Outside.in Takes WaPo's Hyper-Local ReadExpress Nation Wide Outside.in is neat. Should users adopt it as a means of finding and sharing news about their neighborhoods it could become an enormous media force.
At my first glance it strikes me as a ReadExpress for the whole of the US, though it lacks the hand-tooled quality of ReadExpress (WaPo hired someone to more accurately map the precise neighborhoods of their coverage).
I forget where I saw it first, but psfk reminded me of Outside.in today. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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SEL Fieldtrip: Taping Craig Silverstein at UNC
I'll be heading out of the office a bit early today to catch Google's Craig Silverstein at UNC.
Two and a half years ago I heard Silverstein go off about Google brain implants, so I look forward to what he'll level at us this afternoon ;)
Special thanks to Davak of the community techipedia known as Tech Recipes for the ticket hook ups... he even went so far as to get us into the VIP section so I can get some close ups of Silverstein's nose hairs.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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InkyAnswers... Answers: an Interview with NLS Developer Lance Bradley
I posted questions for natural language search engine InkyAnswers' Lance Bradley last week. He responded.
Marilyn Manson and Danny Elfman on NightmareB4Xmas3D
This is completely unrelated, but it's late, I'm still at the office and MySpaced upon this video of two of my favorite musicians talking about one of my favorite movies which is about to be released in 3d. AWESOME.
This is a great example of how Disney just nailed me with marketing that makes me even more excited to go see the movie. And then tell other people about it. Smoove.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Google Adopts Eurekster Distribution Concept with Custom Search Engine
Google just announced another way for folks to make AdSense cash while creating highly-targeted niche search engines: Google Custom Search Engines, and in doing so made another strong move towards increased distribution.
When I write about Google adopting more of a Salesforce strategy this is pretty much what I'm talking about: enabling folks to make a living through leveraging their niche knowledge.
Google's counting on the grassroots content creators/bloggers/niche site operators though, while SalesForce will be enabling development talent from Oracle and Seibel to go independent and make more cash.
I would like to see Google make more of a large-scale search developer-oriented offering... so that in the future sites like Become don't have to reinvent search and can focus on organizing results in ways that are more useful to users.
Finally, from a "swarm of verticals" threat perspective this goes a long way towards making that vertical swarm powered by Google ;)
Salesforce + Google = MSN Killer
Here's the vision: Salesforce provides the distribution platform and half the developer talent for a full office suite. Because of Apex developers can hyper target the office suites to specific business segments.
Google provides the other half of the talent for building the suite and monetizes the whole thing with ads and selling/leveraging data capture.
Susan Kuchinskas, in attending the Dreamforce conference, noted:
"In case anyone in the audience missed this, Benioff asked how many people in the audience had seen Google Spreadsheets. Only a few raised their hands, so Benioff gave a demo! He’s also been trying to convince enterprises including GE to convert from Microsoft Office to Google’s online apps."
WOW! The CEO of the hottest software company on the web encouraging GE to use Google's apps online.
And with the President, Jim Steele, saying he wants to turn the company into a segment-agnostic eBay for software as a service I think we could see in the coming years a HUGE threat to MSN from a Google + Salesforce hookup.
I've long been a Salesforce.com fan (maybe that's what has them out bidding me in adwords for my name? ;)
And it was with great pleasure that I recently recorded Salesforce.com president Jim Steele's keynote presentation at the CED Tech Conference (I didn't catch ALL of it unfortunately...)
Jim Steele p1: the Business of User-Driven Innovation
Jim Steele p2: the Business of User-Driven Innovation
So, students of web business, you would do well to study Salesforce and watch as they embed Google's office suite (and eventually their own...) in corporate America.
I would suggest too that you learn more about Apex, the new "multi-tenant, on-demand OS" from Salesforce.
Shortly I will be linking to the Salesforce + IBM Q/A session I recorded at the CED Tech Conference too - good stuff. If you're really eager you can find them by searching on YouTube :) Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Colin Angle's 14 Failed Robot Business Models and the Roomba Success Story
Part of my job at MSI is media creation consulting to our local entrepreneurial organization, the Council for Entrepreneurial Development.
Colin Angle, co-founder and CEO of iRobot, keynoted the recent CED Tech Conference. In case you opt NOT to watch all 40 minutes (it's in 4 parts) of his presentation I wanted to excerpt his key point for you: "whatever you think your business model is when you start, you're wrong."
To illustrate, here are the 14 failed business models that lead eventually to their break through Roomba product:
1) Sell movie rights to and then perform a robotic mission to the moon 2) Sell research robots to universities and hobbyists 3) Earn royalties on robotic toys 4) Develop and license technology for nano-robots to clean plaques from blood vessels 5) Sell robots to the oil industry to stimulate production in wells 6) Sell nuclear power plant inspection robots 7) Sell educational robots to museums 8) License technology for industrial floor-cleaning robots 9) perform robotic research for the military 10) create and sell "robot wars" style location based entertainment experiences 11) sell land mine clearance robots 12) develop and license a robot operating system 13) sell robots you can control over the internet to industry 14) develop and sell planetary rovers to ballistic missile detection organizations
And for those willing to invest some time in his excellent presentation, I give you Colin Angle's CED Tech Conference 2006 keynote:
Colin Angle 1: 14 Failed Business Models I split his presentation into four parts - this is part one in which he introduces his company and their fourteen failed business models.
Colin Angle 2: the Asymmetric Strategic Partnership This is part two in which Angle illustrates a key partnership model for startups - the asymmetric strategic partnership.
Colin Angle 3: Engineers Learn Marketing In part three Angle shows why, in his words, engineers should not be responsible for naming products...
Colin Angle 4: Reverse Logistics and Key Takeaways With great success comes great responsibility... to your customers. Once the roomba took off iRobot had to learn how to handle customer service.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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October 20, 2006
It's not Google's fault...
...that I have so many tabs open. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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I think this is a direction Google's going in with its purchase of YouTube: ad distribution in the space where the mainstream's migrating.
(They've been advertising the MySpace jobs section for awhile... not sure who's powering it.) Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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David Bonderman on the Rise of Private Equity Peter David Bonderman was one of the speakers at the recent CED Tech Conference here in the RTP. I caught part of his keynote on tape and found it very interesting as the business side of starting and running companies has gotten so facinating to me lately.
Think of Bonderman as a business geek, a guy who knows how to hack cash. I submit these to those of you who have interest in finding capital/buyers and would like to learn more about private equity.
David Bonderman on the Rise of Private Equity part one
David Bonderman on the Rise of Private Equity part two
These two videos total about 19 minutes and I should probably VeoTag them.
InkyAnswers: a New Natural Language Search Engine (beta)
I got a ping from natural language search creator Lance Bradley introducing InkyAnswers.com. The site's not live yet, but he sent me a login to check it out.
Questions for Lance Bradley: Q) Could you discuss the origins of your interest in natural language search?
My initial idea was a method of machine translation. As I was doing preliminary research into the subject, it hit me that the same idea would also improve search, and that the search implementation would also be significantly easier. Although Inky has evolved dramatically from those initial concepts, I think that approaching the problem from an MT perspective ultimately proved to be invaluable. From the start it was not about finding matching words, it was about divining the concept that the words were getting at, then finding other words that do the same-- which was the essence of my initial translation idea.
Q) What are the chief difficulties of natural language search? These vary among the different methods of implementation and the differing resources available to the engineer. Some of my biggest headaches have come from simply trying to get the data in a timely manner. I do not have the infrastructure or resources to maintain a web crawl, so for every query I have to download html from between 40 and 60 web sites. Depending upon their throughput, this step alone can take up to 10 seconds. From the start we determined that we wanted Inky to respond in under 15 seconds. So now I have 5 seconds to parse the html into plain text, split that into sentences, and do millions of database lookups, all on 2 moderately equipped servers.
As for more general difficulties, they are similar to the problems with plain old search. Knowing the time at which some piece of information was written, and rather it's still relevant today, can be difficult. So queries about things that change regularly can return out of date information. ("freshman point guard for Kansas Jayhawks" returns Russell Robinson, a freshman two years ago when the retrieved article was written, but now the junior starter, instead incoming freshman Sherron Collins)
I've also gotten frustrated with the dynamic nature of the web at times. Due to new data appearing and sites going unresponsive, results do unexpectedly change. We've tried to solve this by caching sites that we come across, but then you have to ask at what point does that data legitimately expire and newer data become more relevant. Overall, currency is a wicked problem.
Q) What is your vision for your project?
I think Inky has the potential to drastically alter the mobile search environment in the coming months and years. The current user experience for mobile search is nowhere near as satisfying as searching via a web browser. With slow browser loads, clumsy navigation menus, difficult to follow links, and text you can only pray will be readable on the tiny screen, it can be very frustrating.
Inky allows the user to interact with the search engine through text messaging, which most people are already very comfortable with. We are in the unique position to provide this experience because our results are very concise, and therefore shorter than the 160 character limit on SMS messaging. We do not require AIM or any other software to be configured on the phone.
Ultimately, my vision for Inky is take the "Ah-hah!" experience currently provided on the web by big search and neatly package it in your pocket using an existing, universally supported interface.
Q) How do you currently fund your project?
We're funded by an Angel who is also a principal in the project.
Q) John Flowers, in this interview, describes his IM-facing search product as "natural language response." How is his project similar or different from what you're doing?
I believe that by "natural language response" John means that his system provided collections of sentences as opposed to links, although I'm not sure. Although we do return plain sentences for a small percentage of queries, most of our results are resolved down to concise answers, something kozoru didn't do. For example, the query "author of The Baroque Cycle" concisely returns "Neal Stephenson" followed by relevant sentences and links. You even get a picture and Wikipedia excerpt most of the time. Like kozoru, Inky doesn't force the user to enter a question.
Our systems also have little in common functionally. To the best of my understanding, kozoru's parsing system was based upon word pairing. Inky uses information about each word from the web itself to conceptually parse the query and determine the relevant results. This procedure gives us a massive amount of semantic and lexical information that we use to find relevant passages and answers.
I think Mr. Sullivan was spot on in his article, although he did fail to mention some key points. Namely, the success of Yahoo Answers and the importance of NLS when/if reliable voice recognition technology is developed.
Although I do maintain that Inky is a Natural Language Search Engine, we do not require the query to be entered in the form of a question. Our NLP algorithms tend to work quite well with phrases and even keywords. Users are free to enter the query however they please. You can ask a question, "How deep is the Ocean?" and "Why do cats purr?" tend to make more sense than their keyword counter parts; phrases also make the most sense sometimes, examples include: "last Beatles album" and "fastest production car in the world"; or you can stick with keywords: "car Back to the Future" or "North Carolina beaches". All of those examples, except for "Why do cats purr?" return concise, 1 or 2 word answers, even with a little picture of the answer. We use natural language processing to build a dramatically better SERP, not to impose constraints on the users.
Overall, I'm glad that someone finally called out all the egomaniacs who are very talented at creating a tremendous amount of hype, but roll out products that differ very little from plain old search. (Do not construe that comment to be directed at Powerset however; Barry Pell does seem to get it, and I'm anxious to see what comes of all that cash.)
Q) What advantages do you think natural language search has over, say, query refinement by sites like Ask?
Actually, I think natural language search could benefit from query refinement, but the methods of refinement would have to evolve to meet the needs of questions and answers. It could be used to disambiguate nouns with multiple meanings, for example: "What is the top speed of a jaguar?" could refer to the animal or the car. In a perfect world, query refinement would be done automatically and results for each displayed.
We actually use some very basic query refinement in Inky, however it's all done inline so the user doesn't notice it. NL and QR aren't mutually exclusive concepts.
Q) Why make your natural language search a mobile phone txt-based search format? Txt is not really natural language?
I should clarify that our mobile version isn't txt-based in the sense that you can query it using short hand ("what r u doing"), and I don't see that feature being added. We simply allow users to interact with Inky via SMS on their phone, which most likely has predictive text.
Q) What keeps you enthusiastic about this project?
Search in general is a very exciting field that's relatively young compared to other types of software. Search engines have a lot of room for improvement, and it's safe to say that they will be radically different ten years from now. To be in a position to guide and contribute to something as powerful and useful as search at such an important time in its development is very satisfying.
Q) What advice can you offer other solo developer/entrepreneurs out there?
Well, I'm still in the phase where I'm soaking up advice, so I don't think I'm really qualified to advise others. But if I had to, I would tell them to find inspiration. I've personally drawn quite a bit of it from traditional Geekdom. I can't tell you how many times I've thought I was completely stuck until I heard an encouraging line from an episode of Firefly or a NerdTV interview.
I should also clarify that I'm not solo on the entrepreneurial front. I'm supported by some very experienced and accomplished business leaders who have been instrumental in guiding myself and Inky. So I would also advise other first time entrepreneurs to seek out those who have succeeded. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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October 19, 2006
LA Company Seeking Senior Search Engine Database Administrator
I got a call this afternoon from a recruiter wondering if I could fill the senior search engine database administrator position at an LA search company.
I thought I'd pass the opportunity along to my readers as I am as qualified to adminster databases as I am to administer heart transplants.
Here are the details:
Summary: The Senior Search Engine Database Administrator plays a vital role in the general business operations . He/she is expected to utilize special training, experience or knowledge to perform highly technical tasks with limited supervision.
The Senior Search Engine Database Administrator reviews, evaluates, designs, implements and maintains company databases. He/she identifies data sources; constructs data decomposition diagrams, provides data flow diagrams and documents relevant processes. He/she writes codes for database access, modifications and constructions, including stored procedures. He/she must be familiar with a variety of the field's concepts, practices, and procedures; will be expected to rely on experience and judgment to plan and accomplish goals; and must be creative in the use of technology.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities: * Work with other team members to perform product upgrades, application upgrades, design/development of databases. * Performance tuning, database security and auditing, and provide ongoing production support of search engine database systems as well as utilization of products in performing normal database administration duties. * Expertise within Linux environment with search engine databases larger than 200 GB. * Strong understanding of database auditing and security facilities. * Ability to thoroughly document, communicate, and adhere to processes. * 24/7 on-call rotational duties every four (4) weeks.
Supervisory Responsibilities: This is not a management position; however, senior-level staff members are expected to mentor junior staff, provide technical guidance for 2-3 people and demonstrate leadership skills.
Qualifications: o Minimum of 4 years’ experience in the search engine database administration field. o High level of proficiency in basic computer skills with a passion for technology. o A commitment to continuing education to strengthen skills and broaden expertise. o Strong problem solving and troubleshooting capabilities. o Ability to learn new skills quickly with minimal guidance. o Dedicated to achieving project schedules and milestones. o Ability to work in a team environment with aggressive deadlines and multiple priorities while staying a team player. o Strong oral and written communication skills, as well as strong interpersonal skills. o Strong attention to detail. o Self starter able to work with minimal supervision.
Special Skills/Qualifications: o Experience in search engine databases (FastSearch, Verity, Autonomy, Endeca and others). o Experience on tuning and performance monitoring of search engine databases. o Good understanding of Linux operating systems.
Education: o Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field is required or 8 years applicable experience
If you're interested email me at selowdown@gmail.com and I will forward your info along to senior recruiter. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Decipho: Social/Personalized Search Built on Ask API Decipho creator Steve wrote me recently to introduce his start up, which apparently runs on top of Ask's web search API.
If you're not a registered user you have the tabbed options including General, Shop/Services, and Research/Info (very become).
Once you're registered you can upload your bookmarks, categorize results, and vote for results on your searches. Votes affect the color of results.
Steve is 23 and worked previously at ranking Hawaii travel sites high in Google and Yahoo. He's built all this with no funding at all.
Steve here are my questions for you:
Q) What is your overall vision for Decipho? The overall vision of Decipho is to make it easier to filter search results. I wanted it to be possible to do a search and automatically know what the content is about for that particular website without viewing it.
The key to making this work was by having enough information about the voting patterns for a particular website so that our users can make the best decision of whether they want to view the site or not. This is why I think the Search Analysis link is so important because it will allow our users to see what other keywords this website was categorized for by our users and break it down in percentages.
Q) Are you seeking a mainstream audience or a niche audience? Why? Decipho is seeking a mainstream audience and the niche audience. The key in building Decipho was to make it useful for users who don't want to sign up for an account but with the option of having more features (The "My Results" section) if you did sign up so that we can get the novice and expert users to find Decipho useful.
Q) How do you think that rewarding people for their input will affect that input? I don't think it will. I know that some people will try to spam Decipho with rankings that shouldn't count but I feel that the community will work itself out. There is a way to challenge a website's rating by clicking on a link next to the search result if our users think the rating is incorrect.
Q) What/who are your search engine influences? Of course it has to be Google. I had some other websites that I tried to get it ranked on Google and became fascinated by how Google works that I tried to break it down to see how it works. I started to find ways on how I can improve search that I decided to build my own and was lucky enough that Ask.com decided to partner with us.
Q) What was your development language/s and process for Decipho? We used PHP and some other simple programming languages to manipulate the XML feed.
VeoTag Enables Text Tags + Chapters in Web Video
Mr. Howard Seibel, Vice President, Marketing for veotag, Inc. shot me an email this morning to introduce Veotag.
Veotag enables users to add chapters to video, and apparently gives our text-based search engines a needed peek inside the video to determine the content.
It's simple and very very useful for finding the key nuggets of video information in too-long videos. The site touts itself as a means for better tagging your videos and optimizing them for search engines...
Here are my questions for you Mr. Seibel:
Q) Is aquisition your primary business goal? Acquisition is a possible outcome, not our primary goal. Our goal is to get people tagging their video and audio files using Veotag, so they can attract more viewers via search engines and so viewers can consume the videos with greater understanding and convenience.
Q) will you white label to video upload sites? We are talking to video sharing sites, search engines, media companies and lots of others about ways they can use Veotag themselves and offer it to their users. The ability to tag within an audio or video file is quite a powerful idea to them.
Q) Do you have your own veotag database of video or do your chapters/tags exist somehow separately from the videos? The tags exist separately from the video. In general, when you watch a Veotagged video, you’re seeing the tags from our server and the video from its original source. For example, the video at http://www.veotag.com/player/?u=...r/? u=sitaawfjfs is being streamed directly from Major League Baseball’s site.
Q) If you have your own database then aren't you essentially a video upload site? You can upload to us, you can upload to someone else, but our service is independent of the location of the video, the primary benefit of our service is the tagging.
Q) YouTube imposes a 10 minute cap on videos. Most are even shorter. Is your target for your service the YouTubers? We believe Veotag appeals to people who care about providing the best possible viewing experience regardless of length, and about making their videos more findable by search engines. Longer videos can especially benefit from being Veotagged because it makes for a much more convenient viewing experience.
In all I think the idea is very strong. But... ideas aren't companies and I don't see the business model here. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Google's calling itself a technology company. Considering that they're on track to pull in a quarter of all online advertising spend I say they're more of an ad distribution network. The broadcast giant of the web if you will.
Instead they should focus more completely on enabling business through advertising revenue, and, most importantly, in providing the tools for people to distrubte ads in surprising, clever and relevant places.
Map out their properties (YouTube, Blogger), push into the office app space (with help from Salesforce.com), and partnerships (MySpace). This is distribution. And likely a faster avenue of growth than battling it out in the search share arena.
When Google figures out CPA, video, retargeting, print, radio, behavioral and gives us the AppExchange of ads we will see the emergence of Google's true form: the king of all ad networks.
Thanks to Elliott whose post got my wheels turning this morning :) Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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October 18, 2006
Organized Shopping Says Battelle has No Posse
Battelle recently posted on GMBMG (give me back my Google) which in his words "automatically strips out a ton of affiliate spam from Google. The results are quite revealing."
"It is a crude game of whack-a-mole. Get rid of the top-tier shopping engines and you are left with... a zillion second-tier shopping engines... not to mention the real affiliate spam that has no functionality."
Again I tell you that it's task-oriented vertical sites like Become that will creep up on Google's share because they don't have to solve the enormously challenging task of... determining intent!
So, thanks to Organized Shopping for digging into GMBMG's back end a little and giving me a platform to shake my Google killer = lots-of-verticals stick.
I for one am still a card carrying member, but Battelle's posse has clearly gone down by one ;) Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Video From the CED's Un-Conference: South East Tech is Alive and Kicking :)
Part of my mission, as a consultant to the Council for Entrepreneurial Development on behalf of my company, MarketSmart Interactive, and as an individual, is to celebrate the vibrant and creative tech business culture we have here in the RTP.
I recognize that as a regular SEL reader you may not be highly interested in the South East's tech community (though you should be... we have low cost of living and a huge talent base). Anyways, I submit these videos interviews to you in the interest of demonstrating what a business dork with a $300 camera and iMovie can do ;)
I shot this particular set at the CED's un-conference, which they held for the first time this year on the eve of their Tech Conference (which is a HUGE DEAL here in the South East).
I hope you find these useful, and watch for the Scott Woodard cameo in the intro sequence :)
I've started a video interview series that covers innovators in the South East business community, so be watching for more of those in the coming weeks - I will likely house them on MarketerToday until I figure out how we will be publishing/distributing them.
CED's UnConference: Software as a Service with John Bley
Ced's UnConference: user interface design with Kevin Olbrich
CED's UnConference: agile management with Sandy Waters
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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October 17, 2006
Lee Odden Video Tapes Daron Babin on DMA '06
Mr. Odden sent me a YouTube notice of his interview with Daron Babin on the DMA 06 conference, which is happening now.
Here's Mr. Odden's YouTube page, where you can see his videos: toprankresults
Also, while we're at it, here's my alma mater's (WebProNews) YouTube page, with tons of video interviews including one with Scoble: ientry
Naymz provided me with a profile page that now ranks 9th in organic on Google for "Garrett French", along with a paid search ad that shows up on Google, Yahoo, MSN and others.
What I like best about Naymz though is that they send me emails to tell me everytime someone looks at my profile page and where they're located. It's a big ego-gratifier.
I got an email from Naymz recently that stated, among other things, "Our goal is to make Naymz into a community where people can network and connect with others who have similar identities and interests."
That's when I started thinking - LinkedIn should buy Naymz or Naymz should just start moving in the LinkedIn business vertical social networking direction and let my colleagues leave wonderful and elaborate descriptions of how much smarter they are after working with me.
I'm not a major LinkedIn user - do they show who's been looking at your page?
Naymz would you care to comment about your direction?
LinkedIn have you guys thought of selling paid search ads to individuals so their LinkedIn profile pages will show up in search results?
Does LinkedIn show up in organic results already?
Update: This gmail ad showed up in my inbox with an email from Tom Drugan of Naymz. It's a paid ad for Facebook's Matt Cohler's LinkedIn profile page.
Is this a service that LinkedIn is already providing? Or did Mr. Cohler buy this himself? N-E-body no?
Update 2: A commenter from http://www.localeze.com/ informs me that LinkedIn offered vanity urls for folks. MySpace and YouTube both do that as well. He says the ones for LinkedIn show up reasonably well in organic SERPs. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Pixsy Video Search Widens Distribution with PureVideo, Blastro and EVTV1 Pixsy's Chase Norlin pinged me recently with news of new partners that widen their distribution.
I asked Norlin a few questions about the PureVideo partnership:
Q) How is this significant for Pixsy? A) This is significant because it validates our distribution model.
...HOW does it validate your distribution model? Describe the area of your footprint that has broadened. in what way is this demographic important to Pixsy's growth at this stage? what are your primary considerations when finding distribution partners? - G
Q) What is traffic like for PureVideo? A) PureVideo has a lot of traffic because they control one of the most popular video sites on the web, StupidVideos.com (you can look that up on Alexa)
Q) How is all this traffic monetized for Pixsy vs. PureVideo? A) We power the engine/content for PureVideo and do a revshare on all ad revenue generated
Q) If you are becoming a portal, how do you think distributing results to PureVideo will help your business? A) We're not becoming a portal but it may happen over time; unclear how that will affect our distribution partners down the road.
Chase Norlin follows up: ...HOW does it validate your distribution model? The PureVideo deal, plus our recent distribution announcements in powering media search for Blastro and EVTV1.com, point to the growing demand for our private label photo and video search engine. Expect to see more announcements in the near future.
Describe the area of your footprint that has broadened. At this point it's about sheer distrbution, which is the core focus of our business.
in what way is this demographic important to Pixsy's growth at this stage? what are your primary considerations when finding distribution partners? Again, it's not necessarily about demographics in relation to our distribution deals. Our media search platform is designed to power many different types of photo and video search engines, based on what the partner wants. In this case PureVideo wanted the entire engine. Some partners only want image search, or just video search, or just celebrity photo search, or just funny video search, etc, etc. The increased flexibility of our media search platform and the growing amount of media content we index enable us to serve many vertical markets. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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October 16, 2006
Paul Hemp on the Future of Social Shopping Online
Paul Hemp is the senior editor of the Harvard Business Review and has a particular interest in SecondLife and other massive multiplayer online games.
The real Mr. Hemp and I emailed back and forth some to clarify the terms of our friendly disagreement, and I took the opportunity to reach out to a number of writers in the MMOG space to see if I was on or off base with my reasoning. Mainly because I've never played an MMOG.
Mr. Hemp pinged me recently with the subject line: "Because I'm a glutton for punishment..." and sent me a link to "Are You Ready for E-tailing 2.0"
It's a short article on how retailers like American Apparel and soon Adidas sell pixellated apparel for real cash and brand themselves in SecondLife.
I only have two things to pick on Mr. Hemp about in this article:
1) TOO SHORT! I'd like to read more about this, in particular from a search and navigation perspective... He offers some possible futures, such as an eBay where groups of folks rummage through piles of 3d images in a flea-market atmosphere and friends listening to music at the iTunes lounge. I'd like to see more of this, more coverage, more digging.
2) Confusion surrounding the term "2.0" 2.0, to web marketing dorks such as myself, has a very particular meaning. And while he's pointing to the convergence of social interactions in games and the social interaction of shopping with friends the term 2.0 doesn't really fit. It's more like 20.0 ;)
At some point I will actually sign up for Second Life. In the mean time I will continue reading Mr. Hemp's work and PSFK so I can seem informed when I talk with clients ;) Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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I've had several great video interviews with local entrepreneurs for MSI's video series on local innovators, plus caught some great presentations from Colin Angle, the CEO of iRobot, Roomba creator, as well as Jim Steele, President of Salesforce.com.
Needless to say I will be practicing my video editing skills over the coming days. All videos will live both on YouTube and MarketerToday (poor neglected MarketerToday...) and some will make their way to the CED's blog.
I was getting jealous about folks who lived in Silicon Valley - there's such a strong startup community... that's why digging into the RTP's entrepreneurial community has been so satisfying and rewarding. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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October 10, 2006
YouTube Purchase Signals Google's Vulnerability: Distribution
Piper Jaffray sent out its reactions to Google buying YouTube in an email this morning:
1) Google secures leadership position in online video.
2) Acquisition valuation can be supported on '07 revenue.
3) Acquisition opens door for Google in social networking.
4) Net positive over LT, but signals Google's vulnerability to newcomers
I have problems with point one. I'll let Bambi Fransisco tell you why:
According to a new video report that comScore Media Metrix will begin offering starting Tuesday morning, 37.4 million unique individuals watched a video on MySpace in July. All told, they collectively watched 1.4 billion videos.
By comparison, the audience on Yahoo watched 812 million video streams, making Yahoo the No. 2 most popular video site as measured by video streams. Yahoo ranks No. 1 as measured by unique streamers (similar to unique visitors), but barely beats out MySpace.
YouTube ranks No. 3, having generated 649 million video streams in July.
Point 2 I can't fathom. Point 3 I would argue that YouTube, while good at enabling a browse-by-similar-interests navigation format to video, is not a true social networking site. A video network that enables uploaders to connect around similar interests, yes. It's certainly a type of a social network. But still. I wouldn't call it a social network.
Close enough for Wall Street I guess...
But what got me writing in the first place was point 4, that the acquisition signaled Google's vulnerability to newcomers.
So - what is Google's vulnerability?
Distribution. Because Google's an ad distribution company, not a search company. The YouTube network is a vast ad distribution channel for when Google gets its video ads up and running.
(I could envision Google buying SpotRunner soon...)
Some may arguing that YouTube is a video CONTENT site. It is... but that's not why NBC signed a deal with them - NBC's looking for distribution, and so is Google.
update: I just hope Google doesn't leave YouTube to rot like they did Blogger... I can't wait to port SEL over to WordPress. Blogger's been wonky for me all morning.
update2 : Tristan Louis hits us with some strong comparisons and says we're not in a bubble: No Bubble 2.0 yet
update 3: is um Blogger ajaxy now or something? this is weird... Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Al Scillitani on Cross Linking
Al Scillitani is a good buddy of mine. You may remember him as the guy Google sent aspirin to.
I remember him as the guy who made murder scene chalk outlines of a man and his dog out of masking tape on the floor by his desk.
Al's now bending his intellect to driving the Fortune Interactive marketing train on their new blog, the SEM Zone.
You have two or three sites on the same IP that sell different products or services. Feel free to crosslink in moderation to each other. What is moderation? Moderation is a link on the home page and a few more throughout the website.
That’s it, I am done on when you can crosslink.
Fortune Interactive is one of many local online marketing companies who've been blessed by talent from MarketSmart Interactive. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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YouTube QuickList: Create Video Playlist
YouTube launched in the past couple days a QuickList feature which enables users to create a continuously playing series of videos.
You can save and share lists of course.
This goes a LONG way towards pushing YouTube into the living room as users can set up their Steven Colbert lists at work and then watch them first thing when they get home.
YouTube Founders Speak to YouTube Community in Video
Check out A Message From Chad and Steve: "We're like two kings getting together. No wait, not like that..."
My favorite quote so far comes from AdRants Comments: "If my Google ad representative brings up a YouTube buy in our next call I'm going to videotape myself throwing up on her."
I'm still reeling from all those zeros after the 1, 6 and 5. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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October 09, 2006
Brian Smith Launches SingleFeed to Simplify Shopping Search Feed Submission
I've long been a fan of Brian's work at Comparison Engines. Now I've got the chance to see if his shopping search feed company's as tight, direct and effective as his writing style.
He's got a special pricing for October and November, so take advantage:
-Google Base Submission (which automatically gets the merchant on Froogle and possibly Google itself) for $4.99 per month. No set up fee. No commissions. Just $4.99/month.
-Deluxe Submission to Google Base plus any or all of the other 7 shopping comparison engines SingleFeed supports (Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, Yahoo! Shopping, NexTag, Shopping.com, Become, Smarter.com) for $99.99 per month plus a one-time $29.99 set up fee. No commissions.
Watch for a Brian Smith interview soon as I try and poke holes in his business. Does anyone know of direct competitors? Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Google Buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock
I thought it was bullshit when I heard the rumors. I thought I wouldn't care even if it went through - news just hasn't been jazzing me lately. It's official though, and now I actually do care. YouTube happens to be one of my favorite sites right now.
This is blowing my mind.
Here are some details: > $1.65 billion is an all-stock deal. > YouTube recently announced agreements with Universal Music Group, CBS Corp. and Sony BMG Music Entertainment. > This is Google's most expensive purchase to date. > Google climbed $8.50 to close at $429 in Nasdaq.
I still can't conceive of how $1.65 billion is anywhere near an appropriate price for YouTube.
I was just talking with Geoff Lamm and the only thing we could conceive of is that Google's looking to create an online distribution channel for TV shows...
Update 1: Battelle listened to the conference call:
Why YouTube when you had Google VIdeo? Eric said Google Video was doing well, but YouTube was a clear winner in the social networking side of video...
Why stock, not cash? David Drummond of Google: So as to make it tax free for the shareholders.
How large are YouTube's costs? No comment save Eric: "they have been thrifty."
Monetizing YouTube: In the near term and mid term what is it coming from, search or video? Eric: We don't give guidance. We've come up with 20-30 places where Google tech can help. Most people believe this is just the beginning of the Internet video revolution.
Google Video doesn't go away ever (Eric).
Will you keep the brand separate: Eric: Yes. It has great value.
Battelle noted, as I did in conversation with Jon Revill and Jeremy Swiller, that this is the first significant out-of-brand aquisition for Google.
Google vs. Become.com and Why the Google Killer will be a Swarm of Verticals
A third-party researcher, who Become funded, found that for shopping purposes users preferred Become at a rate of 55.5% and Google at 44.5%.
Some people think this is not a big story (a number of reporters have declined to write about it). I do think it's a big story, especially for the search startup space.
I see this report as an important mile marker for an impending (next 3-5 years) Google slide. (Which may even become an avenlanche if that YouTube purchase goes through... ;)
There are two key scoffing points. Let me quickly pwn those for you.
Scoffer point #1 is that a ten percent ratio is not that big of a deal given that Become is a shopping comparison vertical engine and Google's a "broadcast" search engine.
Let's take a quick glance at number of employees:
Become.com: 40 Google.com: 8,000 (according to Bryant)
Even if you narrow that down to the number of people at Google directly involved in the Google Base/Froogle project I suspect you'd far surpass the 40 people at Become. And if you measured the Google resources available for leveraging...
I say that anyone who has ground on Google for just about any kind of info retrieval service, no matter how targeted, is doing their job well.
Scoffer point 2: How could Become possibly compete with Google? Ok folks, this survey wasn't about how Become CAN compete with Google, it's about how they're BEATING Google in a satisfaction survey.
This was not a survey that showed that Become's taking search share, just that users prefer it when they're conducting shopping searches.
And, well, word spreads. That's how Google got big in the first place, remember? Because it was a better search engine and we told people about it.
Does this mean that Become's a Google killer or that they will begin to take search share? Not likely. Still... let me quote some of the survey respondents for you:
"It gave me just what I wanted without all the wrong stuff you get on Google."
"As much as I like Google, I think Become.com is better organized and easier to navigate."
"Become is a much easier and more useful search engine than Google. I intend to save it to my favorites and use it in the future first rather than Google."
"Best all around for shopping. Wish I would have known about this site sooner - it would have saved me a lot of time."
I DO believe Become could have funded a more compelling survey if they'd included some of their competitors in the mix to see how they stacked up. Then we could have had a more interesting conversation and more support for my next point.
The Google Killer is a Vertical Swarm I don't think Become's a Google killer. And when we talk about Google killers I don't think we're talking about a single source - we're talking about an aggregate of sites that do specific tabs of "Google" better. This will not be an overnight thing, but rather a year-by-year thing in which we will watch Google's search share erode to more targeted specialty engines.
Cable didn't kill broadcast, but it certainly hit it hard, so perhaps "killer" isn't really a precise term. Google Hard-Hitter just doesn't have the same ring though.
Anyways, this Become survey, biased and imprecise though it may arguably be in its methodology, we see some early data that should come as inspiration to the legion of search start ups out there.
And though Google's sphincter has cut off the blood supply to the brains of our industry's media, keep working hard. Beat Google at YOUR game, not Google's. Just like Become did. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Googe - now that just sounds nasty
An ad for an AdSense arbitrage site showed up in my gmail... On an email with Google in the subject line. Googe just sounds nasty though.
Here's the url for copying and pasting should you so desire: http://8-topsites.com/Googe/ Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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October 05, 2006
Chris Seline's Searchles: Social Search Beyond the Limits of Collective Wisdom
"Collective wisdom has its limits."
This is my favorite quote from my interview with Searchles CEO Chris Seline. Because it's true. And the Searchles solution (a three month old solution at this point) indicates a compelling direction for social search.
First, Searchles built a social network for its users in addition to enabling them to add comments, content, votes and tags.
Second, Searchles enables users to pick and choose who from their network - or outside their network - affects the relevance of their individual searches.
Without further ado I give you Chris Seline. And, Mr. Seline, I have some follow up questions for you at the end of the interview that you're welcome to email me answers to or just respond in comments :)
1) Please describe your aspirations for Searchles. We want users to discover Searchles and spend time getting to know us. We want them to tell us what they like, what we can improve and what they can’t do but would like to be able to do. We want them to tell their friends about it. And we want to do a great job of meeting and exceeding their expectations so they’ll continue to come back and tell their friends about it. Along the way, we want to make it profitable.
If we can be the impetus for world peace, invent the magic bullet that prevents every computer in the world from ever crashing again, and ensure that everyone in the world has an unlimited supply of Vitamin Water – well that would be good too – but we try not to wear rose-colored glasses or drink the Kool-Aid of irrational ambition.
2) Do you think a "Google Killer" is possible at this point? Anyone who says yes is going to sound like a moron in some circles, albeit one day, they might just be a prophetic one. That said, MySpace and Youtube have shown that viral sites can become insanely popular within a year or two and so the idea is not far fetched.
3) Do you think it will come from the social search ranks? That’s a big piece of the puzzle but there are others. I think you’re more likely to see a new hybrid that combines several disruptive technologies and ideas for implementing them where social search is the centerpiece.
4) What differentiates Searchles from other social search sites besides its social network? Our search is better – we built it in house - and it is the fundamental component that drives the growth of our platform. Bookmarking, tagging, sharing and rating sites are a dime a dozen. But I’ve seen few answer the question “what for?” – what’s in it for the user? That’s where we’re different and where search comes into play.
Through search, we make it very easy for our community to connect with their existing friends and find new friends who share common interests when and how they want. We also give our community more control over who influences their search for people or content, when and how. i.e. focus only on your own content, friends, friends of friends, groups, etc. Taking this approach is a much more intelligent application of features and functionality that are otherwise ubiquitous and adds more value to the user experience.
Collective wisdom has its limits. Tapping into the masses has value - and we allow that - but we also enable users to filter out the static and focus on searching and interacting using content and/or people they trust. New features we’re working on will further advance this concept.
5) What do you see as the key challenges of search and how does Searchles address these? Search is always going to be about relevancy. Google has done an amazing job making search relevant for a good percentage of queries, but they really only offer one angle on search. On Searchles, by leveraging the knowledge of the people you trust, you can perform searches that are personally relevant. But we don't stop there, we also let you borrow the persona of someone else and let you perform searches that are relevant to them. What if I'm not a Linux expert, and none of my friends are, but I want to do some searches from the point of view of someone who is? I can locate a Linux expert and conduct a search that leverages their knowledge and connections. This is the future of search.
6) What is the hardest part about social search? Achieving a critical mass of users so that there is enough data in the system to dig as deep as you want to into topics of interest and tap into the best expertise. Right now we offer tremendous value in the ability to submit, tag, and share favorite sites and quickly search to identify trends and experts that might otherwise be unapparent. Beyond any one individual, this has huge applications for research, business intelligence and knowledge synthesis even with a small community if that community consists of others you trust. But social "search" will not be a substitute for traditional search until there are enough users in the system.
7) How do you address that? Partnerships. Searchles can add value to any site with original content that has an established user base by providing a more engaging and interactive experience for their users.
8) I spoke with Eurekster's CEO about his attempted work with social network Friendster. He indicated that social network data was too horizontal to be made useful to relevance. What are your thoughts on the value of a social network to relevance? Huh? Tell Friendster to call us. We can help. Eurekster is taking a different approach to social search and has a different customer. For their purposes, perhaps that might be true, but when you have the ability to leverage the actual connections between people, that changes the ballgame completely. Not only can you create more personally relevant results, but you can figure out who the "experts" are by analyzing the network using algorithms akin to Google's PageRank.
9) How many users do you have? When you register, we’ll have one more! It’s not as large as others in the space, but respectable for where we are. We only came out of the box three months ago and have done practically no marketing although we’re ramping up for that.
10) What is your user growth rate? Hard to put a number on it that will have any meaning a month from now. We’re only 3 months old. Registered users currently tend to surge when we announce something new. We also are fortunate that many of them have really taken a liking to the site and are driving their friends to it. Check back in three months and I think we can give you a better picture of our current and projected growth rate.
11) What are you doing to increase this growth rate? Staying focused on delivering great features and functions that add value to what users and potential partners want to do. We’re less concerned about the quantity right now and more concerned about the quality – i.e. actively engaged users. Having a million registered users is worthless if the majority of them never come back.
12) How many users do you project you will need to have in order to be profitable? We can make Searchles profitable with as few as 50,000 actively engaged users. That of course involves introducing advertising and other revenue generating mechanisms. We’re focusing on doing that in a way that adds value to rather than annoys our community and by doing so, provides greater value to advertisers as well.
13) Who are your role models or mentors? What have you learned from them? I started my first company right out of college so I’ve never really had a mentor within the workplace. I admire anyone that isn't afraid to try something new, regardless of whether they fail or succeed. The tech community in the Washington, D.C. region is also incredibly supportive. When I need help, an introduction, advice or just about anything, people bend over backwards, open their rolodexes and make it happen. I don’t think that’s true everywhere and I think it’s one of the real advantages here.
As for role models, I would say my Dad. He has done well by creating many opportunities for himself over the years rather than waiting for something to fall in his lap. He’s probably the reason I caught the entrepreneurial bug.
15) How does your leadership style direct organizational change? Well, there’s a reason I call myself dumbfounder! I know enough from my past lives to know that the key to building great products and companies is to have a solid team of people you trust that work well together, bring unique skills to the table and have a track record of getting things done. You can’t grow a company if only one person is competent to make decisions. I’m actively involved in all the major decisions but I also trust our team to help lead the company forward.
16) What do you look for in selecting people who report to you? They need to be self-motivated and work hard when crunch time comes. They need to be honest and know when to ask for help. They should be confident in their ability without taking themselves too seriously. And they have to be brilliant of course!
17) What do you see as your responsibilities in reporting to someone else and/or a board? I get along extremely well with all parties involved with the company. All of my major decisions have been supported 100% and they bring a lot of expertise in areas I don’t have. I’m very honest with my board and timely when it comes to reporting to them or seeking advice on opportunities, challenges and progress. They in return are very engaged and have been very helpful. I suppose we’re lucky.
18) How do you decide to say "yes" or "no" to requests for your time? I consult with my Homer Simpson chia pet and let him make the decision. ;) Actually, I’m very accessible and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But like any startup, we’re juggling multiple priorities to drive innovation. So it’s very simple. If someone needs me to do something and it makes sense, I do it. And if it doesn’t make sense, we talk it through so they understand the reasons why or if needed, identify another member of the team that can help. We are a team and any team member who is asked to put more time into one activity may have to take time away from another. We do our best to make informed decisions to get the most out of everyone.
19)Follow up questions: What was the inspiration for Searchles? What is the Searchles relationship to DumbFound? How do you build your index? How would you describe the nature or quality of your algorithm?
Garrett, here are the answers to your follow-ups, let me know if you have anymore!
What was the inspiration for Searchles? There were several and then they just sort of clicked and came together. I had been working on our DumbFind search engine (www.dumbfind.com) – one of our other brands - and wanted to find an application for it that would demonstrate its power without having to invest prematurely in the big infrastructure necessary to make it a viable alternative to major search engines like Google.
And then MySpace came on my radar about the time they were acquired by NewsCorp. At first, the acquisition was very puzzling to me, so I started using MySpace to figure out what they wanted it for. I saw the power of the social network, the way it spread virally, and the fact that the network had calculable momentum. This was VERY fascinating to me on its own, but then I thought about how you could harness these people to enhance the relevancy in search and create a greater sense of community at the same time. And that’s what really inspired me.
Taking advantage of just the sheer number of people is compelling, but we can also analyze the networks so that they can create what is basically a vertical search engine based on their peers, interests, or anyone's peers and interests for that matter. When you give users this kind of power, you’ve given them the incentive to spend more time on your site because you’ve increased the quality of their experience. Rupert, did you hear that?
What is the Searchles relationship to DumbFind? Much of the backend technology from Searchles is derived from DumbFind technology. Eventually, they plan to get married.
How do you build your index? Right now Searchles' index is entirely populated by people and DumbFind’s index is fed exclusively through our crawler. The real magic will happen when they stop dating and consummate the relationship.
How would you describe the nature or quality of your algorithm? Wow, um... do you have a few months, a projector, 10 years of computer science background, and a degree in cosmology? :) This is the type of question where the English language fails me.
There are a lot of different algorithms that piece together to form the relevancy score for each result in each search. We have proprietary algorithms that determine the relationships between various entities (people, links, tags, etc) in ways that are unique compared to anything else I’ve seen. Then there are some fairly standard social network analysis algorithms similar to Google's PageRank that analyze the link structure between people. But your basic relevancy balancing act comes in to play when you want to set who determines what, how much, and when, when someone does a particular search. That is something that will be continually refined.
Clarification on Voting Features The voting/ranking/rating feature will be rolled out with our next release . Stay tuned. We’re taking a different path with this than other sites. Knowing the “collective popularity” of a particular person, content or webpage is useful, but when you know nothing about all of the people who voted for it or viewed it or why, it’s not as useful a measurement. Context is key.
A good simple-stupid example is pizza. A lot of people think Dominos is great because it’s quick and a good value for the money. But it’s not authentic Italian and if that’s what you’re looking for, you’re going to be disappointed. Searchles gives our community better, faster tools for making informed judgments based on criteria that matter to them and people they trust. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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