Category Archives: companies

Blinkx

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Blinkx is a brilliant video search program that allows people to search *within* videos for specific content.  This has become one of the holy grails of search because the internet is now awash in video content. Tastes vary but almost everyone would agree that most of the clips out there are garbage. With routines like Blinkx users can rapidly search the tidal wave of video that pours online every day for things that interest them.

Check out the Blinkx home page with it’s “wall” of tiny video clips reflecting content they have recently indexed.   It’ll keep the attention of even the most stubborn A.D.D. sufferer.   Some cringe at the sensory overload of dozens of videos, but massive input reflects the new ethos of the internet, and I predict we’ll see desktops and applications become increasingly overwhelmed with content.    As a superb tool that will manage the most rapidly growing and complex part of the digital maelstrom – video clips – Blinkx has a rosy future indeed.

The New York Times reports on this today.

Larry Page – Artificial Intelligence attainable.

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Over at Battelle’s there is a good AI discussion. I’m always amazed by how reluctant we humans are to realize that our intellectual abilities are neat, but generally overrated. In the evolution debate you see folks unwilling to recognize the obvious fact that humans are *almost certainly* an evolutionary extension of simpler organisms. In the AI debate even many who agree that humans are the product of evolution seem reluctant to assume that machines will ever attain consciousness.

Sure, there are significant computational and possibly biological hurdles in the quest for a fully conscious machine intellect, but there’s little reason to think these can’t be overcome within at most a few decades and hopefully sooner.

Hey – maybe I’m just sucking up to the intelligent machines so they’ll like me when they start reading the internet stuff written before they were conscious. Shame on me!

Dell Ideastorm, a great idea!

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Today Dell announced a social networking / Digg style site that they’ll use to collect ideas for new products.   I think it’s a great idea.   Not clear to me yet if Dell is going to use this for collective troubleshooting as well, which I think would be far more helpful than new product ideas.    Typically in my experience user forums are VERY cumbersome to use and I find it’s better to simply do Google searches and hope you bump into some expert commentary about a problem.  However with DIGG like content evaluation and better organization a sort of DELL FAQ / Troubleshooter would be great.

Kirkland’s Shareware Coffeehouse. Order what you want, pay whatever you like.

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This social and economic cafe experiment by a Seattle Googler is fascinating, especially because it’s actual appears to be working so far to generate enough to keep the business going.  There are no prices and people’s contributions are not monitored.   Thus even the normal social pressure you’d have with, for example, a church collection plate are largely absent here in the Kirkland Cafe.

I’m totally skeptical of this model as a scalable type of business, but it’s sure interesting.   Burning man sensibilities come to mind.

Yahoo’s Big Day?

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The NYT reports that today is of great interest at Yahoo as Yahoo fully launches their new contextual advertising matching routines. If successful, Yahoo’s profits could soar this year. Ironically it was Yahoo that aquired the company that effectively invented the pay per click ad model (GOTO renamed Overture now renamed Yahoo Publisher Network). This happened many years ago, but Yahoo failed to capitalize on the head start and it was Google that created a brilliant ad matching algorithm. This ad matching routine allows Google to make a lot more money per visitor than Yahoo and other search engines. Since Google also has a lot more search visitors, their profits have been skyrocketing while Yahoo and Microsoft search profits have languished.It’s interesting to think how little tweaks can quickly impact the amount of money flowing through these systems. Google makes over ten million per *day* from online ads, Yahoo much less but still millions per day. Thus if, for example, the matching routine screws up for a *few hours* and shows irrelevant ads Google can lose millions of dollars in revenue. Conversely if Yahoo can match Google’s ad matching prowess with the new system there’s a lot of money they’ve been effectively leaving on the table that’ll flow into Yahoo’s revenue stream and profits.

Disclaimer: I have some Yahoo Stock.

Mark Cuban, the sage of internet video?

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I think Mark Cuban  has more valid points than Cory does on the controversies swirling around copyright and takedown notices delivered by Viacom.     Cory is right that it’s annoying and obnoxious to send takedowns to people who obviously are not infringing, but that’ll shake out soon enough.  What isn’t shaking out soon enough is what I’ve discussed at length before – YouTube and Myspace and other big players are making hundreds of millions by purposing user generated content to their commercial needs.   I’d even concede that commercialism is not the bottom line on these big player/user interactions, and also concede that users like me are agreeing to provide content that in turn gets searched at Google and generates money for them and *sometimes* for me.

However as Mark correctly notes it’s significant to ask within the copyright, content, and user community issue this question:  Who gets the lion’s share of the revenues created by copyright holders or community participants?    I’d like to see more of that cash flow to the community and less to the big players.   But maybe that’s just because I’m a community guy?

Go Mavs!

BarCamp USA 2007

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Wow, if BarCamp USA <<too bad… it’s been cancelled >>really pulls in 5000 technology enthusiasts it could be the best conference of the year, and in Wisconsin no less. At a cost of $50 it’ll also be close to the cheapest.

What? You don’t know what a BarCamp is?

I love the unconference formats. After attending about ten computer conferences over the past 18 months including Microsoft’s MIX06 and WebmasterWorld’s in Las Vegas and Boston, my favorite conference was MashupCamp 1, a dynamic gathering of startups and mashup developers down in Silicon Valley at the Computer Science Museum. Dave Berlind, Doug Gold, and supporters did a fantastic job with these Mashup Camps and I’m sorry I missed the one just held in Boston and will miss Mashup Camp IV in July because I’ll be in Pennsylvania for our family reunion.

Organizers of the BarCamp USA say they expect 5000 but could handle up to 20,000. I sure hope this approach prevails in the conference space rather than the expensive and exclusive conferences that are tailored primarily to support existing large companies and sales efforts. I should say that Brett and his crew do a fine job making WebmasterWorld an inexpensive and great conference compared to the alternatives.

Fancy Las Vegas parties at nightclubs like TAO and PURE are really fun and neat, but the really profound changes in technology are only partly happening over cocktails in Las Vegas. They are ALSO happening inside laptops plastered with goofy stickers, handled by young geeks who haven’t even learned how to do laundry. BarCamps cater to that crowd, and that’s a crowd you want to pay attention to if you want to better understand where tech is headed … and headed fast.

Fred: Flickr’s Frickin’ Fantastic!

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Like any good Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson is trying to figure out what the heck is going on …. online, and looking for great examples of companies that are doing things right.

I could not agree more that Flickr is a stunning example of how to get the new internet right.  The photo handling is superb, the interface is easy and intuitive, the tools are powerful, the basic service is free, the buzz is friendly and cordial throughout the site, and perhaps most importantly it’s easy to share photos and intergrate them with blogs.

No wonder Caterina Fake was hanging at Davos this year!

Google + Kiosks = Coolness!

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Wow, I sure hope the rumors about a Google Kiosk project are true. I like Google and I like Kiosks. Here in Oregon I was involved in computer kiosks for over ten years. Back in 1990 I managed one of the USA’s earliest multimedia projects using IBM Infowindow Touch monitors, computers, and laserdisc players. That was a US Forest Service partnership with my former employer the Southern Oregon Visitors Association, and we had 30 units in tourism places all over Southern Oregon.

This project led to a new project I designed and deployed as part of a SOVA, State, and National Scenic Byways partnership that put internet connected units in about 15 places. The internet solved many of the problems with the early kiosk project such as real time information availability, though it brought a host of new problems with rural connectivity issues and eventually a lack of enthusiasm for a complicated, grant driven project.

Could Google bring the necessary ingredients to make Kiosks commercially viable? I think they could by deploying broadly and with enough of an advertising footprint to interest national players who would appreciate being both in the programs and on the sides of the cabinets.

Good luck Google, I’ll always root for touch computer kiosks!

Related link – HUGE touchscreen with mapping demo – fantastic!

Who, what, which Wiki?

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There’s a new search in Internet Town called WikiSeek that is creating a search within Wikipedia and sites linked to by Wikipedia. It’s an excellent idea though I’m not clear it’ll lead to better results than a normal search engine query. Wikipedia is generally better than the snail paced DMOZ at reflecting “related sites”, but like DMOZ the politics and anti-commercial concerns of Wikipedia often get in the way of good articles. Wikipedia is notoriously sparse when listing “related” sites. Like many open source driven projects there is a “NO COMMERCIALIZATION WHATSOEVER” bias that gets in the way of providing the best available information which is increasingly found on commercial sites and blogs, which are not treated favorably enough by DMOZ or Wikipedia.

As TechCrunch noted today WikiSeek is going to get confused big-time with Jimmy Wales Wikimedia Search project which is destined to become a huge addition to the search landscape. Formerly known (well – sort of formerly known?) as the Wikiasari project and still called that by most, it’ll be a robust, community driven search that used human editing to keep out the junk and bring in the jewels rather than the algorithmic approaches taken by Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and most other major players. Confusing things further is the fact that projects like WikiSeek above are not primarily a Wiki, they are, wishfully, a way to work with Wikis.

What?

I think somebody might want to clue in the Wiki crowd to the following challenge:

Few people, even total immersion code crazed onliners, are really comfortable with Wikis. Most pretend to be but when it’s time to collectively participate in a wiki I’ve *never* seen it work nearly as well as the collective results from blogs, which reward individuals with attention rather than reward the collective with information. MashupCamp1 and 2 were filled with very capable internet programmers. In fact even the *inventor* of the Wiki, Ward Cunningham, was there (he’s a great Oregonian fellow who invented the Wiki as a collaboration tool for on computer projects). Yet even in this potentially Wiki-rich environment the lack of updating of the Mashup Camp Wiki was conspicuous. Rather it was blogs, Flickr, and huge sheets of paper that kept people well informed during these intense and infoManiacal extravaganzas.

So, I think big Wiki projects like Wikipedia and the upcoming Wikimedia search have huge potential, largely because they constrain the organization of things such that the big project benefits from huge community participation.

Little bitty Wikis? Let’s just scrap them and have everybody crosslink the blogs, OK?