broadstuff

Three twts do not a summer make, but I was musing this morning on the changing nature of where I got my blog reading from - and then a comment from Steve Bowbrick and a link to this post by Fred Wilson popped up (on Twitter). Fred's post notes that:

I've never used an RSS reader. I've used services like Techmeme and Hacker News to surface interesting posts for me. I still do. I visit each of them about five or six times a day. They are my RSS readers for tech news. Twitter does the same thing for me, but I also get stock news, political news, family/friend news, and some humor too. It's like reading a custom built newspaper.

But enough about Twitter. This post is about Techmeme. I've been obsessed with Techmeme for the past couple years. And I think that obsession is coming to an end. I still plan to visit it as much every day. But I think I'll stop jonesing for my posts to get picked up there. The conversation is happening all over the place anyway and I don't think any one service will ever be able to host it all anyway.

....and Steve notes that:

I discover more interesting stuff in my first 10 minutes on Twitter in the morning than in a fortnight of... you know... all the other stuff

I started reading "blogs" via surfing and RSS reader, overloaded my RSS reader (as one does), then stripped it down and started reading via Technorati search. It became clear hat what I was doing was looking for filtering sstems, so I set off to look at what was going on there. Digg and Delicious never did it for me - a bit too random. Tried taking in a few Big Blogs (TechCrunch, GigaOm) but they seemed too narrow to use as "filters". When Techmeme came along I was very impressed, though as Fred notes, of late its gone more for the Big Blogs so there is less variety (and more PR primping in my view). Friendfeed never did it for me, I think its partly critical mass, but partly format - most people there are not saying anything that could not be condensed to 140 characters.

Like Steve, I have been amazed at how Twitter has moved over the last year from being an airhead's delight to a system that is becoming remarkably good at filtering and highlighting interesting stuff.

So I am now watching with fascination to see how the Algorithm filter (Techmeme) and the Social Network Filter (Twitter) vie for influence on my (and others') attention span in the future.

Article on Ars Tech - NBC's legal council Rick Cotton saying that most of the value of YouTube was from pirated content:

In this view, YouTube was a nice place for emo kids to post rants about Britney Spears, but this sort of stuff hardly made YouTube an essential visit. No, what built YouTube's brand was the flood of unauthorized commercial content sloshing around on the site a few years back—a heady time before Hulu et al. when one could reliably dig up episodes of The Simpsons, The Daily Show, or Saturday Night Live.

At a conference on the Future of Television this last week in New York, Cotton made it clear that he hasn't forgotten those early days. According to him, YouTube was vaulted into national popularity by SNL's hit "Lazy Sunday" rap about a pair of lame white guys from the Village who wanted nothing more than to spend a Sunday afternoon in the theater, watching The Chronicles of Narnia.

Now that was fairly clear at the time (our view here), which was why the amount Google paid ($1.65 bn) had many people gasping / shaking heads / raising eyebrows etc (was Google turning into dumb money etc) as it was clear it wasn't a sustainable play. What was more interesting is AOL repeating the trick a year or so later and buying Bebo for $830m - prompting Billy Bragg's calling the tune and Nick Carr's post about Digital Sharecropping.

Ars Tech reports a YouTube person later naysaying this, and noting that the shows mentioned above were just a blip. But there were many such blips - and the lesson is to watch what they do, not what they say - and what they are doing is finding more ways to load up on quality content with Ads and without lawsuits. YouTube is becoming just a New Order TV channel.

As well as being a comms system an directory rolled into one, Social Media has had another role - low cost search and selection of relevant content. However, as we and others noticed when comparing Last.fm with Pandora, a social network system 's point at which it clould improve no further was limited compared to the algorithmic approach. Well that was 2006 and that was audio, this is 2008 and the next thing that will need to go through the selection mill is video.

I've always been fascinated with Video selection, as it is a far more complex task than text and audio selection, but due to the sheer size of the video industry, solving it is a huge prize. In 2005, state of the art was a 5 movie trick, but the game was upped rapidly. And thus I've been reading (with fascination) this article in the NYT about the efforts Netflix has been making, initially to find selections from its own algorithms, and later trying to crowdsource the approach - there is a $1million prize for building a system that is a 10% better predictor of the movies you will like than the Netflix in-house system, Cinematch.

The state of the art right now is based around singular value decomposition approaches:

Singular value decomposition works by uncovering “factors” that Netflix customers like or don’t like. Say, for example, that “Sleepless in Seattle” has been rated by 200,000 Netflix users. In one sense, this is just a huge list of numbers — user No. 452 gave it two stars; No. 985 gave it five stars; and so on. But you could also think of those ratings as individual reactions to various aspects of the movie. “Sleepless in Seattle” is a “chick flick,” a comedy, a star vehicle for Tom Hanks; each customer is reacting to how much — or how little — he or she likes “chick flicks,” comedies and Tom Hanks. Singular value decomposition takes the mass of Netflix data — 17,770 movies, ratings by 480,189 users — and automatically sorts the films. The programmers do not actively tell the computer what to look for; they just run the algorithm until it groups together movies that share qualities with predictive value.

As you would expect, the hard thing to do is to resolve extreme outliers:

There’s some X factor in human judgment that the current bunch of algorithms isn’t capturing when it comes to movies like “Napoleon Dynamite.” [ A movie that people either love or hate, and unpredictably so] And the problem looms large. Bertoni is currently at 8.8 percent; he says that a small group of mainly independent movies represents more than half of the remaining errors in the way of winning the prize. Most teams suspect that continuing to tweak existing algorithms won’t be enough to get to 10 percent. They need another breakthrough — some way to digitally replicate the love/hate dynamic that governs hard-to-pigeonhole indie films.

This is the first time I'd heard of this, (and the $1m prize ). Now, we know of some really powerful problem solving algorithms that do work in uncertain spaces like these in other industries, so it may be interesting to give them a go. Lets see.....

I stepped in at the last minute this week to do a keynote slot at the Mobile Content Summit when a colleague had to pull out, topic was on "Mobile Web 2.0 and Ecosystems", and i stayed to listen to some interesting presentations from Flirtomatic, Vodafone etc. I think the talks will be put up by the organisers, will link to it when that happens or if not will put mine up.

Coming hot on the heels of the Future of Mobile, it was interesting to see how the memes are flowing.

Now I am the first to be sceptical about Planet Mobile's overblown market projections (vs its Utility-arian ways), but in the 8 or so years I've been involved with Mobile Internet I'd say this is the closest I've seen to a tipping point emerging - mainly because:

- some very big players from outside, Google and Apple, have pushed new business and product models into an ossified industry - and started to gain users, which the industry understands and is what really changes things. They may not win in the end, but they have set off the gun.

- (In my opinion) the locus for innovation has moved outside Europe to the fresher minds of the US and Developing world

- The competition from WiFi is starting to drive more "non-zero" strategy pricing behaviour from Operators

But you've heard this from us before....but this article in the Economist today they made this point that the Mobile industry:

...is going through two important shifts that promise to generate much growth and profit in the years to come. First, even though overall sales may fall in 2009, sales of “smart” phones—those that allow you to surf the internet, download music and use other data services, as well as make calls and send text messages—are booming. According to Informa, a market-research firm, the market for smart-phones will grow from $39 billion in 2007 to $95 billion in 2013, by which time they will make up nearly half of the handset market by value (though only 34% by volume).

Second, and more important, as handsets get smarter the nature of the industry will change. It will be less about hardware and more about software, services and content. In fact, for the first time, more will be spent this year on such intangibles than on the handsets themselves (see chart). And this is why, also for the first time, a fierce battle between operating systems for handsets has broken out.

And that shift to Software and Services will make all the difference. Somehow, watching the industry memes at these conferences I sense a small but imperturbable shift in the forces driving Planet Mobile has occurred. It will still take time though, the Mob-Evangelists will still have to wait awhile for Coming 2.0

Who could resist? From NASA.....beats programming throwaway sheep, Tim O'Reilly would be proud

We are looking for a full-time developer to help NASA send robots to the Moon.
If you want to make a difference in space exploration, come join us!

Ideal candidates will have a solid history of implementing and deploying
complex software systems that integrate multiple languages and libraries on
multiple platforms.

Responsibilities:

- Develop software tools for remotely controlling a rolling-walking robot.
This project includes interactive 3D graphics, GUI design, middleware, and
working with multi-language/multi-platform components.

- Develop software sysetms for processing satellite imagery of the Moon
into maps and 3D models. This work involves creating very high-performance
processing pipelines and innovative geospatial user interfaces.

Dusting off all those notes from my BSc final year Robotics stuff ......

(link hat tip Ariel Waldmann)

Saw this graph on Nic Brisbourne's Equity Kicker.




Nic's analysis is spot on:

Nor are they the sort of growth rates that have made this space such fertile ground for startups over recent years. A rising tide floats all boats, but when the tide stops rising…

This chart nicely illustrates the scale of the growth we have enjoyed. Note also the similarity in the shape of the Q4 2007-Q3 2008 and Q2 2000-Q4 2000 curves.

I remain a believer in the secular growth story of the internet though, and the good times will return.

I agree...I recall in 2000/01 in all the doom and gloom, we were just watching the traffic go up month after month on our servers, and deciding there was a big disconnect between what the 'Net was doing and the market sentiment. And I think we are in exactly the same situation now, this industry is going to be at least as revolutionary as Telecom, if not the invention of the Printing Press.

The buzz on Twitter this morning as been the mashups possible based on the "mislayed" database of the British National Party's (a UK far right party) database - such as linking to Google maps to see where they live (see the picture).



Mike Butcher put the scoop out so deserves the link for the analysis:

The implications of this action are pretty big. I speculated on Twitter this morning that a mashup which identified the actual locations of BNP members would be highly problematic, and possibly even subject to vigilante attack. However I still believe that a map which showed more general areas, like towns and cities, could actually be helpful to local authorities for creating policies to tackle attitudes towards diversity. If you were a local councillor and had been made aware that there were lots of BNP members in your area, you may be able to do something about the attitudes which lead to support for such a far-right political party.

But now this more accurate map is out of the bag, and others are probably planning similar maps, the implications are far reaching. What no-one would wish is for a witch-hunt to begin.

My contribution on Twitter, tongue in cheek this morning, was that if they think this is bad wait till the telemarketers get this data

However, there is a more sober point, re vigilantes etc as Mike notes. 3 weeks ago I was at the Berlin Web Expo which was held in the AlexanderPlatz, the centre of Old East Berlin. To get into the mood I read, along with Marx et al, a book called StasiLand - about the experience of life under the Stasi (secret police). Did you know at the end 1 in about 80 people was an informer fo the Stasi? This drove a society of doubt, paranoia and odd behaviour. And this is a potential dark side of social media as well, as the above example shows.

Where will it all end? I don't know, but clearly the value of your data is valuable not just for positive benefits, but also negative (by the way, am I the only one who is wondering why so much valuable user data is getting "lost" right now?)

So, having told St Barack what to do in US Technology this morning before coffee, its time to move on to tell Mr Brown how to save the UK economy before lunch.

Its simple, of course

The biggest medium term strategic issue facing the UK is energy independence - we use too much of it, and it nearly all comes from countries one wouldn't necessarily want to rely on in a tight spot.

In the short term, we have a demi-depression on hand, a large part falling in the sectors that used to service the comings and goings in the housing market. No demand, no movement, no cash flowing, no jobs for millions of small businesses. To solve this it would, in my humble opinion, be better to borrow money to build infrastructure rather than give tax cuts.

And what better infrastructure than that which reduces energy dependence.

Which is where the whole Green thing comes in. The problem the Green Lobby has is that the economics of Green are poor for the average citizen - the ROI of home insulation, solar heating, double glazing, water independence, energy saving light bulbs etc are typically measured in decades, which is - to use the technical term - cr*p.

Added to that, most of us know that Saving the Planet is not going to be done by a few Brits buying Piouss's and wearing woolly jumpers indoors on cold days - Americans sucking up 25% of the global energy consumption for 6% of the global population and and one Chinese power station going up every 3 days is where the problem is.

But what we can do is subsidise the sort of infrastructural upgrade work and products required to reduce domestic and business energy consumption, and borrow the money to do that rather than give it away in tax cuts. Creates work and jobs, reduces UK dependence on foreign energy despots (at a national level you see the full benefits across the board) and makes Messrs Brown and Co the grooviest Green Guys on the planet. Much better Green commitment than cycling to work while your chauffeur drives the briefcase. Whats not to like?

Actually, while I think of it - Mr Obama could do it too (and vice versa - the UK could do worse than copy the Koreans on a joined up Broadband policy)

If Barack Obama can live up to a tenth of the hopes, prayers, special interests and agendas that others have foisted on his shoulders, he deserves to be canonised while still alive. Typical of the Tasks of St Barack is now to live up to the over-egged beliefs the techgeek industry had vested in him ( What - Tech overhyping something - nevah! ) - from the BBC:

Now some in the industry think it could be "pay-back time" as they looks to the country's first tech savvy President to do his bit to push technology into a new era.

"He is the first real president who seems to understand technology and the needs of the industry," said Tim O'Reilly, the man credited with coining the term 'web 2.0' and who is generally regarded as one of the industry's visionaries.

"The guy's my age," said commentator and founder of Wired magazine John Battelle

" This guy grew up knowing what an apple is besides the thing you eat, and using e-mail and Twitter. He understands what Facebook is and he has young kids that are completely digital.

"I think there is a general sense that he and the people he will employ totally get the web."

This would of course be why the Barack Obama Twitter address, active in those heady days when they wanted your spare change to create change, is now dormant. It's last post (trumpeted voluntarily) was:

We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you. Thanks

Or translated - "so long, and thanks for all the cash"

He "gets it" only too well - let the chatterati go on babbling to themselves now - they got the Conversation, he got the Loot

Its morbidly fascinating to watch all the diverse special interests being lobbied for under the general heading of the "US CTO's" role, and a worrying but quite widespread general lack of concern about what is actually strategically critical rather than tactically profitable to this or that lobby.

Well, here's a big one that does matter - broadband pipes.

We are in the process of finishing a major piece of research on the future of online video, and one of the fascinating things you will find is that the countries pulling way ahead (Japan, South Korea, France, Nordics) - on both size of pipes ( with 16 Mb/sec+ speeds ), and low cost of access - have strong government involvement.

And the US actually has quite low mean speeds and mean broadband penetration, and pricing above that of the frontrunners - and that means low competitiveness in the critical future area of digital logistics. If St Barack did just One Big Thing in the techworld in his first term of office, just getting the US to France or Finland's level of performance (never mind Japan or Korea) would be a major achievement - and like the highway and dam building programs of the New Deal, a large amount of good would flow.

People are lining up to kick Jerry Yang as he departs Yahoo's top spot, this is typical (from the NYT):

The announcement comes a year and a half after Mr. Yang assumed control of Yahoo from Terry Semel, a Hollywood studio boss that he handpicked for the job. Mr. Yang’s tenure has been marked by a precipitously declining stock price and the high profile collapse of a $44 billion acquisition offer from Microsoft last spring.

“It’s definitely positive from a shareholder perspective,” said Ross Sandler, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “Jerry has done less than a stellar job after taking the reins from Terry Semel last year, not just completely botching the Microsoft deal but with poor execution and multiple company restructurings that have done little to restore confidence of any of Yahoo’s shareholders, employees or customers.”

Amazon and Google, of course, who are admired by all as an exemplar of great management and flawless execution, has fared nearly exactly the same:



Yet (as of today anyway) no-one is calling for Messrs Schmidts or Bezos' heads or publicly stoning them in blogland.

They, of course, are merely struggling under adverse market conditions , but clearly - from what the blogosphere and the less financially savvy journalists say anyway - Yahoo's decline is all due to Jerry. Sack him and Yahoo could surely have defied global economics and seen its share prise rise while all about it fell. I await this phenomena now he's gone with eager anticipation!

One of course could argue that they should have sold to Microsoft 6 months ago - a great idea in hindsight, because of course everyone knew the crunch was coming, right? Right! But Yang, imho not unreasonably, felt that the business was worth more than a breakup price. Not only that, but one suspects that Microsoft would no doubt have tried to negotiate as the market dropped - these sort of deals are not sealed on the day.