Google might soon be able to tell Wal-Mart shoppers if better bargains are available nearby.
Google is pretty close to doing that already. In a retail store, when you're looking at something on the store shelf, try using your cell phone to send a text message to Google SMS with the word "price" and the UPC code or a brief description. Google will get back to you in a few seconds with what online retailers are charging for that item.
I think a big concern with this is whether the answers people give are correct.
Given that money is involved, I think Amazon is going to find these pesky humans are pretty clever at doing things that might be in their self-interest, but not in the interest of people trying to get correct answers.
In the speech, Adam Bosworth predicted that "RSS 2.0 and Atom will be the lingua franca that will be used to consume all data from everywhere" because they "are simple formats that are sloppily extensible."
It's true that many seem to be moving in this direction. For example, A9's OpenSearch is a simple extension to RSS. The Findory API offers simple, RSS-based access to news and blog search results. Yahoo offers a few services through more the more complex Yahoo APIs, but offers many more through Yahoo RSS, including news and web search results.
It seems that most web services may end up standardizing on simple REST protocols using RSS and Atom.
Marissa Mayer at Google talks about Google Desktop Search as "the photographic memory of your computer." More details on my weblog post, "Google Memex".
"One of the guys that works at Microsoft... always says to me 'I'm ready, plug me in.,'" Gates said.
I suspect the person Bill Gates is talking about here is Ramez Naam. Ramez is a Microsoft old-timer. He recently wrote a book called More than Human. I haven't read it myself, but a couple of my friends have said it is quite good.
John Gruber wrote a great essay on this called "The Location Field is the New Command Line". As he put it, "Web apps are just so damned easy to use... It's all about the fact that you just type the URL and there's your email."
Chris Anderson (of Wired and The Long Tail fame) had a great post about why social networks might not be the best way to do recommendations and personalization. An excerpt:
No matter who you are, someone you don't know has found the coolest stuff.
The sad reality is that most of my friends have rotten taste in music (I don't hold it against them), while the music recommendations I actually follow are mostly from people I've never met.
The assumption that there's a correlation between the people I like and the products I like is a flawed one.
On the one hand, you trust your friends, so things your friends clicked on might be interesting for you to know about. On the other hand, friendships are not a good predictor for recommendations since your friends often have different interests from you.
It's a cool idea, but I'm not sure how many people would bother to set this up, how often this will change the search results, whether the changes will focus your attention on the most relevant result for your search, and whether you can scale a system that accesses data on everyone in your social network on every web search.
Might try using Findory instead. Findory keeps search history for news, blog, and web searches without any account or registration, so you're effectively anonymous when you use Findory. You can also delete your entire history permanently any time you want.
Absolutely. Charlene Li at Forrester Research posted about this today, calling personalized search results the "Holy Grail of search" and giving an example from Marissa Mayer at Google of how Google's personalized web search might work.
This is one of the biggest challenges. Not everyone can work for no or minimal salary for a year or two, but it's a huge win if you can.
Salaries are really expensive. Fully loaded costs (including benefits, etc.) are $10k/month. A few salaries and you'll have burned through all your cash before you know it.
Burn rate is like a ticking clock on your startup. When you hit 0, it's game over, man. Keeping the burn low is key.
There's some a good pile of business research that says that treating people well and giving them autonomy easily pays off in higher productivity at all companies, not just companies staffed with PhDs.
If you're interested enough in the details to want to dive on in, "The Human Equation" is a light read with a good summary of the evidence.
wouldn't it be cool for the news page to adapt organically in response to stories you click on?
Have you seen Findory.com? That's exactly what it does.
It's a personalized news site. It learns from what you read and builds a personalized front page. Click on a few stories about golf, go back to the Findory front page, and Findory will show you articles related to golf.
I'm biased, but you really might try Findory. It's a feed reader that learns your interests, searches thousands of feeds, and helps surface interesting articles. It's all about avoiding information overload from RSS feeds.
It's easy to use. Just click on a few articles. That's it.
Slashdot Mirror
Google Q&A is an early attempt at this:
- fast.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/04/just-facts
Knowledge extraction from the Web. Incredibly hard, but if anyone has the data and computational power to do it, Google does.
The Price Guide has the full details.
As part of the package, it appears the AWSP offers ssh access to the Alexa cluster where you can write arbitrary C code.
That seems a little dangerous, doesn't it?
I think a big concern with this is whether the answers people give are correct.
Given that money is involved, I think Amazon is going to find these pesky humans are pretty clever at doing things that might be in their self-interest, but not in the interest of people trying to get correct answers.
The trick is finding the right blogs for the right people. Tricky problem, matching content to the people who are interested and no one else.
In the speech, Adam Bosworth predicted that "RSS 2.0 and Atom will be the lingua franca that will be used to consume all data from everywhere" because they "are simple formats that are sloppily extensible."
It's true that many seem to be moving in this direction. For example, A9's OpenSearch is a simple extension to RSS. The Findory API offers simple, RSS-based access to news and blog search results. Yahoo offers a few services through more the more complex Yahoo APIs, but offers many more through Yahoo RSS, including news and web search results.
It seems that most web services may end up standardizing on simple REST protocols using RSS and Atom.
Marissa Mayer at Google talks about Google Desktop Search as "the photographic memory of your computer." More details on my weblog post, "Google Memex".
Great point. Were those six startups all web startups? Or were some of them software or hardware startups?
Mark's argument might be a bit stronger for web startups, especially the kind of web startups that benefit from engaging a large community of users.
John Gruber wrote a great essay on this called "The Location Field is the New Command Line". As he put it, "Web apps are just so damned easy to use ... It's all about the fact that you just type the URL and there's your email."
It's a cool idea, but I'm not sure how many people would bother to set this up, how often this will change the search results, whether the changes will focus your attention on the most relevant result for your search, and whether you can scale a system that accesses data on everyone in your social network on every web search.
Might try using Findory instead. Findory keeps search history for news, blog, and web searches without any account or registration, so you're effectively anonymous when you use Findory. You can also delete your entire history permanently any time you want.
[Disclaimer: I work at Findory]
Absolutely. Charlene Li at Forrester Research posted about this today, calling personalized search results the "Holy Grail of search" and giving an example from Marissa Mayer at Google of how Google's personalized web search might work.
There's plenty of other people doing search history. My Yahoo Search, My Ask Jeeves, and Findory, to name a few.
[Disclaimer: I work at Findory]
Yahoo already has a search history feature. See My Yahoo Search.
It's not just A9. My Yahoo Search, My Ask Jeeves, Findory, and A9 all have had this feature for a while.
[Disclaimer: I work at Findory]
Exactly. Ideas are worthless. Executing on the ideas, that's worth something.
- It's almost always a good idea to start a business on a shoestring.
Absolutely. Another important thing is to launch early and often. If your idea is stupid, you want to find out fast and change it if you can.If you've spent a couple months working on it, no problem if your users hate it. Take in their feedback and improve it.
If you've spent a year working on it, you're dead if your users hate it. No money left to make changes. You just bet the farm and lost.
- 1) Programmer willing to work for percentage.
This is one of the biggest challenges. Not everyone can work for no or minimal salary for a year or two, but it's a huge win if you can.Salaries are really expensive. Fully loaded costs (including benefits, etc.) are $10k/month. A few salaries and you'll have burned through all your cash before you know it.
Burn rate is like a ticking clock on your startup. When you hit 0, it's game over, man. Keeping the burn low is key.
This is very true. Our startup, Findory, runs on a cluster of commodity hardware running open source software (Fedora, Apache, mysql, perl, etc.).
Our burn rate is very low, improving our chances of survival and reducing our risk.
Open source is a huge help to startups. It's provided a tremendous boost to innovation.
There's some a good pile of business research that says that treating people well and giving them autonomy easily pays off in higher productivity at all companies, not just companies staffed with PhDs.
If you're interested enough in the details to want to dive on in, "The Human Equation" is a light read with a good summary of the evidence.
Have you seen Findory.com? That's exactly what it does.
It's a personalized news site. It learns from what you read and builds a personalized front page. Click on a few stories about golf, go back to the Findory front page, and Findory will show you articles related to golf.
[Disclaimer: I work at Findory.]
I'm biased, but you really might try Findory. It's a feed reader that learns your interests, searches thousands of feeds, and helps surface interesting articles. It's all about avoiding information overload from RSS feeds.
It's easy to use. Just click on a few articles. That's it.