Markets are conversation, again May 15, 2008
Posted by
indus in : Facebook, India, Social Networking, World Economy, social media , add a comment
Cluetrain.com:
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
When Markets become conversation, the participation benefits the parties involved, viz. (a) The Intent Owner. This is the person who has the money, spends time and effort. In a non-generic sense, this person is the buyer/purchaser/decision-maker of goods/services/products (b) The “Goods” Owner. A person or an entity who has something of interest for which people will spend time, money and effort.
An Intent Owner collaborates with others for research, analysis and in general to discuss items offered from one or more sellers/providers. On the other hand, Goods Owners researches the intent of the buyers by listening to them and/or participating in their conversations. The conversation leads to perfect markets.
During the old days, a weekly bazaar (aka Haat in some Indian dialects) served just that purpose–Buyers collaborated, chattered while sellers listened, conversed and converted the intent into real money. However, as society got industrialized, the collaboration dropped and became 1:1 (thanks to telephone, email and other 1:1 communication media). Come Social Networks, Markets are conversation again. Social Networks are enabling the same depth/breadth of conversation where people are chattering about products, services, companies, etc. (How this is all coming together? To be continued in the second part of the post).
| 3.1 (1 person) |
Where is the New New Thing? May 2, 2008
Posted byindus in : Google, Jeff Nolan, Tom Forenski, Web 2.0, craigslist, netflix, outlook, reputation, riya , add a comment
Tom Forenski points to Jeff Nolan’s “Incremental Is Not Innovation” piece. With more than $1bn invested in various startups — only a handful can be called as breakthrough. Last year, it was twitter. The last bust cycle produced a slew of collaboration tools based on RSS. In his writeup Jeff talks about the futility of Web 2.0 (the version number exists, thanks to a marketing propaganda!) and me-too culture of startups around it.
However, in a bigger picture, Web 2.0 has created a phenomenon that services can live elsewhere, and so can the data. It has also created a new breed of entrepreneurs who are going to solve a newer set of problems in the continuing evolution of the overall Internet and computing landscape.
In my mind some of the big problems to be solved are:
- Public Information Overload: Average query on Google produces 100,000+ search results. The popular ones have 100,000+ pages of search results. Why do I need more than 3-5 pages of results?
- Untargeted advertising: Bulk of the ads are still unrelated. I was searching/looking for a used Aeron chair, today. The best deal is on Craigslist. Why no one is connecting that dot? A person’s intent is very much monetizable and the field is still green
- Compartmentalized information: If I’m browsing for a movie on Netflix, I cannot see the reviews of that movie from my buddies who are not on Netflix
- Missing reputation: Is that post/comment about fixing unscruplous hedging of commodities coming from a person working in financial business or a wannabe?
- Private Information Overload: With 10,000+ digital family photos, I can’t search a thing. In my last job I had 5+ GB of PSTs at the time of quitting. Same goes for my slowly building archive of digital documents, tax returns and stuff
These are very broad level categories of very large problems, each one can be further broken down into features.
| 3.3 |
‘Virtual Earth’ needs a Googlebot check April 13, 2008
Posted byindus in : Googlebot, Microsoft, Virtual Earth , add a comment
A search for Virtual Earth on google shows: “Web browser and Live Maps are incompatible.”
Captured on Apr 11, 2008 at 8:30p
Apparently, the page does a browser detection through the HTTP headers and shows an error page with that title.
| 3.3 |
How to seamlessly “flickrize” Google Earth April 9, 2008
Posted byindus in : flickr, google earth, hci , add a comment
Ramesh Jain’s blog pointed out to a wonderful project which the USC team is working on.
“Viewfinder” is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth.
| 3.3 |
The ‘Black Swan does not exist’ culture April 6, 2008
Posted byindus in : Black Swan, economy , 3comments
The recent turmoil at Wall St. is nothing ordinary. It is a catastrophe which is hitting the wallet of an average American. Housing market collapse to credit crunch to skyrocketing price of consumables (fuel, eggs, milk, cereal, coffee); though fuel is leading the march with crude lingering at $100/barrell. The falling dollar is swinging the price of imports like banana, coffee, and even fruits from Latin America.
Was the collapse inevitable — you bet! The analogy is very simple. During my college days of binge drinking, my buddies used to make me believe that I can survive few more shots than last time. More resilient (practice as they narrated!). Survived, yeah, but I was wasted and stoned before knowing what happened to me (I vomited, and my friends carried me to my dormitory room). Who suffered? The person (me) assumed that he can take more of it. The same happened to Wall St. The risk was out of the calculation and out of control drinking is showing it’s aftermath in the US and may reach the rest of the world. Remember, in college when the first-timers find out about drinking, they join the “habitual” crowd to enjoy the party. Ditto with Wall St.
Nassim Taleb defines ‘Black Swan’ as a metaphor where the seemingly improbable is considered close to non-existent. Like the Dot com bubble of 1998-2000, the 9/11 attacks, like the recent financial collapse and our overall attitude towards life where we are made to believe that the improbable does not exist.
Black Swan in it’s definition is a large impact catastrophe with far-reaching consequences, something very large, touching a lot of people. However, what I see is that a large scale ‘Black Swan’ event is a culmination of our individual behavior towards things which are possible but are beyond a conventional calculation in our everyday risk assessment model. For example, people bought houses with high risk loans, assuming the value of house would go up (hey, it was going up for the last 3-4 years). During the dot com bubble venture investors, stock market and traders on the street were made to believe that Internet is going to revolutionize the production of sliced bread. It did bring revolution, it is changing our lives, but that change will be consummated over decades and not in just couple of years as perceived during the height of the dot com bubble.
It’s a systemic behavior change — We are made to think positive! Positive is good, but counting the dollars in the pocket before entering a Tag Heuer store is pragmatism. I think we have stopped being pragmatic. The average rating for a stock before it busts is always more or equal to “Hold”. How many Sell ratings have you seen compared to Buy? When was the last time your son’s school teacher said that the child is faring not so well? Have you heard the “recession” (R-word) from the financial chieftains although everybody knows we are in one already?
| 3.3 |
Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008) March 20, 2008
Posted byindus in : Uncategorized , add a comment
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
– Arthur C. Clarke
| 3.3 |
Reminiscing Bon Jovi’s Blaze of Glory March 19, 2008
Posted byindus in : Bon Jovi , add a comment
A friend forwarded a link to the video of Bon Jovi’s Blaze of Glory.
Amazing lyrics:
I don’t know where I’m going, only god knows where I have been…
…Tell me that I’m wanted, I’m a wanted man, I’m a devil on the run, six gun lover
a candle in the wind…
| 3.3 |
Is Google’s mass exodus a good sign for innovation in Silicon Valley? March 5, 2008
Posted byindus in : Facebook, Google , add a comment
Facebook snatched Sheryl Sandberg from Google to hire her as a COO. With the stock price stagnating, a lot of other heavy hitter techies like Gokul Rajaram (Product Manager for AdSense), Justin Rosenstein (GDrive developer), Benjamin Ling (Product Manager, Google Checkout), Nathan Stoll (Product Manager, Google News), and Kevin Fox (GMail UI guru) have left google for other happening pastures in recent months. Some of them were ‘quite rested after vesting in peace’ and exited. A few of them are cash rich and have become investors (Ariel Poler, Chris Sacca, Aydin Senkut, et al).
They are joining brand new startups and/or investing in one. It looks positive as a lot of venture money would follow the Google name.
| 3.3 |
Marketing R Us February 13, 2008
Posted byindus in : Blogging, Web 2.0 , add a comment
“Us” as in the blogosphere, people who are contributing via blogs, twitters, groups, etc. People who are in top 100,000 list. When we talk about Word of Mouth, we think of getting the word out to the (”they”?) A-list bloggers. Fast Company has an interesting piece which debunks the theory that a select few “key influencers” matter more than “the rest of us.”
“Is the Tipping Point Toast” is an interesting read. The article is based on the work done by Duncan Watts of Yahoo Research. According to Watts:
It [achieving marketing success through influentials] just doesn’t work. A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart.
Guy Kawasaki, comments further and says:
Spend more time and effort pressing the flesh of real customers and less time and effort on industry events and other focused PR and marketing that involves sucking up to journalists, analysts, and experts.
| 3.3 |
Using JetS3t to upload larger number of files to S3 February 3, 2008
Posted byindus in : Amazon S3, S3, jets3t , 2comments
I was looking for a tool to upload large number of files to S3. While I have been a great fan of the bash tools for browsing and accessing s3 objects and buckets and a managing a limited number of files — I could not find an easy way of uploading a large number of files (the first batch being around 800K).
Then I downloaded JetS3t. It has a nice gui called Cockpit for managing the files on S3. The GUI is pretty neat. However, for simple upload/download S3 organizer, a simple Firefox plugin does the job. If you need to extensively manage your files then JetS3t’s cockpit is the way-to-go.
For uploading a large number of files, I was looking for something which is multi-threaded and configurable. JetS3t S3 suite has a “synchronize” application which is meant to synchronize files between a local PC and S3. JetS3t allows you to configure the number of threads and connections to the S3 service. Without reinventing the wheel, I got what I wanted. However, one additional thing I needed was the ability to delete the local files once the upload was complete. On tinkering with the java src, I modded the Synchronize.java and added the following code fragments:
public void uploadLocalDirectoryToS3(FileComparerResults disrepancyResults, Map filesMap,Map s3ObjectsMap, S3Bucket bucket, String rootObjectPath, String aclString) throws Exception {
...
List filesToDelete = new ArrayList();
...
if (file.isDirectory() != true){
filesToDelete.add(file.getPath());
}
...
// delete files once objects are S3d
for (Iterator ite = filesToDelete.iterator(); ite.hasNext();){
String fName = (String)ite.next();
File f = new File(fName);
f.delete();
}
}
| 3.3 |