It's Rishi

Universal Studios apparently has a large MySpace marketing budget for the upcoming movie Smokin’ Aces. So large that during my last session, I repeatedly got served three Smokin’ Aces ad placements on the same page. Of course, everybody knows that MySpace has a huge ad inventory surplus, so it seems likely to me that Univeral Studios got a pretty sweet deal on such a bulk purchase. The question I ask is whether three ad placements are more effective than one? My first instinct was no, but I must say being bombarded with Smokin’ Aces imagery really did get me to stop and take notice.

UPDATE: Found an article from AdWeek that talks about Universal’s online efforts to market the film. Apparently there is a Smokin’ Aces action game & sweepstakes on Second Life and a widget that allows you to include the Smokin’ Aces trailer on your blog, profile, etc. I love the widget idea. It’s cheap to make and I’ll guess that 1 widget placement by a user brings better conversion than even 100 ad impressions on the same page. I say this because profile pages on social network sites follow a standard layout (except for heavily customized MySpace profile pages), so our eyes are easily trained to focus on the page content and ignore the ads in the layout. However, if a user places the widget on their profile, it’s much more likely to get noticed because it’s in the “line of sight”. Kudos to Universal for experimenting with these new forms of marketing. I’m sure other studios will follow with their own efforts. It’ll be interesting to see what works.

If you haven’t heard of Meebo by now, you’re behind the curve. I’m not suggesting that Meebo is right for everyone, everytime (I use the AIM client on my laptop and Meebo only when on the go), but Meebo is one of the admittedly few “Web 2.0″ companies that has built and refined a product that truly fulfills a need for a lot of people.

Just like the telephone is about talking with people, IM is about chatting with people. The telephone “just works”, IM should too. Yet the major players like AOL and Yahoo! are clouding the IM experience by bloating their clients with whizbang features and add-ons. Meebo, instead, has been committed to ensuring that IM is simple and universally accessible.

A friend of mine, having just discovered Meebo himself, asked me about how the company makes money. He noticed that they do not charge for the service nor serve any ads. I responded to him that as far as I knew they have not made a dime. They have, however, raised plenty of money from top-tier VC’s so they surely will have time to explore various revenue streams. In Meebo’s most recent message to its users, CEO Seth Sternberg, states that:

We’re looking forward to exploring three ways to generate revenue from meebo: advertising (no “punch the monkey” banners), allowing our user community to personalize meebo (similar to Cyworld’s approach in Korea or QQ’s in China), and distributing other services that directly monetize (like sending IMs over the SMS networks).

Let’s review each of these three ideas that Seth states:

Advertising – Contextual advertising is not going to work. Determining what ads are relevant to a conversation is pretty hopeless. Moreover, I think users will find it very creepy if Big Brother is monitoring their conversations and serving up ads in response to the topic. Run a CPM campaign? Sure, but be prepared for abysmal, MySpace-like ad rates. Content is unpredictable, targeting is low, and Meebo often lives in the background of a user’s session. Serve an ad and there’s a good chance the user’s eyeballs never see it. I suppose a solution to this problem would be to serve new ad impressions only when there is a new incoming or outgoing message. Still though, some money can be made through traditional advertising, but not a lot and what’s worse is that it has a negative impact on the user experience.

Allowing users to customize Meebo…for a price – Seth cites CyWorld as an example of where users in a community pay to customize/personalize their profile. CyWorld has been wildly successful in getting its users to pay for all sorts of additions – from clothing to decorations to background music – for their own virtual world (think “The Sims”) called their “minihompy”. Customizing profiles is nothing new. On MySpace, if you haven’t customized your profile, you’re an uncool newbie. Our profile in a social community like CyWorld and MySpace is a direct expression of ourselves. Every one of us wants to express our own uniqueness, and customizations allow us that ability. Just as in real life, plenty of people are happy to open up their wallets in the name of self-expression. On the flip side, all IM clients allow customization to some degree. Few users take advantage of it. Furthermore, even if Meebo allows fancy customizations, they will likely only be viewable by other Meebo users, not users of other IM clients. I can see maybe 5% of users (Meebo addicts) spending on average $10/year to customize their Meebo experience, but, unlike in social networking communities, I just don’t see a big market here.

Distributing other services that directly monetize – I’m not sure exactly what Seth has in mind for this one. He says “like sending IM’s over the SMS network”? Yes, most carriers offer SMS-based IM functionality on their networks. And, yes, the carriers are making lots of money from all the SMS fees incurred by users as a result of their IM usage. So how will Meebo fit into this? I’m not sure. Meebo will not make any money from user’s sending IM’s to mobile users. For example, Teleflip allows you to conveniently send messages to SMS uses for free. Teleflip does not make any money (they receive no kickback from the carrier nor have they chosen to insert ads into messages). I could be wrong here, but I don’t see how Meebo can make money from SMS. What might be interesting is enabling VOIP telephony over Meebo, but while I can think of some use cases for this I think the demand for this would generally be questionable.

To me, the right strategy for Meebo is pretty clear: the desktop. Meebo, and IM clients in general, are very unique in that the user is “stuck” to it for their entire online session. Personally, whenever I’m online, I’m logged into my IM accounts. E-mail clients are probably the only rival in terms of session stickiness. Let’s look at the stats from their recent press release: average session is 70 minutes, users spend a collective total of 165 years on Meebo every single day. Because Meebo is so sticky and because Meebo is one of the cornerstones of a Meebo user’s online experience, Meebo can take control of a user’s online interaction – acting as a gateway to other information and services. In other words, it can become an excellent online desktop (the popular term is “ajax desktop”).

To expand Meebo’s reach, the company has partnered with other companies that have ajax desktop products such as Netvibes and Microsoft Windows Live. While this is certainly a good strategy for Meebo to get more users, I have got to believe that Meebo’s long-term intent is to compete directly with these companies. I expect Meebo to come out with add-on widgets as you would see on any typical ajax desktop product: RSS reader, PIM functions, search, etc. With increased content comes increased advertising opportunities. Not only can Meebo run traditional ads, they will also be able to establish affiliate marketing agreements (e.g. eBay/Shopping.com for shopping).

Beyond simply advertising opportunities, owning the desktop gives immense leveraging power. As Microsoft proved many times over with Windows, companies will pay big bucks to be available by default on new desktops. Netvibes already charges companies to include their widgets in Netvibes.

So where is the billion dollar business in all of this? To be honest, I can’t define it right now. Clearly, though, right now and into the future, companies will increasingly be fighting for eyeballs. Meebo will be able to provide that to other services in spades. More importantly, Meebo has the attention of it’s user’s eyeballs not seconds or even minutes in a session. We’re talking hours. That’s extraordinarily valuable. More valuable than we can even appreciate today.

Danny Sullivan interviews Gabe Rivera – Gabe is the creator of memeorandum.com/TechMeme, one of the premier blog/news aggregators on the Web. Ever since I first found memeorandum a couple years ago, I have been a multiple-times-per-day reader. My routine is: open laptop, check e-mail, check RSS reader, check TechMeme. You may also notice that Memeorandum is the only company besides Google and Yahoo that has its own tag on my blog! It’s indispensable for me. I’ve also had the opportunity to meet Gabe at various geek social events and he’s always struck me as someone who is purely focused on methodically building the perfect product. He keeps a low-profile and is easy to approach. On more than one occcasion I’ve rambled off my ideas for to him and he’s always been kind enough not to interrupt and beg me to stop boring him. =)

The second interview worth reading today is TorrentFreak’s interview of Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, the now ubiquitous P2P file distribution protocol, and the founder of BitTorrent, Inc (recently in the news for purchasing popular BitTorrent client, uTorrent). If you are a frequent torrent user, you owe it to yourself to learn more from the man who brought about the current revolution of P2P file-sharing.

Apple’s defensive new iPhone is bound to fail

The writer, Matthew Lynn, gives three reasons why he believes the iPhone will not be as successful as all the recent hype suggests:

[the following is all quoted from the above article]

Apple is late to this party – The company didn’t invent the personal computer or MP3 player, but it was among the pioneers of both products. Yet there is no shortage of phones out there. There are already big companies that dominate the space, all of which will defend their turf. . .That means Apple will have to fight hard for every sale.

The mobile-phone industry depends on cooperation with the big networks – Apple has never been good at working with other companies. If it knew how to do that, it would be Microsoft Corp. . . On top of that, its rivals will be pulling out all the stops to prevent the networks offering iPhones.

the iPhone is a defensive product – The price and the e-mail features make it look like a business product. But Apple is a consumer company. Will your accounts department stump up for a fancy new handset just so you can listen to Eminem on your way to a business meeting?

The writer’s final conclusion is that “Apple will sell a few to its fans, but the iPhone won’t make a long-term mark on the industry.”

I mostly agree with this writer’s comments, although I do feel as if he trivializes some of the iPhone’s interface innovations such as the “multi-touch” touch-screen and the gesture input which it enables. However, the writer really hits the nail on the head with his point about how a large percentage of high-end smartphones such as the iPhone are purchased by corporations. Are companies going to be willing to shell out big bucks, more than competing devices from Palm, RIM and others, to give their employees superior music and photo capabilities. Furtheremore, it’s imperative for Apple to deliver a CDMA version soon so Sprint and Verizon customers – both of whom dominate with corporate customers – can enjoy the iPhone with high speed (500kbps+) evDO connectivity.

Last year, in my highlights from the 2006 NAIAS post, two of the ten highlights were focused on alternative fuel technologies. I commented on Daimler-Chrysler’s exciting announcement of the stateside arrival of Bluetec diesel cars. As a big proponent of diesel power, I was excited to hear the news. Finally, with the growing availability of low-sulfur diesel fuel in the US, we can enjoy the advanced diesel powerplants that Europe (over 50% of new cars sold in the EU are diesel) and other parts of the world are.

For along time I’ve been trying to convince people that diesel represents a better near-term solution for improved energy efficiency than hybrid does. What I’ve been saying all along about diesel’s practical advantages over hybrid is finally being recognized by Honda also. For the next-generation, US-market Accord coming in MY2008, it is being reported that Honda may be replacing the outgoing petrol V6 Hybrid with a diesel V6 or possibly inline-4 turbo-diesel. A diesel Honda?? Yup! Honda has developed their own “i-CTDi” diesel technology which employs similar techniques as found in TDI, Bluetec, etc: high-pressure common-rail fuel ignition, oxidation catalysts and particulate filters to minimize emissions. In typical Honda fashion, though, they’ve one-upped their competitiors by creating a nitrogen-oxide emissions control system which does not require periodic ammonia replenishment (a two-stage catalyst technology actually combines nitrogen and hydrogen to produce ammonia), thus becoming a maintenance-free design. Pretty slick.

With both the Germans and soon the Japanese bringing 50-state legal diesel models to the US, it’s only a matter of time before US buyers throw away their negative perceptions about loud, noisy diesels of yesteryear and embrace modern, efficient diesel technology. Already experts are forecasting diesel marketshare in the US to double to 7.5% by 2010.

The other big news at the show is plug-in hybrids, particularly the Chevy Volt Concept that GM surprised the show with.

The big deal with plug-in hybrids is that unlike traditional hybrids which ultimately rely on gasoline power to re-charge, plug-in hybrids let you run indefinitely on battery, without ever burning a drop of gasoline, as long as you stay within the battery’s range. For the Volt, Chevy is saying 40 miles. However, as is usual the case with electric motivation, the primary obstacle is in the battery. Here’s some info from a recent Wired.com blog post on the Volt:

The lithium ion batteries are managed to not be charged more than 80 percent or less than 30 percent so that they will last the lifetime of the vehicle, according to GM’s Tony Posawatz.

Lithium ion is the better bet than nickel metal hydride to provide more range, according to Dan Edmunds, of automotive website Edmunds.com. If only they could be managed to go closer to 100 percent utilization while retaining their lifetime, we’d see a car that would get an effective efficiency of 200 mpg.

The Wired.com post also points out that the 40 mile electric range of the Volt is a scant improvement over the decade-old GM EV1 electric car. Without a doubt, the hybrid configuration and plug-in charging ability make the Volt a vastly more practical vehicle than the EV1 was. However, it is a sad commentary on the progress that has been made. GM is saying that it will take five years to develop production-ready lithium-ion batteries suitable for a car like the Volt. They’re also hoping that the Volt will excite battery manufacturers to get serious about finding ways to reduce the cost (from ~$10k to ~2k) of large, lithium-ion batteries.

One last interesting bit regarding plug-in hybrids: Honda might be getting into the game!

Once all the big debuts have been made, I’ll do another Top 10 NAIAS highlights post.

Back in December, I found a not-so-nice surprise in my Sprint cellular bill. Sprint had quietly raised the cost of an SMS text message from 10 cents to 15 cents per message. I complained to customer service that this was a breach of my original contract. However, after a couple of e-mail exchanges, it was clear that I would be stuck with the rate increase. I later found out that Cingular had also raised their SMS rate to 15 cents. It is also expected that both Verizon and T-Mobile will follow with increases of their own in order to keep their ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) competitive.

So how does this rate increase affect the typical cellular customer? Well, the typical American customer is not affected because he/she does not text much, if at all. Of course, this rate increase will only serve to discourage these users from embracing SMS. For the millions of customers who do use SMS to communicate with friends and colleagues, my hunch is that the 5 cent increase will not result in a significant change in their usage. Let’s face it, most cellular customers will hardly take notice at the extra couple of dollars on their monthly statement. The carriers know this and that’s why they don’t seem to be afraid of customer backlash. The unsympathetic reply I got from Sprint’s customer service supports this.

The real losers of SMS rate increases are companies who provide SMS-based services. One such company is 4INFO. 4INFO provides consumers with easy access to information like stock quotes, sports scores, flight status, and the weather. They utilize a simple, “natural language” query interface (e.g. “weather 94304″ or “49ers nfl”). Very useful. One of the primary challenges 4INFO faces is the lack of SMS adoption here in the US. In foreign markets, SMS is cheap (or even free) compared to voice airtime so it is very popular, even amongst older-age cellular customers. 4INFO is quick to emphasize in their marketing that the service is free. While it is true that 4INFO itself does not charge for their service, the cellular carrier is charging for SMS access. With SMS costing 15 cents per message, a simple roundtrip to 4INFO costs 30 cents. Out to dinner with the girlfriend but want to check the football score every half hour? 4INFO works perfectly for this. The problem is that by the time the game is over, you’ll have paid a couple bucks in SMS fees. That’s pretty expensive. There’s a good chance I would utilize this service if I was in a pinch, but I couldn’t afford this luxury on a daily basis.

What’s the alternative to SMS? Internet access on your mobile device. Carriers have successfully been upselling 2.5G and 3G data plans for the past couple of years. Now we’re seeing devices which support Wi-Fi and Wi-Max isn’t that far away. Combined with the trend in mobile devices of offering ever-more rich display screens and sophisticated Internet software applications, we’re slowly going to see a convergence between the way we access information on our PC’s and the way we access the same information on our mobile devices. As Internet access becomes ubiquitous on mobile devices, services like SMS will quickly becomes extinct. Need to send a quick message to another person? Use IM or e-mail. Need to get alerts? RSS. Etc, etc.

For now, even in light of Sprint’s rate increase, I doubt my SMS behavior will be altered. I will, however, take solace in the expectation that SMS will soon be a distant memory.

Note: I do think there is a future for companies like 4INFO. To be able to understand and satisfy short-hand queries like “UAL SFO JFK” (results in a timetable for United flights from SFO to JFK) is very valuable in the mobile context where keypads and displays are tiny. My expectation, however, is that they will find ultimate success in the future piggybacking off of Internet technologies rather than SMS. Hopefully these companies will manage to stay afloat until then.

Researchers Use Wikipedia To Make Computers Smarter

The idea here is to be able to cluster keywords based on their relevant meanings. The example given in the article is let’s say you’re trying to block those annoying vitamin supplement spam emails. You might set your client to flag emails containing the word “vitamin” as spam. However, let’s say an email comes in with the term “B12″ in it. A human would easily recognize that there is a strong possibility the e-mail is referring to the vitamin B12, but the spam filter – having no instructions for B12 nor the ability to correlate “B12″ to “vitamin” – would allow the e-mail through.

This type of clustering is not new. It has been done many times in the past, including on the Web. However, these technologies have needed to process millions if not billions of web pages to be able to perform such keyword clustering across a wide range of topics. For example, let’s say you have a crawler which has processed 500 million web pages. There is a good chance that in those 500 million web pages, the terms “vitamin” and “B12″ were found together (most likely adjacent to each other, “vitamin B12″). Examples of such pages would be vitamin supplement merchants or health information websites. The crawler, having observed co-occurrences of these two terms, a correlation factor would be developed. Maybe, 70% of the time the term “B12″ was found, the term “vitamin” occurred (The other 30% of the time maybe B12 referred to an apartment number, the name of a rocket, who knows..) So, a spam filter which can perform this kind of analysis would be able to reasonably infer that the this e-mail with the term “B12″ is likely to be related to the term “vitamin” and thus should be flagged as spam.

Again, this type of analysis would only be possible after processing vast amounts of training data – billions of web pages probably. And since web content is uncontrolled, there will be a higher level of chaos in the recorded correlations (e.g. let’s say one of the web pages processed is the key to a crossword puzzle: two completely unrelated terms like “Shakespeare” and “Brett Favre” may be found together).

Using Wikipedia is essentially a massive shortcut. Wikipedia is controlled, it’s 100% high-quality knowledge and is very dense with keywords (there are probably better industry terms for these concepts but I don’t know them). Also, Wikipedia has a beautiful internal link network – articles are connected to one another in many ways. By using Wikipedia as a training set, the amount of computational effort is diminished by orders of magnitude. There is no wasted time and no overlap. Every Wikipedia page is (or trends toward) comprehensive knowledge for a unique topic.

Artificial intelligence, of any kind, relies on humans to train them. As I said, one form of training is the billions of web pages that humans have created. Other ones are human-intensive efforts like the MIT OpenMind CommonSense Project. In a sense, Wikipedia is the most rich training set yet. Even though it was created for the purpose of helping humans, it will help computers (help us) as well. As mentioned in the article, the uses of this are many: search, spam detection, natural language processing, etc. Very, very exciting.

On a side note: Bayesian spam filters, or so called “learning” spam filters, which are now very common operate on a similar principle. Their training set is generally created by each user. As you receive e-mails, marking them as legitimate or spam, the Bayesian spam filter is able to learn which terms lead to a high probabily of spam. These probabilities are refined over time as the user corrects false positives and false negatives. While, these spam filters are generally very effective, they have no ability to deal with e-mails which contain terms it has not seen before. These filters have no knowledge about what terms mean, it’s just storing simple probabilities of terms it has seen before.

After several months of procrastination, I finally got off my ass and got a slick set of personal cards for myself. Check ‘em out:

The “The market for something to believe in is infinite” drawing is by Hugh Macleod. The card was purchased through the Hugh’s special store on StreetCards.

I can’t wait for them to arrive!

No, not that kind of pacer! I realized the other day that I pace back and forth…a lot. Sometimes for an hour at a time. The weird thing is that I don’t do it consciously. Most of the time I will have been pacing around the room for 20 minutes before it hits me, “When did I get up and start pacing?”.

The upside is I find that, when pacing, I’m able to think deeply and efficiently. I often find that questions that I struggle with throughout the day can be resolved with a solid session of pacing. I liken it to the standard meditation technique of softly staring at a familiar object. The idea (I presume) is that since your senses are not being stimulated at all, your mind is free of outside distractions. Similarly, when I’m pacing around back and forth – covering the same steps over and over – there are no outside distractions. My mind is able to dedicate 100% of its processing power to internal thought. The key, however, is to find an environment that is so familiar you can mindlessly and freely walk around without thought.

So, why am I telling you this? You may have noticed that I categorized this post under the Lifehacks category. This is because the process of pacing for me is just that. If pacing doesn’t work for you, find a method that does. I promise that it will help you reach conclusions to complex issues you may be deliberating over.

Happy 2007 everyone! This year, new years eve wasn’t very exciting for me. I’ve had a pretty bad case of the flu for the past 3 days and as a result have been stuck at home. Clearly 2007 hasn’t gotten off to a great start for me but I’m sure the rest of the year will be much better.

So let’s see, as one of you pointed out to me, it’s been almost six weeks since my last post. As I said in that last post, I was leaving for a family vacation to Germany and India. The trip was pretty cool. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring a camera with me so the only pictures I have are those off of my sister’s camera. I’ll post a link once my sister puts them online. Germany struck me as the most similar to the US compared to the all the other European cities I have been to. In terms of tourist destination, Germany is not really that great in my opinion. My sister and I agreed that Munich looked like it was one big Disneyland set. The reason is that while much of Munich is newish construction, the architecture is made to look very classical German. So what you get is a bunch of new, old-looking streets. As for Berlin, the (20th century) history in the city is pretty amazing. Our hotel was literally spitting distance from what one of the last remains of the Berlin Wall. All over the city you find points of recent historical signficance. After Germany, we spent time in India visiting family.

One thing from my time in India that really struck me was how the Internet is still just beginning to make an impact in the daily life of the average college-educated young Indian adult. In India, you’re basically looking at 100kbps DSL as the best broadband in the home – and from my experience it’s flaky even at this low speed. Few of my cousins – even those that are in the tech industry – blog or socialize much online. Sharing photos much less videos on the Web is not big at all there, I’m assuming because the Internet speeds at home are so poor.

From a mobile standpoint they are quite advanced though. It’s typical to see that every family member has a cell phone and in fact many households use a wireless local-loop service that replaces the land-line local loop provider (many buildings have really poor phone wiring which makes having a land-line phone pretty useless). Because most homes are built with steel+concrete walls, it seems like 802.11 is basically nonexistant. I didn’t see a single wi-fi hotspot the entire week. Instead, for the few business professionals who need it, tethering your laptop to your cell phone is more the norm. What’s intersting is that Airtel, one of the popular mobile carriers over there, has a wap portal called Airtel Live, which I noticed many of my relatives using via their cell to get news, stock market notifications, movie times, etc.

It’s almost like India is kind of leaping over terrestial datacom infrastructure and going directly to wireless/cellular infrastructure. Once wireless/cellular broadband shows up in India, I think we’re going to see a really massive explosion in Internet consumption amongst the typical middle-class Indian young adult population – which at xx% of 1+ billion people represents a group of people that likely approaches or even exceeds the entire population of the US. The opportunity over there is pretty mind-blowing.

Anyway, enough about India. Let’s talk 2007. One resolution of mine is to blog more frequently. In the past I’ve tried to put some real deep thought into most of my posts. Sometimes that has meant each post taking several hours to write. This has often discouraged me from blogging. While blogging is something I enjoy, I often am short on time. Instead, from now on I intend to post more of my daily observations and when I do feel like writing in-depth about a topic, I will break it up into a series of posts.

Actually, I have more updates for y’all but in accordance with the aforementioned resolution, I will save it for my next post. =)