A great day. VERY happy to say we’ve raised Series A Investment from the fantastic team at Dawn Capital. I look forward to working with them and the rest of our team on building a market leader. TechCrunch says it better than me:
A thought just occurred to me while was reading about User Centric’s latest eye tracking research on Google vs. Bing. They discovered that the 3-column design on Bing means more people look at the ads on the right. (They also found that most users ignored the “flyouts” that happen when you hover over a result at Bing.com – I hate those flyouts so hopefully Bing can be persuaded to drop them…).
I’m right in the middle of reading a lot of diverse stuff on human attention and vision, to try and get some insight into why people respond to visual cues online. But just this simple analysis of eye movement on Google/Bing did make me think: Why not charge advertisers for looking?
This may not be as valid for text ads as it is for banner ads (which are often more about branding and awareness). As an advertiser, currently an impression is an impression is an impression. But I can see a situation where charges are based on how many people look at an ad, and for how long. Obviously as a publisher you’d then want to optimise your site so that the maximum number of people look at an ad – which would be a much more subtle (and algorithm-driven) process…
In somewhat of an overstatement, that is how a scientist described progress on robot AI over at Willow Garage. Head on over to Willow to see “PR 2 Alpha” navigate into another room, and there plug himself into a wall socket to recharge.
It’s not quite jumping into the car to fetch Pizza, and really, it’s a very long way from our persistent dreams of useful, humanoid robots. That seems to have been the status quo on Robot AI for quite some time now. Behind the scenes though, they promise us, greater things are happening to the code that underlies this sort of behaviour. Certainly these guys, Microsoft, and probably half a dozen others are trying to come up with a Robot OS – a common platform for developing Robot AI on. This should help, but I expect that the leaps/bounds towards humanoid robots will take something more significant.
I spent the morning with the bright students at Hult University here in London who are working on a marketing project for my company right now, and we spent a bit of time discussing how A.I. and those sorts of technologies could start to become part of next wave of technologies. At a stretch, what’s happening with Robots like PR 2 Alpha is part of this (if only he can find a way out of the building…). But I believe it will be this kind of work, combined with a LOT of different, diverse and currently unconnected technologies to make the leap to something that can “fend for itself”.
WolframAlpha launched today (a launch that was so well PR’d it would be worth working out who their agency is, they know their stuff obviously). So I’ll add some column inches to their growing coverage.
Firstly, I hope they don’t do a Cuil, for their sake. Cuil’s growth graph (sic) is below:
Secondly, they’re obviously not a search engine in the traditional sense. Putting them up against Google doesn’t actually mean much, as there is currently little comparision in what the two sites do. Their example searches (Eb major scale, Doppler shift 300Hz, 40gal primer) demonstrate that their target market (or at least the market they are likely to attract) isn’t the same – it’s a much smaller subset of scientific, mathematical or academic audiences. In addition, none (or few?) searches lead to any outside results. Wolfram is clearly trying to present “knowledge”, so perhaps in their eyes that’s the whole point – they are not actually a Google competitor at all.
Thirdly, there is a “Google can do this too” risk. Google does a great job of additional, simple, knowledge-based tasks. It knows that if you search for “25 GBP in USD” or “twenty five pounds in dollars” you want the value of 25 British pounds in US Dollars. Wolfram does the same, and if you wait a while, you get a historical graph and a table that for some reason shows you the UK pound against the Swiss France, Chinese Yuan and Norwegian Kroner (but nothing else). Then at the bottom of the page you get the following message:
That’s not a very mass-market friendly message – which I think sort of summarizes the WolframAlpha issue. It’s too rarified, and its neat tricks (some of which are, without a doubt, neat), are of appeal to a very small subsection of the market. Are they just really some other tools (like a dictionary, financial information and science facts) with a new front end? Cuil’s selling point (indexing more than Google) wasn’t a benefit to the mass-market either – and their search results didn’t compete in terms of usefulness (or user-friendliness) with Google.
For most “normal” searches, WolframAlpha responds with “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input David Tort Droid / 7 Eleven mp3 album “. Appart from the fact that most people won’t understand what “input” means in this context, this does mean most of the audience will switch off, and not come back. It’ll be interesting to see if WA can (or will) change quickly enough to keep the PR momentum going – or if it will become a niche provider to mathematicians, chemists and those who want some neatly-formatted knowledge from various sources, brought together in one site.
Quick note on an upcoming event (15th May in fact) in London – Somesso 2009, being one of the better Social Media conferences out there.
Mary at Somesso dropped me a note to say that Wesley Chen of Google voice will be delivering the keynote, and possibly some beta invites to Google Voice (which unifies your telephone numbers and voicemail), and the line-up of speakers looks pretty good.
So go on, get yourself some social media goodness over @ Somesso.
A couple of things came to light today, which all seem tied together by the common thread private data.
Firstly, I noticed ma.gnolia.com was down. Aside from a frustrating domain name, they had a reasonably successful social bookmarking service. Sadly, due to lack of backup (!), they’ve lost the majority of the bookmarks/favorites that they stored on behalf of their users…
Bang, useful personal data gone.
Secondly, I tuned into “More or Less” a great statistics-focussed radio show on the BBC, on a recommendation from my Dad. Aside from a really great interview with the author of “Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air” which I’ll write about another time, the presenter mentioned Daytum. Setup by the Nicholas Feltron, the guy who exposes his personal stats meticulously collated and designed up at feltron.com each year, the site enables you to have your own “Personal Dashboard”.
Thirdly, I spotted an ad which had a “YouData” logo on it. Smelling a 2.0 startup, I checked out the site - and yes, it’s a (US based) service that lets you sell your attention – the old “pay me to advertise at me” model, but brought up to date.
So how do these strands tie together? Well, they are all about people realising that their own data is:
Problem is, losing bookmarks at Magnolia is a greater value by some margin than what someone like YouData would pay for that data. And so that’s the opportunity – finding a way to bridge the gap between how much I value my data and time, and how much others (typically advertisers) value it. The answer may be that in most cases, that gap can’t be bridged?lady gaga poker face
Why am I thinking 3D? I just tried out BMW’s Z4 “3D” app, which uses your webcam to do some clever augmented reality. If you haven’t tried it, and have 5 minutes and printer handy, try it now, go on, you won’t regret it.
The buzz on screen tech is as follows: it’s going 3D. James Cameron a few years ago (not long after Titanic) stated that EVERY film he made from them on would be shot to be 3D-ready, he believed in it so heartily. Back then we thought “yeah, right, hold the coloured plastic glasses, we can do without it”.
But now it seems like all things digital are going to jump out of the screen at you.
So, firstly, how? Capturing is a bit more technical, but the real question is, will viewing it work for us? 3D is still generally delivered in two ways:
Nausea aside, the “blinking” glasses win at the moment as screen technology is still far too expensive: in fact 3D giant Nvidia is selling the glasses right now for $199, and by all accounts it kind of works, as long as you have a decent screen. I’ve tried something similar to Nvidia’s product, and yes, it kind of works. But only kind of.
So what’s missing? The real issue is that this is not 3D. This is 3D within a screen. That’s not how 3D works for our brains. The real 3D is all around us, and if we reach out, we can touch it.
And getting that sort of 3D means only one thing: plugging into our brains. The tipping point with user interface technology is this: once we can plug into brains, we can do away with everything else. We can chuck mice, keyboards, 3D glasses away. We simply won’t need them – because it will all be there, on demand, in our brains.
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Until then, this tech site alongside videophones on the “keep trying” list - although the BMW Z4 example is pretty great example of augmented reality.
I think realtime reporting IS the future, and dashboards that show live, pushed information are going to be ever more ubiquitous. Hardly any exist right now, but Sprint as part of its “now” marketing campaign has put together a great live dashboard over at http://now.sprint.com/widget/
In addition to more common widgets from World Population to “top words being used online”, there are a bunch more, such as “911 calls being made” to “sticky notes being produced” to “transplants today”. Some of the more amusing ones are:
- A “push now” button, which (predictably) does nothing, but reports that 66,713 other people have clicked it
- “You, now”, which takes your webcam feed to show you, now
- A “habitable planets” counter
While you’re browsing all of that, a female voiceover provides more realtime data, such as ”The earth will travel 18 miles between right now… and now”
Genius, and here’s hoping more useful versions come along soon to gadgets near me.
I’ve been interviewed twice now (on local radio, nothing too mind-blowing) about Google Street Maps and Privacy.
On one level, it’s the same knee-jerk reaction that happened when the service launched States-side. A lot of stuff about “what if I’m captured coming out of X-place, or holding hands with Y”. Well, here’s the news: it won’t usually be Google StreetMaps that catches us out on those moments…
On another level, stories of people stopping or barricading the Google StreetMaps car have made people think there might be something more to this – and when Google move to countries where privacy is a bigger issue, what will happen then?
My take on this: privacy IS being eroded, on a daily basis, around the world. That’s just a fact. Google can blur as many faces as it wants, but I’m being tracked by cameras, URL tracking software, mobile/cellphone masts – and guess what, Google: my car, my branded van (if I had one), my house are all still personally identifiable.
Two things make this loss of privacy okay:
It may be the fact that Google is doing it to make money, but essentially they’re just putting online what we can walk to on our own two legs and see for ourselves. So let’s calm down, enjoy the benefits, and only go out at night with a hoodie pulled over our faces.
The recent rise-and-rise of Spotify indicates one thing to me: the liberation of content. What do I mean by that? I mean owning digital stuff on “hard” physical media that we can reach out and touch, and put in our bags, is on the way out.
Actually owning the hard drive that the data is stored on, or the DVD/Blue-Ray/CD/SD will be very early2000’s. A friend of mine, not long out of college, has never, and will probably never, buy a CD or a DVD. I still buy DVDs, but only because the alternative (movies-on-demand) doesn’t always offer the movies I actually want to see. When I get home and unpack the disc, it’s a pain to actually get it up and running (made worse by having lost the DVD remote control). I hate it, and the moment someone releases a competent iTunes for movies (aside from Sky, which I can’t get where I am), I’ll buy it.
So, my predictions are:
