Sites of Interest
Ilya’s Mission: In-Game Advertising
Monday, March 13, 2006
By way of Jake Setlak, I found Ilya Vedrashko’s MIT master’s thesis, which explores the potential of in-game advertising. He’s supposed to have a first draft complete in May, but his current companion blog makes for fun reading.
Remember Halfbrain?
You probably don’t. Halfbrain was a full-featured web-based replacement for Microsoft Excel, that in 1999, did wonders with Javascript and DHTML to create simply awe-inspiring spreadhseet functionality online. They followed with a Powerpoint replacement, and then a word process application.
Then, as quickly as it appeared, Halfbrain vanished. Well, not quite. It was acquired by IBM by way of Alphablox, and put to rest.
Now, in 2006, I’m reminded of the urgent new application annoucements and venture funding that were synonymous with the late nineties. Suddenly, a new breed of Web developer is loose again, innovating, getting funding, and creating interesting names for his application or service.
Thumbstacks is a new application in beta that simulates on the Web, with great success, Microsoft Powerpoint. Several years ago, Philip Greenspun and I designed and created a small application called WimpyPoint (scroll down to the credits for a cheesey hand-raise,) which was meant to launch a database-backed version of PowerPoint. What Thumbstacks has done is to take the best of new presentation technology and create a version of our program on speed. Of course, you can’t do transisitons and things of that nature, but it’s still in Beta, and it’s a damned fine start!
Similarly, iRows offers what HalfBrain used to, for spreadhseets.
The advent of these new applications signals a new era of optimism in the Web innovation market. But unlike last time, when the world collectively took a hit from a dot-com bong and went ape-crazy with its time and money, let’s hope that we can be more responsible with our efforts and strategy.
Recognize This?
Thursday, January 05, 2006
So, I live with two women. One’s my wife and the other’s my sister-in-law. Suhani’s been staying with us, interning at my agency, taking photography classes (she’s amazing with an SLR,) making friends, and doing all the things that smart, beautiful, talented 21 year-olds are supposed to do.
I’m on the road four days a week for work, and have this habit of buying DVD sets of TV shows so I can watch them on longer plane rides. Recently, while I was away one week, both sisters decided to start watching season one of Alias, the adventures of Sydney Bristow and her band of merry spies. It’s gotten compelling enough that they’re now in the middle of season 4, and any time is Alias time. So, there I am, on our bed with my laptop while they’re both sprawled across eating Doritos and intently watching for the next shocker.
If you’re the one person who hasn’t seen the show, it’s a rolicking set of implausible costume changes and spy-meet-cutes, with more plot twists over the past five years than there exist numbers. The best part of the show (for us, anyway) is Marshall, the funny Ops Tech guy, a modern day version of Ian Fleming’s “Q”. We especially like things like the super-fast photo recognition software that matches faces in an instant.
While I’m sure things like that exist somewhere, imagine my surprise when I found this. Riya.com is photo-recognition for the masses. Identify your images on your hard drive and sites like Flickr, train the software to recognize certain faces, and it will start finding other images on the Web and in your collection that have those specific people you identified.
It’s still in Alpha, but imagine the possibilities!
Plaxo and LinkedIn Should Merge
Plaxo is contact management software that makes ridiculously good use of the Internet. So, you have this massive address book in Outlook that you’ve grown over several years and several jobs. You never get to clean out the book to figure out if people’s numbers are still the same, where they’re at now, and wouldn’t it be nifty if your address book automatically updated itself everytime someone changed jobs or contact information? Also, its a pain letting everyone know your new information every time its you who’s doing the moving. Plaxo connects you to your network, and keeps your address book fresh, relevant, and up-to-date.
Of course, for this to work, a lot of your contacts need to be Plaxo’ed as well.
Guess what? They are.
Now, LinkedIn is another story. It is literally the best networking tool I have ever used, and I’m on it constantly, looking for new talent, getting references for people who aren’t in my first degree, and expanding my prospect list. Some time ago, I wrote an entry in this blog about the service. Essentially, here’s how it works:
You know Abe and Ben. Abe knows Cassie and David. Cassie knows Ben and You. David knows Ed and Frannie. We’re all on LinkedIn, and identified who we know. Now, let’s say you’re browsing your extended network, and realize that Frannie is VP at a company that you’re trying to do business with. Through LinkedIn, you initiate a contact request through your friend Abe, who forwards it on to his friend David. David forwards this “trusted request” onto Frannie, who is much more likely to take your call than if you cold-called her. It’s structured networking, and it really, really works.
Of course, the larger yours and everyone else’s network is, the more people you can connect to, and network with. This is where I see incredible synergy between Plaxo and LinkedIn. Plaxo allows you to keep in touch with contacts, and LinkedIn lets you network through your contacts. Marrying the two services would give each something they don’t have.
Plaxo would give LinkedIn breadth, and LinkedIn would give Plaxo depth.
Of course, there’s a shark on the horizon. If I were Microsoft, I’d be looking very carefully at Plaxo to figure out how it if it fits with my Microsoft Office and Outlook strategy. Plaxo’s use of the Internet is exactly what the doctor ordered to give Outlook a fresh lease.
The Battle of the Labs
Yahoo! and Google, for example, spend millions of dollars each year in their so-called “Labs”. It is here that they work to create their next generation information browsing and research tools. My post-office hours are sometimes spent in awe of these applications that show us the beginnings of a truly connected networks.
For example, Google’s Ridefinder shows the real-time positions of several taxicab company cars in major cities. It works in conjuction with Google Maps to provide you with the actual locations of cabs near you. You can’t order them yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
The folks over at Yahoo! Research seem a little more academic and serious in their pursuit of new ground, and give funky names to their projects like the ”Mindset Research Demo.” That particular application allows you to search for any term, but then adjust on a slider, whether you plan to shop for that item, or are just trying to find information on it. It adjusts its results dynamically as you move the slider.
Far more interesting than that is the Tech Buzz Game that, as Yahoo! puts it, “ is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends. As a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time.”
What I really like about what Google Labs does is that they’re constantly trying to fix issues with finding information. While Yahoo!’s pursuits are fantastic, they’re still a bit too academic for me. Google keeps adding features that I’ve started to take great pleasure in discovering.
For example, you can now enter your FedEx or UPS tracking number directly into your Google Search Bar, and have the tracking results pop right up. You can enter a phone number and have it do an automatic nationwide reverse-directory search. You can SMS “Rubicon, San Francisco” to GOOGL (46645) and have it return a number, and an address. You can enter filetype:ppt and have your search results just return PowerPoint files. You can even enter in things like (25*45)+34 and have it come up with the calculated results.
PC Magazine has a great article on 20 Great Google Secrets that gets into more detail on what you can do.