processing and storage?
* Does it include advanced functionality (BigTable) or just lower-level components (MapReduce)

Looking forward to finding out more...

Nokia + Navteq: Local, meet mobile

Today's announcement that Nokia is buying Navteq at a $2 billion premium to its market cap is a very big deal. Winning the next generation of the Web is all about owning data, and Navteq is the clear leader in local data. As the second use case for local emerges -- mobile users with immediate contextual questions, as opposed to deskbound users planning for the future -- Nokia's mobile platform technologies and devices will play more and more central a role in user's access to information. Navteq's data underpins both of those use cases, both today and in the future.

When Google is building phones, Nokia is buying data service companies, and Apple is gleefully playing up and down the stack, it's time to recognize that the mobile/web, phone/computer convergence that we've been talking about for at least 10 years is finally arriving.