innovation playground Idris Mootee

This Is Month 10 Of Our Company, Things Are Moving Faster And Fatser. If Things Look Too Smooth That Means We Are Not Moving Fast Enough.

Here’s a picture of one of our teams in action (L2R, director of usability and information design Jeff, director of strategy Edwin, head of technical development Souvik and head of new business Nick). Very Hugo Boss looking, which doesn’t happen every day. I think we will be running out of space soon. Every month we’re adding new people (5 this month), Each one of them is carefully picked and must be ir has potential to be the best in their respective discipline. It is the only way to build a great company. That way, I will never have to worry about mediocrity because the system will reject it. Our policy is to maintain ‘deadweight free’ so we can move fast and smart. I hope we can continue to remain agile when if we reach 100 people. The office is getting a lot of good energy lately, just good 'chi' everywhere.

One of our current projects requires us to look at semantics search. It is a very important area and for us is how that would change social media. Semantics search is hot but many are confused of what it is. It is basically a smarter search that allows a system to discern if there is a link between two words, such as money and happiness. We all know that the relationships between the two are complex and both direct and indirect, and can be categorized as such. Our brain seems to comprehend this easily (may not be so in this example), but for a computer it is a very difficult to understand it. We are all trying to solve this puzzle.

So how does semantics search allow technology to refine its search capability? It can automatically place pages into dynamic categories, or tag them without human intervention. Knowing what topic a page relates to is key for returning relevant content. It can offer related topics and keywords to help you narrow your search. Instead of offering you all the related keywords, it directly incorporates them back into the search with less weight than the user inputted ones. I am sceptical whether this will produce better results or just more different ones. If the engine uses statistical analysis to retrieve it’s semantic matches to a keyword then it’s likely that keywords currently associated with hot news topics will bring those in as well.

A semantic search engine generally takes the sense of a word as a factor in its ranking algorithm or offers the user a choice as to the sense of a word or phrase. (This is not the same as what is known as Semantic Web which requires a lot of more human labor to tag everything) Can technology tells what is the content of a text? Or to be more precise: what are the core concepts which must be identified in order to grasp the essential meaning of a text? Or what is its emotion or tone? Or its credibility whether it is an opinion or results of research? The challenge is to locate this central core of the text that holds the essentials of its meaning. This is step one before any attempt at interpretation. Generally only a very small proportion of these text - constitute the foundations of the concepts, if they were removed, the "textual construction" would collapse totally, and the meaning would be lost.

Content analysis consist of the following four steps:
1/ the identity of the main actors,
2/ the relations they have to each other,
3/ the hierarchy of these relations,
4/ the tone and style of the words.

Microsoft is moving fast on this and is rumored to buying Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset.
The purchase price is rumored to over $100 million although no announcement has been made. Powerset has developed a technology that trys to understand the full meanings of phrases you type in while searching, and it returns results based on that understanding.
 Microsoft’s strategy is to close the gap with Google’s search engine. Google was quick to dismiss Powerset’s semantic, or “natural language” approach as being only marginally interesting. Behind the scene Google has hired a team of semantic specialists to work on that approach. This is the next race for search and I think the winner will not be Microsoft or Google.

Google’s search results are still based primarily on the individual words you type into its search bar, and its approach does very little to understand the possible meaning created by joining two or more words together. Powerset’s technology is still controversial because, while sexy in theory, the natural language approach is difficult to pull off in practice. Many wonder if the technology can ever be developed enough to be useful within a major search engine. Powerset was valued at a $42.5 mm after the first round of financing just two years ago. Investors expected that the technology it acquired from PARC would help this into a killer app. However, the technology has taken longer to develop than expected. Powerset has a high burn rate, and so a purchase at $100 million is considered a safe result for an area that is also seeing increasing competition (players such as Hakia, Twine and TextDigger are all using similar approaches). I need to dig deeper into Hakia and TextDigger in the coming months and will share my thoughts here.

More 2008 Predictions. Yahoo, Facebook,Google and Microsoft.

More predictions. What 2008 means for Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft? In 2008, while Google is reaching its supreme status with the launch of Google revolutionary health platform and GPhone and more.

in 2008, Yahoo will continue spending the majority of the year trying to figure out its strategy other than saying "we have 500 million users, so we are a player." Yahoo’s main strength, display advertising, is now being challenged more directly by Google and Microsoft. They missed and missed all big opportunities the last 24 months and struggle to integrate their acquisitions. They fell into the trap that acquisitions can make up for the lack of innovation.  Let’s face it, Yahoo needs help… a lot of help.  Even the brand is getting less relevant other than they have access to lots of traffic. There is a 51% chance that Microsoft will end up buying them.  It will happen in the next 90 days. That will give the combined company around 30% share on the ad space. (Jeffrey, you don't have much time! May be it's too late aleady)

In 2008, Microsoft will (once again) fail to gain much traction in any innovation that is Web 2.0. ..Not a difficult one to predict.  In the next 12 months, Microsoft will work hard to figure out what do to with aQuantive (and Razorfish). The strategic option is simple, leave them alone. That's probbaly what they will do. Visia will get better, XBox will do well and Office 2007 will get more adoption. Zune..what is it?

In 2008, Facebook will start feeling the challenge of being a real company. It is like  a teenager trying out a suit. They will start to have business policy and operations planning and all those things that they'd thought they will never need.  They will find their heads deep in the hell of pre IPO work. And they will need a lot of creativity to figure out a way to justify its lofty valuation.

And for AOL, 2008 we will see the final stage since the AOL Time Warner merger. Platform A will likely go public. The company is going through its last phase of brain drain and the rest of AOL will be sold, dismantled or folded into Time Warner. So here’s what I think will happen with AOL. Time Warner is going to phase out the AOL brand name (imagine the yello man slowly walking out of the screen) and rebrand the Internet unit as something else. There’s no value for the AOL brand name to serve as the operating brand for the Internet unit anyway.  Besides many of AOL's popular sites are not branded as AOL any, including media gossip site TMZ.com and MapQuest. The AOL chapter will be finally closed. Say goodbye to the yello man.

The key players for 2008 will be Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Yahoo is out. And where's MySpace?

Continue on "Widgetnomics"

I have seen people throwing out crazy numbers around usage of widgets. Those big numbers are being thrown around by widget developers and tracking firms and just smoke screen, becasue of the fact that many of those companies are not bringng in any decent revenue. So I dig this up from comScore ranking the most popular widget services. Popularity is one thing but figuring out a business model is another. This is not a popularity contest but it helps. Here they are:

1.  Slide
2.  RockYou
3.  Picturetrail
4.  Photobucket
5.  BunnyHeroLabs
6.  BlingyBob
7.  Poqbum
8.  Brightcove
9.  Layoutstar
10.  Musicplaylist.us

The number one on the list is Slide with 117 million people a month seeing one of its slideshow widgets distributed all over the Web.  RockYou comes in second with 82 million.  Other notables are Photobucket with a monthly audience of 28 million, and Brightcove with 17 million. Slides is based in San Francisco. Slide has developed customizable and easily assembled slide shows of photos that can be embedded in a blog or a MySpace page, sent out in an RSS feed, and streamed to a desktop as a screensaver. It is believed that they are funded by Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla and others. Founded by Max Levchin and currently has 46 employees and have been in business for 3 years.

While slides show and video clips are graat, I really like the idea of drawing and sketching. That's why all of us use the ThinkPad Tablet and my business partners Scott and Keith are just using them like a notepad. I am the old fashion white board guy (with colorful markers). While many concepts cannot be communicated easiy through text, using visuals is an absolute must, and if you are a visual minded person, SketchCast is for you. SketchCast is a relatively new service that let's you create sketches and add audio to them. The concept is similar to screencasting, with the freedom of drawing whatever you want - to convey your message. Their idea is to help people better express themselves, but I think there are more applications i we use our imagaintion. I should try to create my next slide show with it and see how it works.

Free Real Time Video Conferencing Is Here. Will You Use It?

We have always believed that soon we can just do video conference with anyone on our computer. We've seen them on movies and sci-fi or James Bond film. The interesting thing is that even though the technology actually existed today that allows us to chat to each-other on video in real time, this service has still not really taken off. One reason is not everyone wnats to be seen while on the phone.  Real time video calling seems to be slow getting adoption. A start-up Tokbox think believes this is going to change. They provide a free service that allows users to talk with their friends via video web-cams in real-time. The good thing is absolutely NO client software to dowload. This is a key feature. To set up a real-time video conference you only need to send a link to the person that you want to speak with.

The co-founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, has a financial stake-holding in Tokbox and also sits on the board. Sequoia Capital who made billions by investing in and then selling YouTube also plan invest $4 million it them. Tokbox are also currently using the same office space that YouTube grew out of. The "free" service idea will ultiamately become an issue as big dollars are required for investments. Think about it, providing a real-time service, with a 200-millisecond response time worldwide, for multi party, multimedia sessions requires an intelligent global network. And there are four people in a meeting, sharing data, voice and video. We are dealing with multiple channels of real-time information each requiring optimization and synchronization. It is incredibly difficult to deliver real-time multimedia communications over the Internet, a fundamentally non-real time network which most people do not recognized.

Will Microsoft and Google play in this space. It is an absoulte yes. earlier this year Google bought this firm Marratech, a video conferencing and collaboration company, which will now compete with the likes of WebEx and GoToMeeting.  Ultimately this will have full integration to existing Google services and all is free. When they're bringing in $1b+ per quarter in search revenue, they can afford to give these services away for free, with a little ad on the side naturally.

 

Social Netwoks May Be Just A Fad? A Danagerous "May Be".

A week ago Microsoft’s Ballmer was warning that social networking may be a just another fad. Google’s Schmidt doesn’t think that is the case. Here’s what he was telling the journalists at the end of the Zeitgeist conference, a two-day gathering of an eclectic mix of Google co-opetitors, social activists and even politicians. “People don’t appreciate how many page views on the Internet are in social networks. Social networks account for an ‘enormous proportion’ of Internet usage. It is very real. It’s a very real phenomenon.” added Schmidt.

In a conversation that also included Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Schmidt did not answer the question in the mind of many reporters: What is Google going to do to remedy its lack of success in social networking? Schmidt did say that over the next year or two, Google is planning to use information it has about the connections between its users, something techies call the “social graph,” to improve searches and other Google services. I was showing this idea toa client about a year back  and I called it “social search” and "social links visualization". Schmidt also highlighted Google’s existing social network service, Orkut, and its plan to sell ads on behalf of MySpace (and Facebook?), the largest social networking site.

What is social graph? Facebook’s Fitzpatrick defines "social graph" as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related". It is kind of when you watch on Without a Trace on TV when the FBI guys draw links between individuals that are linked to an event.

This is not an easy problem to solve. Today we need to have different logins for different social networks and often we use different names. What we use for linkedin is definitely not the same as what we use in MySpace or Second Life. This may have some legal issue as many would argue user themselves want to own their personal information - including their explicitly or implicitly links to groups or individuals. Graphs have always been very powerful modeling tools for modeling any kind of systems. Economies and cells can be represented and analyzed as networks. Let me throw out a vision. In three years, Microsoft will have functions in Explorer called "People Explorer" and one click on that you get an instant visualization of a person and how he or she is connected to others, click on filters such as “school”, “neighborhood”, “hobbies” or “work” will get you a view of those social connections within the context of your filter. How’s that?  It is essentially a meta-social network search and visualization interface. Anyone interesting in making a prototype of that, ping me. I will write a business plan for you. You can get funded in two weeks.

Have You Ordered Your Google Ring Yet?

If you wonder what presents to give to your friends this Christmas then I've got an idea for you.  This is a great gift for those who can't stop Googling themselves. This VanityRing is the ultimate vanity accessory for technorati: the number on its face shows how many links show up when someone Googles you. Sure this ring can get you a table on Friday's night in the hippest restuarant even without a reservation. Designed by Markus Kison (he received several international awards for his work “Roermond-Ecke-Schönhauser“ 2005), check out the product demonstration here.   When the ring is inserted into its docking station, the ring is reloaded & updated to the objective popularity & importance measure of your personality. I am gesssing the next thing you'll get is a feature showing how many people you're linked to via Facebook or MySpace. Get one now.

Web 2.0, Media 2.0 and Agency 2.0 – What Do You Mean?

I wrote about Media 2.0 a few weeks ago and I want to write more on this subject. I have been meeting with a lot of senior executives and clients these days and when I ask people what is Web 2.0, some are quick to list an inventory of tools (trust me, we have numerous debates on this among ourselves before we started idea couture and we were beating it to death on what is Web 2.0). I answered that these are only enablers, Web 2.0 or Media 2.0 is about emerging consumer/ cultural practices. Rather than saying Ajax or consumer generated content, we must start with understanding the underlying forces shaping the new media landscape which fuels Web 2.0. What does the new media landscape looks like? Media executives please read on.

Let’s start with better understanding the nature of our relationship with media is that “peer2peer networking”, “personalization” and “participatory” culture. Some think that Web 2.0 is sometimes misleading as that implies that the whole of the web has changed, the way a 2.0 service pack package replaces its 1.0 predecessor, but that's not really the case here. Some simply refers Web 2.0 to the Web's usability and the technologies behind it. This so-called new version is defined by blogs, social networking sites, wikis and RSS feeds etc. In contrast to Web 1.0, where users were largely restricted to simply reading web pages, Web 2.0 makes for interactions. Consider this metaphor: instead of just reading a book, the reader is helping to write it. Some will doodle on it and resell it. Some might tear off pages and bind them together as an art book.

Some executives will ask "what does this has to do with my company?

Many executives might be tempted to think that 2.0 won't affect their companies, other than a few angry customers posting their videos on YouTube . Indeed, Forrester Research, Inc. in March this year polled 119 CIOs at firms with 500 or more employees and found that a lack of current need stopped them from Web 2.0 adoption 47% of the time. A little more than half of these CIOs were most likely to view social networking and blogs as unnecessary. Think about it…. “A lack of current need?”  Come on, what are these people thinking? They need a little imagination. This ad helps.

Media 2.0 is the number one driver of Web 2.0, it is about “innovation” that happens as a result of “convergence”. We are seeing a period of prolonged and profound technological change. New media are created, distributed, adopted, adapted, remixed, redistributed and absorbed into the culture at rapid pace. And that’s causing headache for all media executives. Everyone wants to know what’s next and what to do to prosper or survive this change.

Looking back at the last 200 years or so, the shift from orality to literacy, the rise of print culture, and the emergence of modern mass media during the last 100 years represent important paradigm shifts in the way we communicated and expressed our ideas. Generally a burst of technological change was followed by a period of adjustment. So Print 1.0 to Print 2.0 etc. The explosion of new technologies at the end of the 19th century started a period of profound self-consciousness which the sociologist called modernism.

This modernism is impacting all institutions (marketers and media owners), it is constantly reshaping all modes of artistic expression (24/7 and global), and is sparkling a series of intellectual breakthroughs of which the full extent of the impact is still unknown. If anything, the rate of technological and cultural change has accelerated and social networks are evolving into new entities. It is breeding a new generation of subculturalist. Many of these are the new creative classes of our societies. For the last ten years, my job required me to analyze the impact of these trends on business. I’ll be honest; it has not been an easy one.

The very nature of the digital space is the ability for brands to speak with – not to, but with -- the micro communities and individuals themselves. In the digital world, marketing will be about finding them, excites them, engages them, empowers them and builds relationship with them. Advertising over the past two decades has provided more and more production spectacle, more and more belly laughs but less and less relevance and information. Because information is core of digital, digital marketing will soon enough fill the vacuum. That's Agency 2.0.

According to ZenithOptimedia $10.5 billion will be spent on display, including video, but $14 billion will be spent on search for 2007. Why? Simply because search is contextual, measurable and information rich. As digital advertising itself becomes more targeted and measurable, it will be best deployed as a sort of street signage -- posted on extremely vertical social networks or served based on user profiles -- directing the audience to where the real information is: brand or third-party websites, or embedded in highly utilitarian content. That’s why we will see over 75% of all ads will be digital in 2-3 years. Case in point, the $500 million mkt budget Microsoft allocated to the introduction of its new Vista OS, 30% went online. Imagine, if all marketers decided to follow Microsoft and spend 30% of their budgets on digital tomorrow? This would be Madison Avenue’s worst nightmare.

The birth of new media technologies sparks social and aesthetic experimentation and as a result we see an ever-expanding menu of cultural choices, from devices to storages. How exciting? Because these emerging media and technologies have lowered or removed many barriers to entry into the cultural marketplace, everyone can easily participate much like everyone can be a merchant with eBay. The cultural marketplace is now opened for anyone and anywhere in the world as long you have a computer and a connection. It is no longer headquartered in Madison Avenue. This grand utopian movement of our contemporary age is headquartered in Silicon Valley, and is now around the world, I've met smart Indian, Brits, Dutch, French, Chinese, Korean entrepreneurs joining this march seeing the great seduction is actually a fusion of two historical movements: the counter-cultural utopianism of the '60s and the techno-economic utopianism of the '90s. This seduction is known to to the world as the Web 2.0.

The rapid diversification of cultural production inspires a diversity of aesthetic (we have seen that in graphic design) responses, as it gets taken up and deployed by different communities or users. Such transformations broaden the means of self and collective expression. Social networks then become storage of collective meanings. In a previous post, I wrote about the relentless commodification (and virtualization) of all areas of social life, and there is a lot of opportunities for brands to play a role. Unfortunately, not many marketers get this.

The birth of new media technologies sparks social and aesthetic experimentation and as a result we see an ever-expanding menu of cultural choices, from devices to storages. How exciting? Because these emerging media and technologies have lowered or removed many barriers to entry into the cultural marketplace, everyone can easily participate much like everyone can be a merchant with eBay. The cultural marketplace is now opened for anyone and anywhere in the world as long you have a computer and a connection. It is no longer headquartered in Madison Avenue.

So what is the new role of brands here?

Every bite of image, sound, story, brand, and relationship will play itself out across the broadest possible range of media (fixed and portable) channels and remixed by different people. What’s going on now is consumers are exercising their newfound power that empowers them to shape and control the flow of media in their lives; they want the media they want when they want it and where they want it.

The mass media era pushed amateur cultural production underground, in the form sub-cultures niche music and publications, though it were never totally destroyed by the rise of mass media. The web has brought this layer of amateur production back to the surface, providing an infrastructure where amateurs can share what they created with each other: this ability to share media has helped to motivate media production, resulting in a massive explosion of grassroots movement from expression to taste-making. So the "big media"--the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and international publishing houses--now represent the enemies of the Media 2.0 movement. In Marxist terms, the traditional media had become the exploitative "bourgeoisie," and citizen media, those heroic bloggers and podcasters, were the "proletariat". Welcome to the world of Web 2.0. Your thoughts please.

Microsoft Latest Competitive Moves

Microsoft has been working a few interesting projects that could empower new users. First one is Silverlight, which carries the best of traditional software development and Web development in a new model that extends the skills and reach of both disciplines (procedural code versus or used in conjunction with scripted code). The idea is to allow a high quality experience to be created by a large number of pros with skills in .NET, JavaScript and eventually Python and Ruby, plus the ability to compile dynamic and scripted languages into a multi-platform CLR that works well both on a Mac or a PC.

The second one is Popfly which is tool like Yahoo Pipes that enables developers to quickly develop mash-up style Web applications and services. This will drive the expectation of user experience in software from the bottom up. People ask questions about why do big expensive software packages cost so much and provide so little. I wonder why people are not asking that enough.

The third one is Surface which is a next generation computing paradigm that's built on the same technology many of us use today or will use in the coming months (Vista and WPF). After years of development, they plan to release a computer that uses the tabletop as its high-resolution display, recognizing objects placed on its surface and skipping the traditional keyboard and mouse in favor of a touchpad-like control interface. This is a biggie. They envision a number of applications such as people placing a card on the table to call up a virtual stack of digital photos from a computer server and then rotate, resize and spread them across the table using their hands. In another, diners split a tab by dragging icons of their meals to their credit cards. Practically from general retail to fast food and casino.

And then there is aQuantive's Atlas, which will be powered up by Microsoft and will have a chance to become the dominant platform. Plus Microsoft Web 2.0 strategy that includes Version 2.0 of the so-called “Community Kit for SharePoint,” which includes new versions of its Enhanced Blog, Enhanced Wiki, ChatterBox Ajax and Tag Cloud editions. Microsoft is ready for the game.

Now everyone can do web mashup - Thanks to Microsoft Popfly

Microsoft just announched a new web mashup tool for people who cannot write a line of code. Interesting strategy...  going after non-consumer..much like Nintendo Wii going after non-gamer. The hosted service Popfly is now in alpha testing, it gives everyone a visual way to add features such as mashups to blogs or websites. Popfly includes a builder tool that allows people to create an application by drag and drop. These "blocks" represent tasks or services, such as a widget that adds a video clip to your blog etc. It is as easy as ABC (The service itself is written using Silverlight, Microsoft's browser plug-in).  The idean behind Microsoft's decision to create Popfly was that it wanted a software development tool for nonprofessionals. This is a key innovation coming from Microsoft and will be part of a  movement of a new Microsoft stratgy to go after general consumers. This is a new game.

eBay + Paypal + Skype + Stumbleupon + ? + ? = ?

eBay recently acquired a small company called Stumbleupon which directs traffic to socially rated content, it means it's not even something you are "searching for" but something people like you might like that you've stumbled upon. The beauty of this is while Google is mostly good when you have some ideas of what you are looking for, but this is about what people want to see, sort of like window shopping followed by impulse buying when you see something you like in a shop window. Before the acquisition, Stumbleupon was among the top ten in terms of sending traffic to eBay. Let's imagine what eBay can do with it. One feature that now exists is the ability to rate a webpage and code it with a keyword on the fly by clicking on a comment button on the Stumbleupon toolbar. Ebay took paypal and turned it into the worlds largest online payment system, adding Skype (it probably costs too much) and now this small one.  I think I have an idea of what it is becoming and I can see a few more missing pieces. I think this is a good move. Maybe I should share my scenario planning slides with eBay in 2010.