Monthly Archives: February 2008

Kurzweil on cellular level computing

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Ray Kurzweil is shaking up our idea of what will be with his amazing predictions about the future of computing – a future he thinks will soon lead to the emergence of computers so small and powerful they’ll drive our own thinking processes from within.     Speaking to the gaming conference   today Kurzweil noted that the accelerating advances in computer technology will soon allow fully immersive virtual reality experiences which will be coming to a body near you.     Cool.

MicrosoftOxymorons

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OK, not quite an oxymoron, but here is the latest “headline” from Microsoft that comes pretty close to contradicting it’s own strategic premise:

Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability.
New interoperability principles and actions will increase openness of key products.

Huh?   Oh, OK, now I get it.  Hey, that really is big news, but I wonder if many folks will have a clue what all this means until it’s intrepreted by the media which is generally not all that sympathetic to the Big MS.     Why do they write like this?    It’s bad enough that these initiatives come like Microsoft is Google’s lap dog, chasing away at quality innovation two or three years too late.   Can’t they find somebody to state this stuff clearly?

It seems to me microsoft routinely shoots themselves in the foot before they are even out of the gate.  This happens for many reasons, but it is almost as if the company actually believes all the bad things about them and thinks they can only maintain dominance via monopoly and power plays rather than ….ummm…. working a lot harder to be customer centric, highly communicative, innovative and clever.    They can do it, but they don’t do it. 

Ironically all these goals are a key part of  what they are trying to do with this excellent open architecture  strategic initiative, but I think this great idea is almost lost in the bizarre Microsoft doublespeak we’ve all come to know and shake our heads at.

How would Google write a corresponding headline?

Microsoft Headline:
Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability.
New interoperability principles and actions will increase openness of key products.

Google Headline: 
We’re OPEN!

Yahoo Headline:
Help, we are about to be held prisoner in a Microsoft Soylent Green Fortune Cookie Factory! 

Google Adsense for Video, Google Health

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Google is the big news today with two major product initiatives.    The first is Google’s entry into the health records management business with trial recordkeeping at a Cleveland hospital.   AP reports

The second Google development is adsense for video, yet another attempt to monetize video.   I tested the last attempt, using YouTube advertising embeds, here at Funniest Online Videos.    The results were abysmal in terms of monetization although I didn’t push a lot of traffic through the site and used cheap low quality traffic.  However notable about the YouTube problems was Perez Hilton’s huge celebrity site with millions of visitors which only had something like $5000 in revenues despite many millions of clip views.    Perez has switched to different advertising approaches.

However I’m guessing Google’s been learning from the poor YouTube system and that the adsense will involve better targeting and probably better returns.    That said, I remain very skeptical that video can monetize well.   As with social networking or a TV show, a person’s relationship to the medium is very important in these money relationships.   Searching offers the potential for good monetization of a person’s natural behavior and relationship to the media – often it’s a “win win” where your search for camera information and camera deals also presents you with advertising you *want to see* because it’s relevant to your needs.    It is very hard to make that happen with video or social networking, which remain pretty barren environments for advertisers. 

…. and in the “old news” department Blodget suggests that the fat lady is singing in the Yahoo Microsoft deal and it’ll go down this way.    This scenario – minor jousting by MS followed by a small increase in the offer followed by Yahoo aquiescence – sounds very reasonable to me.

Gates on Yahoo: “It’s the People” | Yahoo on Gates “OMG! He’s making Soylent Green!”

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As Microsoft prepares for a proxy fight that will pit them agains the Yahoo board in the fight over control of Yahoo, Bill Gates is talking up the deal as a way for Microsoft to access the great talent pool of Yahoo.    Although he’s certainly right that Yahoo’s got a lot of great talent, it is not at all clear that most of them will stay and work for Microsoft.   I think a lot of the Yahoo staff will see MS as trying to consume them into the Micro Borg mother ship, rather than work with them to make a better Yahoo/MS to fight the Google wars.

I suspect they will if MS treats them right, and I think MS would treat them right, but it would not take an extraordinary poaching effort from Google to effectively dismantle the really great parts of Yahoo.   Oh, yes, and this Google poaching has already begun. 

A couple years ago – at the Google Party no less – I was involved in a fascinating conversation with one of the key search guys from Microsoft’s search engineering team and another top engineer from Google.  One of the most interesting topics was how MS felt that Google had very selectively poached a key Microsoft search insider.    The MS guy said until that point he felt Google had been basically playing fair, but that he knew from that episode that Google was strategically picking off people not so much because they wanted them but because Microsoft *needed* them.      He felt this defied the “don’t be evil” Google mantra and had soured him on Google’s honesty in these matters.    Suffice it to say that as much as I think Google *usually* does follow the “don’t be evil” mantra there was some pretty interesting clandestine activity going on at that party to record the MS guy as several beers got him to spill more beans about the MS algorithm.    In fact it was then I realized how weak the MS search effort was with what he said were only 300 engineers working in search, while Google had *thousands*.

Gates is certainly wrong that the cultures are the same.   Based on my experiences with people from these three companies I’d suggest the cultures are pretty clear:   MS culture is a massive corporate empire with lots of heirarchies, corporate bloat, somewhat overbearing, and diminishes the role of the individual as a key part of the big team.  People are not proud to be with MS – they are often almost apologetic.

Google is flexible with lots of lateral motion in terms of project and ideas.   Ideas and cleverness will trump formal designations which are few anyway.   You can stand next to a top engineer worth tens of millions and a new hire and you can’t tell which is which – not even from the way they treat each other and certainly not from the casual dress or styles.    Google people are smart and confident, and generally very helpful and well-informed with the notable exception of questions about ranking quirks where transparency goes pretty much out the window.

Yahoo?   I think they *used to be* just like Google, but managed to mov in the direction of managerial bloat and questionable treatment of engineers several years ago.  They paid people well, but I think the focus moved away from search and engineering and towards a content and entertainment empire.  This was a mistake, and Yahoo’s about to to pay the price – they are about to get absorbed into the MS empire.    But don’t worry Yahoo engineers – they are not making much Soylent Green over there anymore.  Right Bill?

Ina on Gates

Disclosure:  Long on YHOO 

Farber in charge at CNET: A good move

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Premier Tech news website CNET has a new editor in chief.  Dan Farber takes over today, and as a tech journalist *and prominent tech blogger* the choice of Farber is smart for CNET and a sign that blogging sensibilities are playing an important role even in “legacy” media outlets, though it’s funny to consider CNET – a groundbreaking online news network – “legacy”.    Yet in this rocket paced online world most of us now turn to TechCrunch before CNET for breaking and insider news.    Partly for this reason and partly because CNET can’t leverage internet efficiencies as easily as leaner and meaner sites like TechCrunch, CNETs traffic and profitability has been suffering for some time.   Farber’s experience may help to bring more innovative approaches to blogging tech news at CNET, and Dan will recognize how important it is to work to establish a social network that revolves around CNET’s tech coverage.     Mike Arrington has done this brilliantly at TechCrunch and it drives their very successful efforts.    Sites like DailyKos and Huffington report as well.  Others have built smaller communities around their blogs with more modest levels of success.  CNET already has a brand and a large body of quality journalistic experience and tech related content.   Let’s see what Dan does with all that.

Journablogger Battle Dome 2008

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Blogging people love a heated argument and Mike Arrington always aims to please, so he nailed Fred Wilson for a few inconsistencies in his otherwise very reasonable post suggesting the obvious – that blogs tend to have lower standards of accuracy than mainsteam journal articles.   I don’t think this can be reasonably disputed though I think on balance I’d rather have the fast paced, up to the minute blog coverage that is sometimes inaccurate than the next-day-fact-checked-cold-news that we sometimes see with mainstream technology coverage. 

Of course I hope the Journablogging does not upset Fred too much because I predict things will get *much* worse before they get better.   Monetizing is increasingly dependent on article output, and blogs like TechCrunch are pumping out articles faster than you can click on an RSS feed, and systems like TechMeme encourage mass postings to increase the chance you’ll be seen.    The flood of blogged tech news has only just begun, and accuracy is already one of the first casualties.

Matt explains all this wisely.  He’s pretty smart for a real journalist..

143 Million Pounds of Beef Recalled…from your stomach.

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Could somebody help me understand why the latest beef recall isn’t stupid?   This is terrifying millions of parents despite the fact that there is almost certainly close to zero health risk here according to the FDA.  Oh, also there is the challenge of the fact that most of this beef has already been eaten by you and me.  Excuse me while I barf it up for the FDA?

The FDA notes:
We do not feel this product presents a health risk of any significance

Oh, that clears things up for me.  Rules require the recall of perfectly safe beef- enough to  feed the entire country for days and valued at close to 100 million dollars -because..ummm ….huh?

This is yet another case of absurd bureacracy driven by absurd irrational concerns of absurd people.   Mad Cow?   Still *zero* deaths.   Stop worrying about this crap!   There are millions dying all over the place from *real* hazards like malaria, malnutrition, no seat belts, gun proliferation, and wars.  Those are legitimate concerns.  Bad beef is not. 

Caveat:  The company that this came from appears to be in violation of many rules.  Close them down if that’s wise – I don’t have enough detail to know.   But the recall appears to be rule based spitefulness rather than reason.   My tax dollars, squandered again, costing more people their beef and more future cows their precious cow lives. 

You know, if they recall any french fries I’m moving to Canada.

Engineering’s Grand Challenges

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The National Academy of Engineering has suggested a list of the world’s greatest and most important engineering challenges, and it looks pretty comprehensive to me.   If we can solve all these problems we’ll really be taking life on earth up a few notches and kicking some globally sustainable problematic butt.   

I hope they add a priority and ROI component here.    My feeling is that reverse engineering of the brain will lead to general Artificial Intelligence and very rapid solutions to most if not all analytical problems.   Thus I’d like to see us devote, say, 1/100th of what we are poised to squander failing to solve CO2 problems to AI research.     But even if we forego that notion it’s questionable to spend in engineering as we currently do, especially on huge military technologies of questionable effectiveness.

 Here are the Grand Challenges for engineering as determined by a committe of the National Academy of Engineering:

  • Make solar energy economical
  • Provide energy from fusion
  • Develop carbon sequestration methods
  • Manage the nitrogen cycle
  • Provide access to clean water
  • Restore and improve urban infrastructure
  • Advance health informatics
  • Engineer better medicines
  • Reverse-engineer the brain
  • Prevent nuclear terror
  • Secure cyberspace
  • Enhance virtual reality
  • Advance personalized learning
  • Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

Blogger.com troubleshooting – ghs.google.com IP fix

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Posting a blogger.com fix I just struggled with for some time.  This sounds more complicated than it is but I could find little online to help me, so hopefully I’ll save somebody future time with this post.

I wanted to run my Airports Blog as part of AirportCityCodes.com, hosted at Verio.    Blogger (owned and run by Google) has a great IP redirection feature that lets you run a blog off your domain by creating a CNAME record that directs to ghs.google.com and accesses your blogspot blog.    Normally this works fine, but Verio’s DNS system will reject ghs.google.com because it in turn is an alias for ghs.l.google.com.    Verio claimed that Google using improper DNS protocol by telling people to use ghs.google.com.

The blogger fix at Verio is to use this:    ghs.l.google.com.    

Note the period at the end which is needed at Verio to keep them from appending your domain name to the record. 

If this does not work, or at some other registrars (Network Solutions was mentioned somewhere), I think you’ll want to use the IP address for ghs.l.google.com which is this:    72.14.207.121

I hope this works for you, and if not let me know as I use this feature for many blogs and I’m always interested in Troubleshooting tips, especially for blogs.