Zvents raises $24M for local & mobile search

It has been pointed out to me that for a blog ostensibly about things other than Zvents, there's been hardly anything but Zvents news here of late.

Separately, it has been pointed out to me that for a life that is ostensibly about other things in addition to Zvents, I've been doing precious little but work of late.

To you my blog readers let me say that this is the last Zvents post for quite a while; and to you my friends and family let me say... hang in there, it can't stay this crazy for ever.

That being said:

Zvents raised $24M in funding from Nokia Growth Partners, AT&T, Navteq, and our existing venture investors Vantage Point and Red Rock. We will use this money to make our local search service for our media network even more awesome; advance our very promising new local ad model; and as a warm, fuzzy security blanket against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Lots of people are writing about our round, including VentureBeat and Paid Content, as well as local gurus Pete Krasilovsky of Kelsey and Greg Sterling.

AT&T even issued their own press release about their strategic investment in Zvents.

How did we manage to raise all that money in tough times for both VCs and startups? Is there a pony in there somewhere? Forbes lays out a nice explanation.

And now... back to work building the future of local search.

The Google Alphabet: 23% of top search terms are local

Brady Forrest has a nice post over at O'Reilly Radar about the 'Google Alphabet,' the top suggested search terms for each letter. He makes a bunch of interesting historical observations, but through my local lens I noticed something different:

23% of top search terms are local.

The list:

Craigslist
Ikea
John Lewis (a UK retailer)
Sears
Target
Zipcodes

6/26=23%. You could argue that 'Kelly Blue Book' is a 7th, but you could also argue that there are some ecommerce implications to some of the retailer name searches, so we'll call it a wash.

Local search is very big business.

Update: I posted this to my blog and checked out how it looked, and lo and behold, the very first local event for today in the SF Bay Area displaying on my Zvents left sidebar widget was 'Target Free Sundays' at the Asian Art Museum. Apparently retailer Target is sponsoring Sunday museum admissions as a local marketing tool. Yet another example of local merchants using events to promote their businesses.

Zvents news: Too much to ignore!

I've got a list of interesting topics right here on my desk, on a couple of increasingly tattered Post-it notes.

There's the 'Poker Analogy' post for machine learning-driven processing of log data.
There's the 'Match.com Analogy' post for how search is a collaborative process.
There's the 'Spice Rack' post on building search relevance.
And there's the 'Smart Delivery of Dumb Objects' post about ad targeting.

In addition to these four fascinating posts (trust me ;-) I've got at least two really cool related product ideas moldering on that same little collection of decaying desktop notes.

So what's keeping me from fulfilling my bloggy destiny? As usual, Lots Is Happening (I almost typed Happyning... can your fingers create malaprops?) at Zvents.

Today's particular news is that as our marketing VP Paul O'Brien has noted at length, we're launching dozens of campus guides for MTVu, powered by Zvents local search. It's gotten a ton of press, written by people less busy than I -- check it out!

Substantive posting will resume in September. I think.

14-year-old real estate moguls and the end of bubbles

Home in Detroit sells for $1.

Writes the Detroit News, "...some abandoned homes in Detroit sell for $100; vacant lots can be purchased for $300."

"My 14-year-old son could buy a block of Detroit property," said Ann Laciura, senior servicing specialist for the Bearing Group.

Whenever someone tells you that it's impossible for an asset class to go to zero, they're either dumb, or hoping that you are. If the carrying costs and net obligations of any asset exceed the cashflow, it's worth zero or less than zero. We saw this a lot during 2001-2002, as companies with insane cost structures met grim fates, occasionally returning as shadows of their former selves, or reinvented as actual profitable businesses.

Businesses probably worth less than zero right now:
GM and Chrysler
Citibank and Washington Mutual

Silicon Valley got crushed in the last asset bubble deflation. This time around will be relatively kind to us, but there will still be pain.

Winter is coming.

Dancing with Elephants

I try to keep the Zvents news to a minimum here, but I'm very excited to note that we're now powering local event search for the new MSN CityGuides. We've been powering major media sites since our first partner, the San Jose Mercury News, launched in July of 2006 -- over two years now, and it's seemingly gone in the blink of an eye. Even versus our now-hundreds of local media partners, big sites like MSN are a whole new level of scale. It's not just their userbase - which numbers in the millions per month - but as one of the biggest technology companies on the planet, their expectations around SLAs, integration, product and project processes, etc., require us to really step up our game. I'm excited that we're proving that we can play in this league. We may still be a little mouse of a company, but we're dancing with elephants ;-)



Some coverage of the announcement -- thanks, guys!

Greg Sterling before
Greg Sterling after (No, Greg, you didn't blow the embargo!)
SeachEngineWatch
LostRemote
Adotas Interactive Advertising
Local Biz Bits

Search relevance and the data-driven web

My frustration with CNET's informative but misguided article on Microsoft's BrowseRank has only redoubled with the reading of some other stuff like Andy Ha's breathless and utterly silly piece on VentureBeat -- I refuse to link to it, but you can go look it up if you're curious. Example phrases (good for searching on, too ;-):

"could really shake up the search landscape"
"it would upend the way companies get attention online."
"it might be able to reverse MSN Search’s slide towards irrelevance."
"a new kind of search"

Aargh.

I decided to channel my powers for good instead of evil, and rather than trolling in the VentureBeat comments, I decided to trawl through the Onotech archives and pull together many pieces I've written about search relevance into this one handy post that I can refer to in the future.

Note that this is not just about search. Search is just one facet to the golden rectangle of the data-driven web -- search, ad targeting, discovery, and analytics -- that makes every modern web company rivers of cash. All of these product mechanisms share underlying concepts and technologies, and I've blogged about them (and the infrastructure that makes them possible) many times over the years. Here, in time order, are some of the better posts on the concepts behind the data-driven web.

Another time, I'll pull together a second summary blog post on infrastructure thoughts - because there are some really cool software technologies that make this all possible.

This is also probably a great time to show off my birthday present from Somer Simpson:

Schweet. I may make T-shirts -- email me if you want one ;-)

OK, here we go:

Click data drives not just search, but all advertising

The impact of monetization on search result ranking

Query type differentiation and machine learning

All search is social search because people determine value

On relevance/selection mechanisms, and types of voting

The four fundamental ways to determine ranking

Updated:
How to better understand user intent

CNET on BrowseRank: An informative article with a nonsensical premise

It's great to see a well-written, informative article, "Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank," about an innovation in search ranking, published at a major tech news outlet like CNET. Stephen Shankland's piece on Microsoft's BrowseRank is definitely all that. It thoughtfully discusses the concept that people's click behavior is a very powerful (and different) voting popularity mechanism than the link graph of PageRank to assess web page search relevance. All good.

However it's maddening to see yet another naive or deliberately misleading article on an innovation in search ranking, that perpetuates persistent misunderstanding of how search works and what makes search better. Maybe it's just a standard media trope to essentialize any topic to the point of parody, but I'm so tired of seeing pieces that fetishize "The Algorithm" as some singular magical trump card by which search is won and lost. Combining scientific models to produce a ranking function is difficult, obscure, and incredibly important, so to some extent I can understand why the media keeps writing stories focused on this. But it's sort of like watching a Saturn V take off for the moon, and turning confidently to your neighbor and saying, "that thing takes off because NASA figured out The Engine... I hear the Russians are working on something better than "The Engine."

Please. Great search is made up of a couple major areas of competence:
* Scaled aggregation of content. It doesn't matter how good your matching might be if you don't have what the user wants in your cupboard of goodies.
* Scaled user voting behavior to assess value. Be this the ability to crawl and assess hyperlinks, access to and the ability to assess user clicks, or one of (as Udi Manber rightly says) hundreds of other variously valuable and tractable methods, you need access to behavior metadata, crystallized in one form or another
* A scientific process and platform by which you can run many experiments to fine-tune the value of various voting behavior signals.
* A technological platform to rapidly and cost-effectively perform this mind-boggling level of computation, faster than the answers and the questions are evolving on a global scale.
* A bunch of really great scalability engineers to build that platform
* A bunch of really great search scientists to conceive, build, and test models on a continuous basis
* Oh, and a very effective monetization effort to pay for all of this incredibly expensive infrastructure, people, and time cost.

It sounds a lot more like General Motors circa 1955 than it does "genius in a garage cooking up the next great thing," doesn't it? Perhaps that's why the media always falls into this trap - the brilliant loner or breakthrough insight that changes the world is just such a powerful narrative hook, whereas a discipline, competence, process story is just kind of... boring.

The reality of world-class search today is that it's big, complicated, and multi-faceted. It has emerged into a discipline of technology all its own, and advances will tend to be subtle and hard to explain. Remember that whenever you read the next excited story about the Next Great Algorithm.

Update: I've written a new post that channels my grumpiness to productive ends -- a few more thoughts on the data-driven web and an index to my various posts on search relevance. Reporters, please read them all... twice!

The tech bubble's toxic legacy

An article on GigaOm caught my eye: "With Exits Barred, VCs Keep Investments Flat". In the piece, Stacey Higganbotham relates the reassuring news to entrepreneurs that VC investment in early stage companies remains strong, and that later-stage deals are being done at a historic clip -- 318 in the second quarter alone. But then she drops this little tidbit:

If those companies don’t exit within the next two to three years, VCs will have to start selling at a loss or pushing firms into bankruptcy.

Huh?! What's wrong with this picture? Any 'late stage' deal likely means a C and possibly a B round -- so the company involved has been in business for 2 or 3 years already when it raises the round; and the round should last it for at least another 18 months.

The presumption here is that tech startups don't get to profitability.

This is the worst legacy of the tech bubble, when lots of permanently unprofitable companies were started, funded, and even IPOed. It's got nothing to do with the true legacy of Silicon Valley, where superstars of past eras -- Intel, Apple, Sun, PeopleSoft, Oracle -- became insanely profitable companies. And this presumption is blinding us to what's happening in the Valley today. It's the same mistake that made you not buy Google shares at $85 in 2005, and you shouldn't let it blind you again.

I personally know of at least three highly profitable startups that may go public in the next 12 months, and may not. All three of them have been in business for over five years, and they are throwing off not just revenue but cash profit at a very impressive rate. To those three, I can add at least a dozen that I'm pretty sure are highly profitable as well, I just don't know for certain. All of these companies are the types of startups that are raising the "late stage rounds" that Stacey seems to believe must lead to exit or bankruptcy, because there is no third path.

Every startup that I've built has been intended from Day 1 not just to be transformative to its market, but to be a real, profitable business, with real customers. That's the true legacy of Silicon Valley, and the sooner we get our heads past the failed abberation of 1999-2001, the better.

Doug Judd presents Hypertable at Structure '08

Liz Gannes at GigaOm has the story and the pictures. Hypertable will be going beta Real Soon Now, and we're very pleased at the press and traction that it's been getting. It's the featured article in the June 2008 Linux magazine (link soon when it's on the web) and Doug has a pretty packed speaking schedule this summer including OSCON and FOO Camp.

Even more exciting is that we've got Hypertable in production at Zvents, and we're starting to see some of the benefits of a really fast and scalable analytic platform for search relevance, analytics, and ad targeting.

It's not that often that you can do a cool thing, a good-for-the-world thing, and a smart business thing all at once. I'm pretty happy that our two-year adventure with Hypertable appears to be that rare intersection.

Jeff Weiner, CEO of Facebook?

It's pretty common for accomplished executive talent to join VCs in EIR positions -- with the 'E' being either 'Entrepreneur' or 'Executive' In Residence. But this may be the first time that I've seen someone join *two* VC firms in such a role simultaneously. The purpose of an EIR role is to help advance the agenda ( = fund returns) of the VC, while advancing the career of the exec. Hard to do that for two different VCs at once. So unless Weiner is such a rare talent that he got Accel and Greylock to agree to go halvsies on his potential future value creation, there must be some reason that that they're mutually interested in him.

The biggest thing that Accel and Greylock have going together is... Facebook. Now we all know that Mark Zuckerberg is firmly ensconced in the CEO role there. But is he really? A year later, Beacon is a failure. Jerry Yang has spent the last six months giving us all a lurid demonstration that even with fifteen years of seasoning, founding CEOs rarely are the right guys to manage public companies. Facebook has made no secret of its intentions to stay independent and go public. So... Jeff Weiner as CEO of Facebook? Don't be surprised.

Is Weiner a good fit for Facebook? It's a company with serious platform ambitions, which has been successfully recruiting senior technical talent from Google. It's a classic Web 2.0 company, scaled to the max. And it's a company that is poised to inherit the mantle of Yahoo as the biggest property of the social/personal web, as Yahoo continues to bleed away its birthright. Here's a snippet of Weiner's resume from the Accel release:

During his tenure, Weiner helped drive the Network’s Open and Social strategy and expansion of the company’s category-leading consumer web products... Prior to his Network role, Weiner was part of the Search leadership team that directed the acquisition and integration of Inktomi, AltaVista, FAST as well as the development of Yahoo! Search Technology. He helped launch the company's suite of social search products - including Yahoo! Answers - and led the acquisitions of del.icio.us and Flickr. He was also part of the leadership team formed to help revitalize the company's Search Marketing efforts.

Yeah, that experience might just apply to what Facebook is trying to do.

Kara Swisher has some thoughts on the implications of Weiner's departure from Yahoo, and she also wrote the magic 'Facebook' word before I did ;-)

It's all happening

I generally try to keep the Zvents posting light. This is not a long post about the company - it's just a quick note, somewhat of a milestone of awe. I've been so silent for so long because I've been utterly immersed, spun up in a tornado of business - for four months now, seemingly without end. It's been incredible. Exhausting. Exhilarating. I just did a quick count, and I've received 195 emails today - 97 of which came after 5pm. This past Memorial Day weekend, from 4pm on Friday through Monday at midnight, I personally did more business than many startups see in a month. At least six customer and partner calls, and endless email. This is not meant to brag. It's more of a sense of wonderment. When everything starts working, the net acceleration is just incredible.

I hope there's not a big wall out there just over the horizon, because we're moving at the speed of light.

Snapshot taken. We'll see in time which story it's telling.

AOL: The Network is the Content, the Network is the Ad

There are two big AOL announcements floating up TechMeme today. Most interesting is the news from Comscore that due to Platform A/Ad.com, AOL leads all major internet companies in reach, touching 9 out of 10 users on the internet.

The second is that AOL has acquired Sphere, Tony Conrad's blog recommendation engine, for about $25m. Since it launched three years ago, Sphere has done a great job of bringing its 'related commentary' widget to the content pages of very large sites like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Time magazine.

These two announcements are related, and I'm surprised that the usual commentators haven't picked up on this yet. The future of the internet is becoming increasingly clear -- it's advertorial, or a blend of commerce and content. In a huge number of cases, the content that users consume - presented either editorially, via search, or via a recommendation - is highly commercial in nature. If you care about gadgets, for instance, Engadget or Sony.com are both great landing sites for your online explorations. Cars? You may go to an enthusiast site, or Porsche.com.

Both content and advertising are best distributed via analytics- and algorithm-driven networks. Sphere is quite simply an algorithmic content redistribution network, and AOL's platform A is a (targeting) algorithm driven advertising network. These are different stripes on the same zebra.

Google, of course, has been experimenting with embedding content such as YouTube videos into its huge AdSense network; and there are a number of very interesting large-scale advertorial networks emerging such as Aggregate Knowledge's Pique. (Disclosure: I am an investor in AK). I will be very interested to see how AOL adds Sphere in to its market-leading network, and to watch how this emergent trend evolves.

Alan Greenspan is the Robert McNamara of economics

I was reading Krugman's latest piece on the ongoing meltdown of the capital markets, and he offered this quote:

Meanwhile, false beliefs in the political arena — the belief of Alan Greenspan and his friends in the Bush administration that the market is always right and regulation always a bad thing — led Washington to ignore the warning signs. By the way, Mr. Greenspan is still at it: accepting no blame, he continues to insist that “market flexibility and open competition” are the “most reliable safeguards against cumulative economic failure.”

It hit me: Greenspan, in practice and in retrospect, reminds me of nothing so much as Vietnam-era defense secretary Robert McNamara, the proponent of "the domino theory," and his still-ongoing and increasingly tragic efforts to shift all blame from himself long after the disastrous damage is done.



Greenspan's trumpeting of the ludicrous notion of efficient markets and support for the demise of market regulation will one day been recognized as equivalent folly.

The real tragedy here is that both of these men are geniuses in every sense of the word. It's impossible to watch The Fog of War and not come away impressed with McNamara. I highly recommend that film to anyone who has ever suffered even a little from hubris or ego. McNamara is smarter than you, better educated than you, more subtle and strategic than you, and he still blew it about as badly as a human being in power ever has done. Why? I can only guess, ideology.

Which is exactly how Greenspan has sent our country into our current tailspin.

Coming to a theater near you in 2028, _The Fog of Commerce_.

Hopefully, coming soon to a government near you, competence unblinded by nonsense.

NYTimes: It's all about the data, dummy!

Great article in the NYTimes on ad targeting and data scale. This is probably the first intelligent article in the mainstream media that I can remember on this topic - explaining that the combination of on-site and off-site behavioral data by consumers is what's driving the Internet today. An extension to the claims in this piece is that the same data is used to drive *products* (i.e. search relevance) as well as ad targeting; but I'll wait for their follow-up piece to close that gap.

Worth noting: The NYTimes has integrated "blogs" and their conversational style allows Louise Story to add some useful and interesting information to the more formal article. Check out her piece at the "Bits" blog for more data and further insight.

Some key quotes:

The rich troves of data at the fingertips of the biggest Internet companies are also creating a new kind of digital divide within the industry. Traditional media companies, which collect far less data about visitors to their sites, are increasingly at a disadvantage when they compete for ad dollars.

The major television networks and magazine and newspaper companies “aren’t even in the same league,” said Linda Abraham, an executive vice president at comScore. “They can’t really play in this sandbox.”...

Web companies once could monitor the actions of consumers only on their own sites. But over the last couple of years, the Internet giants have spread their reach by acting as intermediaries that place ads on thousands of Web sites, and now can follow people’s activities on far more sites...

“So many of the deals are really about data,” said David Verklin...

Some advertising executives say media companies will have little choice but to outsource their ad sales to companies like Microsoft and Yahoo to benefit from their data. The Web companies may prove they can use their algorithms and consumer information to better select which ads for visitors better than media companies can.

“I think a lot of publishers are going to find they don’t have enough data,” said David W. Kenny, chief executive of Digitas, a digital advertising agency in the Publicis Groupe. “There’s only going to be a handful of big players who can manage the data.”...

Even with all the data Web companies have, they are finding ways to obtain more. The giant Internet portals have been buying ad-delivery companies like DoubleClick and Atlas, which have stockpiles of information. Atlas, for example, delivers 6 billion ads every day. The comScore figures do not capture such data.

I am pretty confident that there is at least one zero missing from every number the Times quotes in this article. This is happening today at a monumental scale, and will only get larger as time goes on.

Data is the new lock-in and sustainable competitive advantage.

So how do you collect, store, and analyze all that data? That's why we built Hypertable...

Google uses prior searches and spelling correction to match AdWords

I imagine that one of the problems that Google has is matching existing ad inventory against all the wonderful random crap that searchers type in - with many searches being really hard to monetize by "traditional" means. Thus the many experiments they run. I wonder what the ROI on this particular example is?

This is a random discovery which came about as I was looking up some old co-workers. First names have been changed to protect the innocent.

First I searched for my old co-worker "Ed" Biasi:


Note that there are no ads. Name searches are tough to monetize.

Then I searched for my old co-worker "Joe" Satchel:


Note the ad match - It's for a Biasia satchel - which is apparently some sort of $200 name-brand purse:

Not only is Google doing spelling correction on my Biasi search, they're remembering the immediate prior search term to match the ad. Apparently they only remember one prior search - when I did the same search twice (either Biasi or Satchel) the ad disappeared.

Fascinating.

Hypertable - press and traction

It's now been two weeks since we launched the 0.9 alpha of the Hypertable distributed database, and we've been a bit blown away with the excitement it's generated. The release got picked up on Slashdot (w00t!), in LinuxWorld, and just today, the 451 Group in the UK published another great piece. Meanwhile it's causing a little enthusiastic consternation in relational land -- my absolute favorite quote is from DBA4Life:

"HyperTable is sexy... yet, not relational... This is very confusing... I have to go now."

That's the sound of the world changing :-)

Most exciting, however is the level of engagment we've seen with the actual codebase, since that's where real open-source traction occurs. In addition to a vibrant mailing list, we're getting tons of feedback and bug reports - perhaps driven by the fact that in just two weeks, Hypertable has seen over 2600 downloads (!) -- of a 700MB tarball that you need significant skills to unpack and install. We're seeing all sorts of cool ideas about how this could be used, and look forward to many more.

Meanwhile, Zvents is laser-focused as always on the future of local search...

Hypertable is launched!

For the past year, Zvents has been sponsoring the open-source Hypertable project for a distributed, web-scale database and analytics platform. I am *very* pleased to announce that earlier today, the alpha version of Hypertable became available for download, at the new hypertable.org site.



Data scaling dudes of the world, rejoice!

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."