Social Mode

Nice write up from my friend, Florent, about Foursquare API being used to create location heatmaps. This is precisely the location behavior data I was talking about in my post the other day.

You see in his heatmap I know where he works, where he hangs out and where he lives… and when he goes between all that.   What’s great is you don’t actually need a lot of check ins and you don’t need someone to use one app or another. There’s enough location data flowing around through facebook, twitter, myspace, flickr, foursquare, yelp, email accounts, etc. etc. for ad networks and ad providers like Apple, Google, Microsoft to build the location mapping for you.

Once you have a users location map it’s pretty obvious how you want to target ads to them by day part, ad type, etc.

This isn’t all that surprising, is it?   The surprising part to me is that we didn’t really need every user in the world to be tracked by some big brother entity, some central GPS tracker.   The way of the Internet (loosely coupled/linked services) provides all the information, perhaps more, than we need to build better targeting algos.

I suspect more and more user will opt in to ambient location pinging if it means they get more relevant, less distracting content and advertising.

The key in making a successful ad network on all this data/targeting is building up the marketplace such that bidding happens based on Latitude/Long and day parting, not keywords. Most of the infrastructure for bidding systems now is largely keyword based.

Oh, and… location based bidding systems won’t be strictly about pushing ads to your mobile device. It will include digital out of home displays like billboards, signage, etc. etc.   (My friend Lane was trying to get a bidding system in place for that a couple of years ago!)

Local Advertising Algo Follow Up

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Apr 7
Weplay.com is a great experience and it’s a great start-up to work at.   At its core Weplay is a clean-well lit platform for parents, kids and coaches helping them do all the things you want and need to do in youth sports and family life. On a somewhat biased note (I’ve got young-ins!), it’s a social platform that younger people can cut their teeth on.

Weplay is exceptional to me because I work on it, I use it and I love it.

Weplay has a responsive and responsible community who help build and define it.

These are remarkable characteristics that, in my experience, are rare for a “new media” effort.   Certainly it doesn’t yet have 25 million people visit the website or use the API or use the mobile app yet (closing in on a million Unique Users and 8 million pageviews ain’t bad, though!).   It does have the core of something special and it has a team working on it that understands how careful and dedicated a company needs to be making something users actually care about.

There are no shortcuts!

When we develop product ideas the decision making process is very simple and very challenging.   Is whatever we’re about to build something we’d use as parents, coaches, and participants in sports?   Is what we just released and are thinking about improving actually being used?

And by use, we don’t mean can we pump some internet traffic through it, can we push ad impressions against it.   Is Weplay actually being used to manage real teams, deliver real snack schedules, help kids learn real skills, help kids strengthen real world friends, and so on? Is it something that is increasing the engagement in learning, practice, and competition? I’ve seen the evidence that it is.

Another tough but important question about long term success – if Weplay went away would a user have to change their behavior dramatically?   Not very many services, technologies, media experiences can answer that in the affirmative.   I believe Weplay is a “must use” for a good deal of our 300,000+ members.   Frankly, I’d rather have 50,000 users who must use a service, than 3 million passer-bys.   Perhaps that’s not popular to say in new media, but over the long term of a business it is vital to become a must use for a core set of users. There are business graveyards full of media/software experiences formerly of 50 million+ “users” because they never became vital to some users’ regular daily behavior.

Great technology is defined by Usage, not Code.

Weplay has very slick code. I could show you lines and lines of clever ways of delivering the experience. But that doesn’t matter. What makes the Weplay technology platform special is that a huge percentage of the code is actually currently vital to the experience is repeatedly put to use by the user base.   I’ve worked on code bases that maybe less than 30% is still actively invoked. In fact, I’d say that’s very common in the media world. Of course, if the codebase were small and very simple this might not seem like such a big deal to be so tight. Weplay is not a simple platform. It contains calendaring, alerting, social graph integration, profiles, private messaging, online awareness, media transcoding, media uploads, sharing, full blogging platform, points system, friending, groups, “fan pages”, an “answer” system, walls, a full/more traditional CMS, tracking/analytics, and so much more. It’s high availability, cloud based, and has multiple upgrade deploys a week. And it’s only team of 6 people building and maintaining that code base!

You can’t fake fun!

Believably faking a smile and a laugh is one the hardest things to do. Spend time on Weplay and you’ll run across thousands and thousands of smiling and laughing kids, teams, coaches, grand parents.   Spend time at the Weplay offices in NYC and you’ll see the team smiling.   The Weplay team can’t help it… other people smiling makes you smile… ya know, that evolution, fixed action pattern thing is tough to shake!…   I’ve never worked on a platform that produced and shared as many smiles.   Youth sports is FUN. A platform about youth sports is fun.   Weplay is a fun experience and you can’t fake that with fancy designs, clever marketing, or great PR.   Don’t take my word for it. Join the community and you’ll see what I mean.   It’s not “fun” like playing modern warfare 2 on XBOX. It’s fun like going to a saturday afternoon baseball game with sun shining down and kids running around doing their thing. You can’t fake that.

Is this blog just spin for something you’re working on, Russ?

If I didn’t think the experience backed it up, then yeah. But I challenge you to sign up, log in and experience Weplay.   For those that personally know me, you know when I’m just schilling for a product (probably can’t fake real enthusiasm for a product either!). It’s usually the products and companies I don’t write about, post something on facebook, etc that I don’t believe in whether I’m working on them or not.

One of my personal goals for 2010 is to build, design, consult, contemplate, talk about products I believe in and actually would or do use. Period.

(Just for the record I love windows 7, the iPad, Wolfram Alpha, Mathematica, XBOX live, and several hundred other very cool things…….)

Weplay.com – Working on Things You Personally Use and Believe In

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Apr 6
I’ve avoided posting much about Tiger Woods. It’s just too easy. However, today ESPN had a piece from Rick Reilly that is just too crazy to not poke at a bit. The piece isn’t badly written or “wrong”… it’s crazy in its assumptions and bombastic its claims and it might just be an accurate reflection of golf’s, ESPNs, sports’, and Tiger’s audience values.

Here’s the zinger of it all:

We don’t usually build statues of nice, helpful, well-balanced men.

This sentiment seems to call out a justification of Tiger Woods’ behavior – in the pursuit of greatness you should do anything… in fact, greatness is a result of Tiger Woods’ “self-obsession, a limitless appetite for domination, me-first-ism to the extreme.”

That’s the same logic used by people to suggest that great comedy comes only from troubled souls, good writing from lonely people, successful business from obsessed workaholics, etc. etc. These are catchy statements that help people wrap up complex situations but they really aren’t justified. For one, you can’t at all determine causation from correlation in any of these examples.   It might be that great sports stars learn those behaviors while playing their sport, or they self select into the sport, etc. etc.

He vows no more “entitlement.” But Tiger Woods always played as though the trophy had his name engraved on it when he showed up Tuesday.

He vows to “tone down my negative outbursts and … my positive outbursts.” But can he win without the fist pump? Can he win without passion?

So… if Tiger Woods doesn’t win the Masters will Reilly and the audience blame rehab? Tiger’s wife? Buddha? The Weaker Fist Pump?   There’s a subtle suggestion in this article that suggests that Tiger sorting out his personal life might not be worth possibly losing some golfing success.

I suspect there’s a good chunk of the audience that share these value statements – winning golfing tournaments might be more important than the other stuff……….

If Tiger Woods wins his last 4 months of behavior will fade quickly from the public discussion.   (Remember what Kobe Bryant did a couple of years ago? No, not that winning MVP and championships….)

I’m not saying it’s good or bad values that we’re seeing on display or I share any of these.. just calling out that there are value systems at work here and they often aren’t very politically correct.

Tiger Woods Masters Experience – About to Showcase Audience Values In A Major Way

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Apr 6
The iPad, like the iPod, iPhone, and iMac isn’t a revolution in computer science, design interface, consumer packaging nor ui. It’s a revolution of the economics of those things. Now that there’s a device on the market now at 500 bucks and an unlimited data plan for 30 bucks a month it’s almost assured that the iPad type of computing and media platform will be popularized and maybe not even by apple. The hype of the technology will surely drown out the economic story for some time but in the long run the implications of the price of this technology will be the big story.

Sure we have sub 500 dollar computers and media devices. they have never been this functional or this easy. Apple has just shown what is possible so now the other competitors will have to follow suit. It really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme if it’s apple or htc or google or microsoft or Sony who wins the bragging wars each quarter – the cat is out of the bag – cost effective, easy to use, and fun computing for everyone is possible in a mass producible construction.

There are some interesting side effects coming out of this. If a business can’t make huge profits from the hardware or the connection or the applications where will the profit come from? (I’m not saying companies won’t mark good profits I just don’t think it will be sustainable – especially for companies used to big margins.)

Obviously the sales of content matters. Books, movies, games, music and so on. This computing interface makes it far more easy to buy content and get a sense that it was worth buying. If the primary access channel is through a browser I think people aren’t inclined to pay – we all are too used to just freely browsing. On a tablet the browser isn’t the primary content access channel.

The challenge for content providers is that quality of the content has to be great. This new interface requires great interactivity and hifi experiences. Cutting corners will be very obvious to users. There’s also not really some easy search engine to trick into sending users to a sub par experience. That only works when the primary channel is the browser.

If advertising is going to work well on this platform boy does there have to be a content and interaction shift in the industry. Banners and search ads will just kill an experience on this device. Perhaps more old school magazine style ads will work because once your in an app you can’t really do some end around or get distracted. Users might be willing to consume beautiful hifi ads. Perhaps the bigger problem is that sending people to a browser to take action on an ad will be quite weird.

Clicks can’t be the billable action anymore. Clicks aren’t the same on a tablet! (in fact, most Internet ads won’t work on the iPad. Literally. Flash and click based ads won’t function)

Perhaps the apps approach to making money will work. To date the numbers don’t add up. Unless users are willing to pay more for apps than they do on the iPhone only a handful of shops will be able to handle the economics of low margin, mass software. So for the iPad apps seem to be higher priced. More users coming in may change that though.

In a somewhat different vein…. Social computers will be a good source of cold and flu transmission. If we’re really all going to be leaving these lying about and passing them between each other, the germs will spread. Doesn’t bother me, but some people might consider that.

Will users still need to learn a mouse in the future?

Should we create new programming interfaces that are easier to manipulate with a touch screen. Labview products come to mind?

What of bedroom manners? The iPhone and blackberries are at least small…

And, of course, the porn industry. The iPhone wasn’t really viable as a platform. This touch based experience with big screens… Use your imagination and I’m sure you can think up some use cases…

I do think this way of interacting with computers is here to stay. It’s probably a good idea to think through how it changes approaches to making money and how we interact with each other. I’d rather shape our interactions than be pushed around unknowingly….

Happy Monday!

The Implications of Popularization of new forms and functions

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Apr 4
I’ve had a good time messing with this iPad. The hype is justified I’m afraid….

It’s true many of the ideas coming to life in the iPad aren’t new but like so many apple products they just put them together better than anything we’ve seen before.

Touch screens
Manipulative interfaces
Long battery life
Tablet format
Simple, controlled ui
Virtual keyboard
Wireless connectivity
Spelling correction
Universal access features
Ereader
And so on…

Bits and pieces have been tried before. This is just a whole different package.

Sure it’s got some things that can be improved… I keep pressing the caps lock key, sometimes the screen mode gets weird, and the screen gets dirty quickly like the iPhone (dorritos aren’t a viable snack anymore). This are things that can be refined overtime.

One major concern I do have… The iPad doesn’t seem rugged. It’s so pretty and so smooth but I fear moving it out of my lap. Reminds me of holding our children during their first week of life…

Apple takes a lot of criticism for lack of multitasking and closed os. Frankly though it flat out works. I think if you don’t have constraints on a system it gets sloppy quickly. My droid phone has all sorts of oddities that my blackberry and iPod touch do not. I’m not saying one approach is better than another on os and devices… Different devices different needs. I want the iPad to work well on my most common tasks and it appears to do that. I will take some loss of functionality for a great experience on key elements. Also I noticed that most good apps include the right functions so that multitasking in the os isn’t really that important. E.g. Code editors including a browser an FTP function in app.

The economics of the ipad will change the industry. The hardware is so functional it’s hard to believe you can get one of these for 500 bucks. And this is gen 1. The software In the app store is already very good. And it’s easily 80% cheaper than typical laptop / desktop apps. The fact that you can attach a bluetooth headset to this and run Skype pretty much could do in landlines and typical voip. When the 3G models ship with their decent data plans the cellular economics have got to change.

I played a few of the games. They are very fun and very good looking/sounding. Beyond being a very big threat to other gaming machines like the ds and psp, I think the iPad will do what the Wii did – bring about a whole category of gaming and a whole new category of gamers. Board game dynamics are going to be much more interesting on this platform than in any other platform. At the controller less experience with a screen as part of the interface is very enjoyable. And unlike the iPhone the experience is bigger in every way.

My favorite apps so far are Wolfram|Alpha, iWork, brushes, word press, AIM/life stream, and Theo Grays The Elements.

Civ revolutions and Tap Tap radiation are awesome games.

And my ultimate test for whether this will be a long term device for me… Can I type fast and in great enough quantity to be able to write emails and script/program? Yes! Both the keyboard and the text editors are very functional.

By Christmas time the consumer software, gaming and computer industry are going to look very different. New companies, new economics, new approaches…. Yes, it will be that fast of transition…

iPad impressions and iPad’s best apps so far

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Apr 3
CNN has a very unnerving report about some crazy loophole, government meets private sector dealings.

First, doctors as PR people:

Internal company documents show that Pfizer and Pharmacia (which Pfizer later bought) used a multimillion-dollar medical education budget to pay hundreds of doctors as speakers and consultants to tout Bextra.

Pfizer said in court that “the company’s intent was pure”: to foster a legal exchange of scientific information among doctors.

But an internal marketing plan called for training physicians “to serve as public relations spokespeople.”

According to Lewis Morris, chief counsel to the inspector general at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “They pushed the envelope so far past any reasonable interpretation of the law that it’s simply outrageous.”

Pfizer’s chief compliance officer, Doug Lanker, said that “in a large sales force, successful sales techniques spread quickly,” but that top Pfizer executives were not aware of the “significant mis-promotion issue with Bextra” until federal prosecutors began to show them the evidence.

By April 2005, when Bextra was taken off the market, more than half of its $1.7 billion in profits had come from prescriptions written for uses the FDA had rejected.

Second, fake companies to get through legal issues:

“We have to ask whether by excluding the company [from Medicare and Medicaid], are we harming our patients,” said Lewis Morris of the Department of Health and Human Services.

So Pfizer and the feds cut a deal. Instead of charging Pfizer with a crime, prosecutors would charge a Pfizer subsidiary, Pharmacia & Upjohn Co. Inc.

A couple of thoughts.

If the federal government ever wonders again why the public doesn’t trust them/listen to them the officials need to review this situation. It’s just crazy that the bailouts of all these financial entities went against major popular opinion and really didn’t end up solving problems (I know, that’s debatable…).   In the aftermath the government came out and said how tough they were going to be with people that abuse taxpayers.   So, now in this case….

“If we prosecute Pfizer, they get excluded,” said Mike Loucks, the federal prosecutor who oversaw the investigation. “A lot of the people who work for the company who haven’t engaged in criminal activity would get hurt.”

Did the punishment fit the crime? Pfizer says yes.

It paid nearly $1.2 billion in a criminal fine for Bextra, the largest fine the federal government has ever collected.

It paid a billion dollars more to settle a batch of civil suits — although it denied wrongdoing — on allegations that it illegally promoted 12 other drugs.

In all, Pfizer lost the equivalent of three months’ profit.

It maintained its ability to do business with the federal government.

The Obama administration should take a stand on this because all the new health care reform is likely to stimulate more of this type of activity – strange dealings with the government.   This situation is exactly why I want either a completely private health care system OR universal one. This hybrid system is just terrible. We’ll see more of this as long as their are big government programs that use private companies with profit incentives.   I don’t think it’s bad to profit driven, I just think it’s dangerous when it’s the government handling the relationship, and not the customers.

And maybe the fed prosecutor was right in that a lot of people will get hurt for holding Pfizer accountable… but I just don’t see how that’s a justification for letting them off the hook.   Ends don’t justify the means and all that.

And this is the zinger:

“I worry that the money is so great,” he [Loucks] said, that dealing with the Department of Justice may be “just of a cost of doing business.”

Oh, I’m sure that’s already true.

Pfizer Fraud?

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Apr 3
It’s fairly obvious that the next “advertising” land-rush is in mobile. Really, it’s been that way for a solid 5 years.   What’s not yet clear is how the marketplace will develop.   Up until the explosion of iphones and android there hasn’t been enough demand (inventory) to put into a marketplace that supports bidding, yield management and the associated structures.   It’s now time.

A couple of clear distinctions between mobile advertising and other mediums is how much more you know about the user and little real estate (display and attention) you can get from the user.   i.e. the targeting has to be GREAT for this to work en masse.

Here are my thoughts on what the basics of the algorithms would be for a great mobile ad marketplace.

Targeting

Targeting the user isn’t terribly challenging as a great deal of information is available to the advertising engine about a user.   Knowing where someone is and how often they frequent a location and browse certain info reveals pretty much as much as an ad server would need.

Targeting facets:
- Time of Day
- Location (lat/long)
- Demographic (gender, household income, age)
- Service Provider
- Phone/Client
- Connection Speed
- Segment (business user, soccer mom, etc.)
Yield Management

Targeting only gets you so far. The most important aspect of “online” advertising isn’t hitting someone right the first go ’round, it’s getting the funnel right. Can you take someone from initial view/siting/click of an ad through a transaction with the most profit possible? that is the essential question in advertising.

Yield Management facets:
- User click history (time of day, location patterns)
- price per click/action/view
- advertiser account balance and history
- Time of Day
- Location Features (bar district, business, sports complex, etc.)
- type of advertiser (restaurant, national advertiser, services business, website, application)
- type of advertisement (offer/coupon, brand ad, registration, etc)
Creative Execution

Beyond getting the math right it’s important to get the creative – the design, content, UI, IA – of an ad correct. Targeting and yield can only get you so far… if the ad stinks, well, it stinks. Local ads are of a different type than Super Bowl ads. What’s good creative in a specific time and location and context isn’t always what wins a CLEO award.

Ad Capabilities:
- Text only
- Display
- Connected to App
- Click to SMS/private offer
- Alerts
- Customized to user info
- Connected to Inventory Feeds (where it makes sense)
Bidding

To put the above three in play you need some sense of a bidded marketplace – some way for advertisers to compete for real estate. Generally that was determined, on older local sites, by very basic algorithms involving who pays the most for the top spot within a category and location (e.g. who pays the top cost per click for Restaurant in NYC gets the top spot).

This approach is no longer sufficient. The market is there to compete for “top spots.” However, what’s changed is the concept of top spots. Owning a keyword on a search engine, even if it’s a “local” search engine doesn’t matter that much and isn’t worth bidding on. What matters now is are you the ad/sponsor/location/brand that pops up/shows up/is presented when the user passes through a particular latitude+longitude?

Amazingly, the world has been here before. It’s called a billboard. Very quickly that’s what local advertising online (in mobile apps) becomes – a competition for a couple of premium “billboards” in navigation and “check in” apps and social networks.

Bidding algorithm will center on figuring out who pays the most, has the most inventory available and converts the most users over time. You’ll pay more as advertiser if you are further away, don’t spend enough and/or can’t put buts in seats. Figuring out how to report those metrics back isn’t that hard as more of our systems (e.g. FB Connect and Open Table and pos systems) become tightly coupled.

Recommendations

If you are still buying online ads based on category and general location keywords or IP location you are wasting your money. And if your ads are still “click” based you are wasting your money. People don’t click on their mobile phones. They act.

The Algorithm To Rule Them All (…Locally)

To be published soon!

it goes something like (and this is very much not real math):

show_particular_ad? = category_segment_action_history+historical_action_per_impression*(budget_remaining/cost_per_action) is greater than (other ads values in consideration based on basic relevance of lat/long, keyword, category).
Bidding Algorithms for Mobile and Local Advertising

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Apr 2
If you believed you knew the future your behavior would…?

At first blush you might think Flashforward, the book or the tv show, is scifi fluff. Actually though it presents an interesting question about beliefs and behavior. If one believes in a destiny does one do things to make it come about? (Its not about whether there really is destiny…) do we really behave, or justify our behaviors, in a self fulfilling kind of way?

I think we do to a certain extent and its often very subtle and very powerful. Infact, there are many experiments that deal with this. The famous milgrim experiments come to mind.

This effect permeats American culture. From manifest destiny to “yes we can”….

Flashforward philosophy, more real than you might think

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Apr 2
Now that both the iPad and Wolfram|Alpha iPad are available it’s time to really evaluate the capabilities of these platforms.

Wolfram|Alpha iPad

[disclaimer: last year I was part of the launch team for Wolfram|Alpha – on the business/outreach end.]

Obviously I know a great deal about the Wolfram|Alpha platform… what it does today and what it could do in the near future and in the hands of great developers all over the world. I’m not shy in saying that computational knowledge available on mobile devices IS a very important development in computing. Understanding computable knowledge is the key to understanding why I believe mobile computable knowledge matters.   Unfortunately it’s not the easiest of concepts to describe.

Consider what most mobile utilities do… they retrieve information and display it. The information is mostly pre-computed (meaning it has been transformed before your request), it’s generally in a “static” form.   You cannot operate on the data in a meaningful way. You can’t query most mobile utilities with questions that have never been asked before expecting a functional response. Even the really cool augmented reality apps are basically just static data. You can’t do anything with the data being presented back to you… it’s simply an information overlay on a 3d view of the world.

The only popular applications that currently employ what I consider computable knowledge are navigation apps that very much are computing real time based on your requests (locations, directions, searches).    Before nav apps you had to learn routes by driving them, walking them, etc. and really spending time associating a map, road signs and your own sense of direction.   GPS navigation helps us all explore the world and get around much more efficiently. However, navigation is only 1 of the 1000s of tasks we perform that benefit from computable knowledge.

Wolfram|Alpha has a much larger scope!    It can compute so many things against your current real world conditions and the objects in the world that you might be interacting with.   For instance you might be a location scout for a movie and you want to not only about how far the locations are that you’re considering you want to compute ambient sunlight, typical weather patterns, wind conditions, likelihood your equipment might be in danger and so forth. You even need to consider optics for your various shots. You can get at all of that right now with Wolfram|Alpha. This is just one tiny, very specific use case. I can work through thousands of these.

The trouble with Wolfram|Alpha (its incarnations to date) people cite is that it can be tough to wrangle the right query.   The challenge is that people still think about it as a search engine.   The plain and simple fact is that it isn’t a web search engine. You should not use it as a search engine. Wolfram|Alpha is best used to get things done. It isn’t the tool you use to get an overview of what’s out there – it’s the system you use to compute, to combine, to design, to combine concepts.

The iPad is going to dramatically demonstrate the value of Wolfram|Alpha’s capabilities (and vice versa!). The form factor has enough fidelity and mobility to show why having computable knowledge literally at your fingertips is so damn useful. The iPhone is simply too small and you don’t perform enough intensive computing tasks on it to take full advantage. The other thing iPad and similar platforms will demonstrate is that retrieving information isn’t going to be enough for people. They want to operate on the world. They want to manipulate. The iPad’s major design feature is that you physically manipulate things with your hands. iPod does that, but again, it’s too small for many operations.   Touch screen PCs aren’t new, but they are usually not mobile. Thus, here we are on the cusp of direct manipulation of on screen objects. This UI will matter a great deal to the user. They won’t want to just sort, filter, search again. They will demand things respond in meaningful ways to their touches and gestures.

So how will Wolfram|Alpha take advantage of this?   It’s already VISUAL! And the visuals aren’t static images. Damn near every visualization in Wolfram|Alpha are real time computed specifically to your queries.   The visuals can respond to your manipulations. In the web version of Wolfram|Alpha this didn’t make as much sense because the keyboard and mouse aren’t at all the same as your own two hands on top of a map, graph, 3d protein, etc.

Early on there was a critical review of Wolfram|Alpha’s interface – how you actually interact with the system. It was dead on in many respects.

WA is two things: a set of specialized, hand-built databases and data visualization apps, each of which would be cool, the set of which almost deserves the hype; and an intelligent UI, which translates an unstructured natural-language query into a call to one of these tools. The apps are useful and fine and good. The natural-language UI is a monstrous encumbrance…

In an iPad world, natural language will sit back-seat to hands on manipulations. Wolfram|Alpha will really shine when people manipulate the visuals and the data display and the various short cuts. People’s interaction with browsers is almost all link or text based, so the language issues with Wolfram|Alpha and other systems are always major challenges. Now what will be interesting is how many popular browser services will be able to successfully move over to a touch interface. I don’t think that many will make it. A new type of services will have to crop up as iPad apps will not be simply add-ons to a web app, like they usually are for iPhone. These services will have to be great in handling direct manipulation, getting actual tasks accomplished and will need to be highly visual.

My iPad arrives tomorrow. Wolfram|Alpha is the first app getting loaded. and yes, I’m biased. You will be too.

iPad’s Killer App? Wolfram|Alpha iPad.

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Apr 2
I seriously wonder about this all the time.

Spending a lot of time thinking about collective intelligence and collaborative filtering over the last decade has led me to believe that most of the stuff we’re creating actually reduces our vision.

From Facebook to twitter to iphones…. we’re pruning our networks and our opportunities to actually run into new people, new experiences. Why have a new, uncomfortable conversation at a school function when you can just text your friends on your phone? why participate in a town hall meeting when you can just join a Facebook group? why surf the web anymore when twitter can just tell you what’s hot? why go to a bar for a band you’ve never heard of when Pandora can just pick what you like?

Maybe it’s just me.

Food for thought.

Read the following Edge piece or check out “You are not a gadget”.

34. The Internet today is, after all, a machine for reinforcing our prejudices. The wider the selection of information, the more finicky we can be about choosing just what we like and ignoring the rest. On the Net we have the satisfaction of reading only opinions we already agree with, only facts (or alleged facts) we already know. You might read ten stories about ten different topics in a traditional newspaper; on the net, many people spend that same amount of time reading ten stories about the same topic. But again, once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. One of the hardest, most fascinating problems of this cyber-century is how to add “drift” to the net, so that your view sometimes wanders (as your mind wanders when you’re tired) into places you hadn’t planned to go. Touching the machine brings the original topic back. We need help overcoming rationality sometimes, and allowing our thoughts to wander and metamorphose as they do in sleep.

— David Gelernter

and do all this before midnight tonight when you pre-order your vision reducing iPad, like me!

oh well….

Does the Web Let us Discover Anymore?

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Mar 11

Targeting

Yield Management

Creative Execution

Bidding

Recommendations

The Algorithm To Rule Them All (…Locally)