Filed under: Book Reviews, Search, Technology | Tags: Book Review, Google, Search, The Search
The full name of this book is actually “The Search – How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture”. The author of this book John Battelle was the co-founding editor of Wired Magazine and is now the founder and chairman of Federated Media, a company that manages advertising for some of the most visited blogs such as Boing Boing, GigaOm and Techcrunch.
As you can see from the title, this book is not entirely about Google but also talks about the other search companies, some that have already ceased to exist, and also the search industry in general. However, Google being the indisputable leader in search, it is inevitable that they are mentioned most within the book. The book starts by addressing the dynamics of the search process, i.e. the who, what, when, whys. It also talks about the fundamental technologies behind search in layman terms.
The book then goes into the early players of search such as Lycos, Alta Vista and Yahoo. The story of how Google was formed within the labs of Stanford University was then discussed with focus on the famous PageRank algorithm. A chapter was then dedicated to the pay per click model and how goto.com came up with the idea with Google adopting a similar model in the form of Adwords.
The rest of the book is entirely about Google and how it tries to stick with their “not to be evil” mantra even though going public, the federal government and countries such as China forces them to deviate from their original believes. The book then ends with what the author perceives the future of search will be like.
This book doesn’t introduce any profound theories about technology, but gives a very in depth analysis of search and the economy that surrounds it. It will be a interesting read for people interested in the technical aspect of web technology and less so for the business centric reader unless they have a vested interest in search.
Who can tell me the name of the CEO of Coca Cola, or even the name of the lead singer in the rock band, Greenday? I bet not many can but I’m very sure that most people reading this blog can tell me who the CEO of Facebook is, or who the founder of Apple is. The time has come where a lot of people prefer to see a Bill Gates interview, or a Steve Jobs keynote presentation, than say an episode of American Idol.
This phenomenon has resulted in the rise to stardom of many tech entrepreneurs. Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, has his own show now with hundreds of thousands of viewers each month. Mike Arrington of Techcrunch appeared on news programs to talk about the technology policies of the presidential candidates. Loic Le Meur of Seesmic was even asked by CNN, the world’s largest cable news network, to have a short segment on their channel to talk about the interviews he conducted during the World Economic Forum.
It even went as far as having an award ceremony, just like the Oscars and Golden Globes, for tech companies. This award named “The Crunchies” was held just recently, honoring the best companies as well as their founders. With the Oscars and Golden Globes becoming so cliche, the Crunchies may very well have a better rating if they were aired on TV.
Geeks used to be depicted as dorky-looking freaks who are aliens to the society, anti-social. Recent trends have more than proven that geeks can be superstars and role models for millions of people. Geek On!
Filed under: Technology, Web Services | Tags: Conference Bay, Conferences
Start-up company, Conference Bay, first launched their portal in July 2007 and aims to be a one-stop shop for all conference goers. The site allows users to search for conferences, bid for seats and purchase tickets for selected conferences. The company has gotten a lot of media attention for providing the world’s first conference bidding system and also from their marketing activities such as one where the team went to a local food center and placed on the seats tissue packs with the word “Reserved” printed on it.
CEO & Founder of the company, Arnout Mostert, wrote on the company’s blog 2 days ago that the company is going launch a new version of its site. This Conference Bay 2.0 is a complete facelift from its original form and will definitely appeal more to the masses. This being said, the new site’s increased popularity with techies and the general public may not help with the business which targets executives and working professionals. Most comments on the blog post have indicated that this redesign would be a downgrade rather than an upgrade.
Conference Bay is currently requesting for more feedback on this new look. You can play a part in the company’s new site by placing a comment in the post where they announced the new version.
Filed under: Search, Technology | Tags: A*Star, Search Technology, Singapore
Singapore’s premier research facility, A*STAR (Agency for Technology and Research) has launched a competition called “The Star Challenge 2008″ last week to develop “a rich media search engine that will be smart enough to identify text, audio and video containing any word, even if that word, or search term, has not yet been tagged in the internet material”.
The prize money for this competition is set at USD$100,000 and participants will have eight months from now to build such a technology. An international advisory panel consisting of renowned experts from UC Berkeley, University of Washington, University of Columbia and National University of Singapore have been invited oversee the competition.
I highly doubt that this competition will really accelerate the ongoing research in this area as this has already been a hot research topic for quite some time now and progress would be at its full speed. Such a product in its commercial form will definitely be worth a few million and USD$100k seem so trivial in the scheme of things. I believe the winner of the competition will be someone who is already building such a product and sees this merely as an opportunity to get more research funds. John Battelle, who wrote the most successful book on the story of Google, and search technology blog, Search Engine Land, has both agreed that this competition will not have any notable results.
If you are interested to participate in the competition, register at the competition’s official website which in my opinion have a tat too much flash animations.
A few days ago, this signboard was placed at the entrance where MacWorld is going to be held. This signboard then led to a big frenzy about the new MacBook “Air”. It is quite baffling why Apple would name its newest product same as Adobe’s proprietary technology – Adobe AIR so perhaps the speculators may have got it wrong?
A few hours ago, wired magazine then posted a picture of the new Macbook Air claiming that they have done this mock up based on reports from third party vendors.
Truth or Myth? We’ll find out in a couple of hours.
A band from New Zealand, Flight of the Conchords, was invited to preform at CES that ended just a couple of days ago. Before they started their song, they joked about the cliches of current technologies, like how there are more girls on the internet than there are in the real world and how new inventions are just 2 devices put into 1.
Their song’s pretty interesting too!
Seesmic which is currently still in closed Beta is a start-up founded by French Entrepreneur Loic Le Meur. Seesmic has gathered a lot of interest within the valley recently and one of the reasons for this is that Loic has been very open about the way the company is run. He posts a video about the company and how it is run on his blog everyday and invites his viewers to participate in making decisions that affects the company such as getting them to send in applications and vote on the company’s logo.
Essentially what Seesmic is providing is similar to the widely successful micro-blogging site, Twitter. The difference is then instead of allowing short text messages, Seesmic lets its users take short video clips with their webcams. Loic is known to be a huge Twitter fan and hence copied some of twitter’s features onto Seesmic such as the ability to allow people to follow your all video posts.
By posting videos on Seesmic and allowing their members to interact, Loic hopes to create a video conversation beyond geographical boundaries. As mentioned, the service is not open to the public as yet, but you can ask Loic for an invitation code by adding him on Twitter. Seesmic has attracted many interesting investors such as Michael Arrington and Dave Winer.
On several video posts by Loic, he has mentioned that a Singaporean programmer working from Singapore was hired to develop the site. Seems like Asian talents are really being sought after internationally. I would encourage everyone to go through a few of his videos on his blog as he talks about why he left France to build a start-up in Silicon Valley.
Even though the internet era began around 1995, domain names were defined as early as 1985! Back then not many would have thought of using websites as business, so most of the names registered were of tech companies rather than really marketable names such as buy.com or shopping.com.
Going through some of the better known companies, Symbolics.com is the first ever domain registered in March, 1985. Companies such as DEC, HP, Xerox then soon followed. Then came IBM, SUN and Intel. Apple.com is number 64 on the list and interestingly, Microsoft was not even in the top 100 which is kind of appropriate considering they are still playing catch up within the Internet arena now.
You can see the full list here!
Couldn’t make it to CES this year? Here’s the next best thing, videos of fifty-four sessions which include speakers such as Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang, Intel’s Paul Otellini and Dell’s Michael Dell!
You would also be able download Bill Gate’s final Keynote in CES as he retires from his role in Microsoft to work on his non-profit foundation.
Filed under: Technology, Virtual Worlds | Tags: First Meta, Linden Labs, Second Life
Duncan Riley of Techcrunch reported earlier today that virtual world banking will be banned within the most popular virtual earth, Second Life, effective on 22nd January 2008. This was announced on the Second Life blog where the creators, Linden Labs, said that they “will begin removing any virtual ATMs or other objects that facilitate the operation or facilitation of in-world ‘banking’”.
This was a result of failed virtual banks such as Ginko Financial which owed the equivalent of US$750,000 to their customers when they declared itself insolvent in August 2007. Riley then goes on to say that even though the virtual stock exchanges will most likely not be affected, credit card providers may be forced to end.
Local start-up First Meta is one such company offering credit card services on Second Life. They have previously enjoyed a lot of media attention for providing the world’s first virtual credit card. They were covered by Techcrunch and Valleywag and they even got into the Red Herring 100 Asia 2007 Awards.
Even though the savings account that First Meta provides will have to be closed down, I believe there may still be a possibility that their credit card services can go on as Linden Labs’ concern is more on institutes that offer high interest rates for storing their user’s money which they may not be able to pay back. The credit card service can then be provided based on a pay back system that only collects what is spent and hence the users are protected. It is still however unclear whether Linden Labs will accept this argument.
There still may be alternatives for First Meta like going into another virtual world such as popular Chinese virtual world Hipihi, but surely without the user base of Second Life, the company’s revenue model will surely take a huge hit.
This brings about a huge issue on whether start-ups should focus all their efforts on hosted platforms such as Second Life’s or Facebook’s. This incident has showed that there is a huge risk involved, that the host can change its policies without giving much notice and may very well destroy the company.
