Varying Degrees of L'attitude by Kevin McDonald

Citi is inserting ads into their online credit card statements. You'll notice in the picture below that Walgreens is the vendor on the credit card statement and Drugstore.com is the competitive marketer. I'm not certain how long they have been at this type of in-process online advertising but it is the first time I have seen it...

The good news from a privacy perspective is that no cookies were dropped during the ad click-through and the items initially purchased at Walgreens were (to the best of my knowledge) not shared with the advertiser.

A year and a half ago I wrote a post about this very topic but in that case it was QuickBooks Online that I thought should have an ad sponsored offering. Fast forward and I was wrong about the 'free' edition. Ads in QuickBooks would be incremental revenue to Intuit and if done correctly a great service to their customers looking to reduce accounts payable/expenses.

Back to Citi. I am curious to hear how this deal was structured (CPM, PPC...) and how effective it is. I certainly clicked on the ad but that was more out of curiosity than any motivation to save money. I'd imagine we will see a lot more of this type of in-process advertising on financial services, package delivery, and eventually health care providers' websites.

If only Drugstore.com offered to pay my Walgreens line item in exchange for my future business.... One can dream.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

It seems that ever other website I stumble upon these days has a recommendation feature be it for songs, friends, products, restaurants it doesn't matter - there is a recommendation engine for everything. Many of these engines use variants of collaborative filtering and often preface their recommendation by stating "people who bought x also bought y" or "You may also like/know..." etc  

There are times when I'm looking to make a decision and I find myself asking, "what would somebody like me want or do in this situation?"   Recommendations engines first look to those who have come before me to make an intelligent suggestion (who the hell are these people?) and now they are starting to look for answers in social networks. The assumption being, if a friend likes something maybe I will also like it. Come on, give me a break. While I see some value in this approach I know my friends don't have all the answers and I know certain topics each friend is an authority on but each friend is certainly not an authority on all topics. Also, let's not forget there are topics I wouldn't want them knowing I am asking about and topics for which they won't digitize their experiences.

There are a lot of companies circling these problems but there is a piece of the puzzle that I haven't heard much talk about - it's personal preferences i.e. "why" did 'somebody' 'like that' 'thing'?  Identifying personal preferences is a difficult problem.  Preferences often change based on mood, location, time of day etc etc   Take deciding where to eat dinner as a simple example: who am I planning to eat with, are they driving me home, who's buying, what did I have for lunch that day, are the kids joining us, how much time do we have etc etc. The answer to each question will alter the final decision and ultimately where I decide eat dinner. Furthermore there is 'brand performance' and how well it preforms against my personal preferences for in this case a restaurant that has vegan options, is kid friendly, is new/hot, etc etc

It isn't enough to know my friend "Kathy dines at Loving Hut Restaurant".  Companies that are pioneering the semantic web are marking up the Subject, Predicate, and Objects triples (SPOs if you will). e.g. "Kathy", "dines at", "Loving Hut Restaurant"  What I really want to know is 'why' does my friend Kathy dine at Loving Hut? Is it the all Vegan menu, the convenient location on University Avenue, the fact that it's kid friendly, has interesting tea menu, is spotless.....  In order to infer 'why' Kathy likes Loving Hut one needs to chain together SPOs  e.g. 'Kathy' 'is' 'Vegan', 'Kathy "likes' Clean Bathrooms' and "Loving Hut' 'has' 'Clean Bathrooms' and 'Loving Hut' 'is in' 'Palo Alto' etc etc 

Marking up SPOs may be an essential first step to identifying the connections between things but IM(very unscientific)HO it's ~3 to 7 times more valuable to know 'why' the connections exist and how strong the connections are.  It's the history and circumstances in which 'things' are related that holds the value- more so than the relationship itself.   

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Two full months have passed since moving 100 domains to WhyPark.com. Read here to see the 1 month results. Sept. ended with an increase in Visits of 56% over August. I did nothing different in September than I had done in August. These domains are essentially parked and on autopilot with WhyPark rotating in fresh, relevant content from the public domain. Search engine traffic still represents about 3/4 of the Visits.

On the 'contextual' Adsense ads the CTR just over 1.32% up from 0.78% last month! (total number of ads shown / total clicks on ads). An other way to look at this is during Sept. 4.75% (up from 2.66% in Aug.) of the pages my domains served generated CPC revenue. Not bad at all considering the sites are on autopilot.

The absolute dollars earned is barely enough to qualify for the monthly Adsense payout but it's certainly going to more than pay for the 1 time WhyPark fee in an other 2 or 3 months.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After recieving an error message while trying to sync the iPhone with my contacts in Outlook (on my 'last' PC) I stumbled onto what must be a workaround to the 'enable sync' requirement i.e. to make certain Outlook2003 is open before asking iTunes to start the sync process. Works prefectly now.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Google's AppEngine goes private beta

This morning TechDirt compared Google's recently launched AppEngine to Amazon's Web Services.  There is nothing like competition to grow a market.  One of my teammates is in the private beta so we'll be keeping a close eye one Google's offering (especially its pricing).  To date we've looked to alternatives like 3Tera as the grown-up's version of AWS.  I'm a big fan of this type of on demand offering and from what I've read to date my preference is for Amazon's a la carte approach as described here and here.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 09:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Open, shared database of facts and some knowledge

I was reminded of MetaWeb's Freebase yesterday while in a bus. dev. meeting so I decided to check in on their progress. Wow. They have done an impressive job of organizing facts and providing access to them. If you are an information hound you'll appreciate what the team at MetaWeb has enabled and what their contributors have imported into this open source web database. Think Wikipedia meets database tables but the database is built for the web and is extensible by the community.  Check out the search results for this query "Films starring Jennifer Connelly and actors who have appeared in Steven Spielberg movies" - if you can look past the presentation style - you start to get a glimpse of how powerful an open shared database is. There are still a few challenges regarding accuracy, latency and data duplication but this is pretty inspiring as is - that said I wouldn't say they are a 'database of the world's knowledge' as they claim at least not until they start justifying people's beliefs. 

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Weekend Reading...

If you've never experienced Second Life and only casually followed the company in the press, this post and the accompanying comments may as well be published on the Cliff's Notes brand. Hat tip to Reuters and the SL community that commented.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Renowned & Rockin Restaurants in San Francisco with Syrup , Pork and Nuts

Believe it or not Circos returned 6 restaurants in San Francisco that matched this obscure request. I'm not making this stuff up...somebody actually searched for this on our site.

You may notice a few of the scores (letter grades) have asterisks next to the results. This indicator means that while we found results we didn't find very many references to support the grade - nevertheless - try and find "renowned, rockin restaurants in San Francisco that use syrup, pork and nuts" with a local search site or on one of the majors... then try to compare your findings to gage which restaurant best matches your personal preferences- be that your love of pork or desire for a rockin experience.

How long would you search for before giving up?

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Love Hotel is Open

Today we announced our first Facebook application: The Circos Love Hotel. While it may seem like yet an other poke style app there's a bit of 'plumbing' behind the scenes.  With this first application behind us we are able to roll-out additional apps on the back-end set of APIs - some apps will be just for fun and others more discovery oriented. The interesting part of this first app is that once you send room service items to your friends that are staying in the Love Hotel we are able to infer your preferences and recommend hotels and restaurants based on your fb profile and behaviors.  It's a step towards realizing our vision of a the web - one that conforms to who you already are, or aspire to be, and discovers the things you want.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

AWS Bandwidth outpaces Amazon.com

While catching up on last week's reading I ran into this post from Read Write Web.  Amazon Web Services are consuming more bandwidth than all of Amazon's web properties. More evidence supporting my 'long' thesis.... 

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Both Significant To The Search Process

There has been a lot of talk lately about the the virtue of human intervention in the search process.  Read Write Web posted a rough transcript of what must have been a lively panel discussion (reps. from Mahalo, Wikia, and Google) at Digital Life Design in Munich. 

I found Google's Marissa Mayer to have the most affirming comment in the 'transcript': "To take an algorithm and enhance it with editorial without introducing bias is the solution, if you can find it."

The search landscape is large with many needs unmet; there are lots of companies aiming to fill the voids.  I tend to agree with Marissa that starting with an algorithm and inserting a dash of human intervention to achieve the best results without sacrificing scalability is where the unbiased answers will be found. It is 'where' the editorial is inserted into the process and 'how much' editorial intervention is required and 'who' the editors are that makes this space so interesting.  IMHO, it is in part how a search engine addresses these questions that will separate a leader from the pack.

Stay tuned, in one week we will launch a preview of Circos.com at DEMO08 and we'll show the world our search engine - in color.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Can you say ironic?

While diving further into web analytics options for Circos I noticed something strange while loading a page from the Microsoft website. The private beta page for Microsoft Gatineau (web analytics offering) is being tracked using Omniture.

Notice the bottom right corner of the screen capture. Hat tip to WASP.

Friendly jabs aside, Gatineau is a product to watch out for in 2008 and an other threat to Omniture.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 04:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Web Analytics Market Share May Indicate So

Earlier this month Stephanie Hamel shared some interesting findings from herhis Web Analytics Solution Profiler (WASP). In a note to the Web Analytics group on yahoo she wrote:

"Here's the rough results based on 7,788 web sites visited between
December 4th and January 2nd:

Google Analytics 59%
OmnitureSite Catalyst 19%
WebSideStory HBX 9%
WebTrends 7%
Coremetrics 3%
ClickTracks 1%
MSGatineau 0.3%"

I've been using her tool on and off and would recommend it to anybody curious about the data sites are collecting from (your) site visits.

The rough results help to confirm my thesis that Omniture (recently acquired VisualSciences the maker of WebSideStory) is in an unenviable position. Their products compete against Google's free product (that happen to keep adding higher-end features), they have an execution risk that has just increased with the finalization of the VSCN merger, and at 12X Revenues, no net income, and shrinking margins, OMTR may be setting up as a nice short.

My hunch is that Google probably takes 5$ of revenue away from OMTR every-time somebody uses Google Analytics. What's more is that Google may actually get stronger when a site uses a product like OMTR- more effective advertising via visibility into the search/keyword-context/referrers that drive traffic to a site.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Next Gen Teleconferencing - a real green room

Jeff Nolan recently had a demonstration of Cicsco's telepresence and has further whet my appetite for this next generation teleconferencing system.  Over the holidays I spoke with a Cisco product marketer and learned all about this offering.  He had me salivating wanting to try this.

I can hear the TV commercial now, "Those of us that travel more than 8 times a year no longer view travel as romantic or thrilling. Ask anybody that has hit the top bracket of a frequent flier program a few years in a row how they will about getting on an airplane post 9/11...then have them try Telepresence."

I hear that the Telepresence room comes pre-decorated, chairs, green paint, etc etc. Saving on travel costs is just one benefit the other is the environment.  I'm trying to find some sales figures and looking forward to a retail/reseller announcement (Kinko's, BestBuy, or even an ADP partnership?). We could put something like this to use at Circos instead of flying to and from Singapore every couple of months.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My 2 Pennies on favs from Read/Write's Predictions

Read Write Web posted their predictions for 2008. It's a good read. Equally good is their 2007 'trends'.

My favs from the 08 list excepted here:

"Semantic Apps will become popular in 2008, due to their ability to get better content results and make better data connections. Think search engines like Hakia and Powerset, wikipedia-like efforts like Twine and Freebase, and apps that use semantic technologies under the hood (such as AdaptiveBlue and Snap).

Online video will become so ubiquitous, including live and mobile, that everyone will wonder how the internet existed without it. It won't feel like a big deal, though.

The value of recommendation engines will become all the more clear; the era of data will be celebrated.

People will rebel against Google, at least a little bit. Maybe.

Implicit applications, which monitor our habits and automatically infer our likes, will rise.

Google will really start looking vulnerable in 2008. While the 'one trick pony' comment by Steve Ballmer drew sarcastic responses, this will begin to look prophetic. While they'll maintain market share in the search industry, the lack of traction in any other of their other initiatives will start to cause frustration. Plus, they will increasingly be perceived as the 'evil' company in many of these new initiatives. 

In the 1st Q 2008, the true "Google Killer" in search will be in Stealth Mode. In 2nd Q 2008 the first prototype will begin in closed Alpha mode. In 3rd Q 2008 it will be ready for the final closed Beta testing. In 4th Q 2008 it will launch and "Rock and Shock" the world!"

To the writers and editors of RWW - thank you for sharing your thoughts. You're one of my favorite reads.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Plagiarism Prevention

Turnitin.com recently came onto my radar screen when a buddy of mine introduced me to their chairman.  iParadigm the company that runs TurnItIn has ~4.5 billion pages indexed in their database and updates at ~40 million pages per day (according to their marketing materials).

While the database is impressive check out this value proposition:

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Beyond Keywords

Today we were discussing how our technology will add value to a large ad network. The fact that value would be created has always been obvious to me but describing 'why' we are able to add value had been a bit of a challenge. Today Morris summed it up nicely by saying, "Advertisers may inserts their messages into an emotional context."

We all had a good laugh as we were surfing through some of the ad placements we were finding on publishers' websites.  "No wonder nobody clicks on ads." "No wonder I don't even realize they are there."  Targeting ads based on demographics, broad topics, and keywords leave a lot of room for improvement.

Imagine you are an advertiser and are able to insert your message/ad/offer into context- when you know the context is positive and referring to your brand or inserting your message/ad/offer when you know the context is about your competitor and is negative or knowing the context is about a 'very cool' product and being able to associate your brand with that 'cool' context.... That's emotional context.

While helping an ad network increase its effectiveness would be a big business- we plan to create an even more valuable business with a consumer offering. We'll unveil a preview in January...

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Strange behavior

Lately I've been unable to author blog posts via the Firefox browser. I'm not certain why but my guess is that it has something to do with cookies (which I've cleared etc etc without any luck).  Someday I'll take the time to figure this out in the meantime I won't be blogging as much (IE7 is dreadful).

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 05:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently I Worked For Microsoft

Check out this plaxo pulse update in the screen shot below. It seems that plaxo is not deciphering authors of blog postings. The post below is from my colleague Morris but anybody in my plaxo network would think it's from me. Here's what happened or at least what I think happened: We have a corporate blog circos.wordpress.com, the entire team is able to post to that blog. My plaxo account has the corporate blog (which I am an author) as well as my personal blog (the one you are reading now) as public and available to be shared via the plaxo pulse. It seems whenever the corporate blog is updated the RSS gets feed into plaxo and they attribute the postings to me (or at least omit the byline)  hmmm why isn't plaxo isn't picking up the bylines? It really does look as if I wrote this post. Note to self and team - manually enter bylines into every post

- kmm

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

HIT Completed

Last night the human interaction task I submitted on Amazon's Mechanical Turk was completed. The entire process came with a bit more in the way of learning curve than I had anticipated but the concept behind this service is solid.

Top of Mind Lessons Learned:

1 HITs with shorter durations that may be executed in parallel seemed to be preferred by MTurkers.  

2 You can't edit the HIT after it has been accepted (at least I didn't find a way to accomplish this). e.g. I wanted to add a bonus payment for accuracy but could not.

3. Funding by check is not ideal and only provide 50% credit to your account while the check is being processed. This limits the value of the HITs you may create.

UPDATE - 4 - You can't approve the completion of a HIT until the funding of your account is processed. That is estimated at 4 days. This is unfortunate for the MTurkers working on the HIT and annoying for the posters.

I'll be putting up s second HIT today. This service by Amazon is a real game changer in the temporary workforce/out-tasking space.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Interview with former employee indicates so...

Yesterday the team at Circos was busy interviewing a few candidates as we look to round out our core team. One of the candidates was (as of the day prior) an employee of Teqlo. It seems the investors have pulled the plug on this mashup platform.

It will be interesting to see if the core tech gets into Radar Network's Twine offering as they appear to share the same VC.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Uuugh

The other day I posted my first HIT on Amazon's MT. Several people picked-up the work item and evaluated the assignment. Most people abandon the request. two people contacted me to ask for more time to complete the task. During the setup of the HIT (human interaction task) I estimated that it would take 12 hours to complete the work. I didn't realize that this time limit is (or at least perceived to be limit) was an absolute must be done by time.  Amazon could have done me a favor in explaining this more clearly.  I thought the time 'allotment' was to give the Mturkers a shot at calculating an hourly wage equivalent.  Anyway, one MTurker suggested that I carve the work up into 4 separate assignments and post each for 20$.  I decided to just extend the time allotted for the work from 12 hours to 3 days.

That is when the frustration set in. I expired the original HIT. No problem. I setup the new HIT with more time allotted but could not activate the HIT due to this error: 

'You do not have enough money to create your HIT. Please transfer money to your Amazon account to create HITs. Up to $100 of your pending balance can be used to create HITs."

Interestingly enough on the same page it says I have 200$ credit pending and my new hit is for 88$.

I'm still bullish on Amazon and MT but this experience has makes me wish the 'beta' tag on the logo was larger.

UPDATE - 12 hours after I logged the issue with Amazon and not hearing back about any possibly causes or resolutions I decided to dig deeper. The issue was that my canceled HIT was just that canceled not deleted. Once I deleted the HIT the funds were released and I was able to create a new HIT.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mechanical Turk (Part 1)

This morning I post my first human interaction task (HITS) on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The account setup was simple as I had already had an Amazon account. The frustrating part was that the account needs to be prepaid in order to create HITs. Not that surprising but the fact that I could only fill the account with a checking account number and bank routing number was disappointing.

The creation of the HIT was really well explained and straight-forward (title, description, keywords, instructions, payment amount, and duration). The HIT was a simple data entry and Internet research request - e.g. download this spreadsheet, preform a search on Internet for a brand, find the home page for that brand, enter the URL in the spreadsheet.  Not rocket sciences but with 3325 rows in the spreadsheet it was going to take us about 12 hours to complete.  

The HIT was accepted by 'somebody' in less than a minute after it was posted. That tells my my 6.80$ per hour was WAY too high of a price to pay for research and data entry. The challenge in pricing is that it is not obvious what the market rate is for certain tasks. Amazon has a great opportunity to help 'employers' in this area. The other challenge was the 'answer type'. It wasn't obvious to me that when I selected file upload as the answer type that the services was NOT looking for me to upload the spreadsheet I wanted to have filled in.  My colleague, Mario, suggested we put the spreadsheet on a website we run, let the 'contractor' download it and x-fingers that the file upload answer type would work out.  That's what I did. Time will tell if this service is as game changing as it sounds.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Is it really re-'marketing' or re-'advertising'?

Today I was checking out my Amazon affiliates account and the +16$ this blog has generated during the past year and a half. Once a quarter I take the time to see what new widgets Amazon has in the gallery. Today I found the Omokase widget.

According to the FAQ on the Amazon site (sign-on may be required):

How Do Omakase Links Work?

Omakase Links use a number of techniques to determine what products to show on your page. One of these techniques involves the Omakase system processing the text on your page and finding products from Amazon.com that relate to what your page is about. We also use Amazon's unique information about what products the Associate has been successful with in the past; and, if the person viewing the site is an Amazon.com customer, what that user has previously expressed an interested in.  

To enable Omakase Links to work properly, your site must allow our spider (Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; >> AMZNKAssocBot/4.0)) to crawl your website. The crawl is needed in order to identify the content of your website and provide matching products. If you do not allow our spider to crawl your website(s) we will not be able to choose contextually relevant products, but will still display selected products from our product lines as chosen by Omakase Links' other techniques. Site owners can use their 'robots.txt' file to restrict the site content searched by the Omakase spider. "

Not a big surprise that Amazon is tapping the cookie they placed on their customer's devices- Double Click has been doing something like this for years.  Facebook is said to announce a similar cookie based 'social ad' service next week according to the folks at Read/Write. The added context cross-site cookie sharing provides is quite valuable to advertisers.

These 're-marketing' techniques IMHO are sadly little more than re-advertising with the use of additional context.  What would make this really appealing and effective is if the offer itself was modified based on the additional context. For example, if I was visiting an Amazon affiliate's site and browsing for a wine let's say the Sea Smoke 05 Southing Pinot Noir, I put it in my shopping cart, abandon the cart, leave the site, land on an other Amazon affiliate's site - The opportunity is to show me an add for the wine I abandon with a lower price, better shipping rates, available at a merchant in my neighborhood etc etc.  Change the offer - I'll trade privacy if you really do 're-market' me better offers.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

HaaS Has Lock-in

Emre Sokullu wrote a nice piece comparing what Amazon is doing with EC2 and S3 to what Google did with AdSense. He cites the inevitable competition from MSFT and GOOG but he also indirectly points out an interesting fact - Hardware as a service has lock-in. The more Amazon web services a company that is on EC2/S3 uses the more difficult it will be to switch off of Amazon's grid onto a competitor's grid. It's hard to say how much of a lead Amazon has on the competition but as Emre correctly points out this is one of AMZN's initiatives to increase profit margins. The Join Advantage program is an other big deal as it relates to expanding margins - don't house inventory have your partners do it.

Last week's pull back was a good time to start a position. Any additional weakness and I'll be pushing chips to the center of the table.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Find Nirvana

Hat tip to Mario for finding and passing this article on.  We at Circos found this part of the article rather reaffirming: 

"When asked to name their #1 complaint about the process, 25 percent cited a deluge of results, 24 percent cited a predominance of commercial (paid) listings, 18.8 percent blamed the search engine’s inability to understand their keywords (forcing them to try again), and 18.6 percent were most frustrated by disorganized/random results."

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

T-Shirt Sized Computing Cloud

Amazon announced that they are now offering different 'sizes' of instances in the elastic cloud. I'm a big fan of Amazon and their web services offerings as I've stated here and here. The price point of these offerings is very very compelling. If Amazon would only offer a service level agreement for up-time....

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Websites to watch 

If you are into social shopping or apparel check out Polyvore.com. The site reminds me a bit of Kaboodle (now owned by Hearst) but with the ability to create visual 'sets'. Sets seam to be focused on apparel and accessories e.g. everything you need to buy if you are attending a holiday party. Visitors to the site may explore or create an ensemble of shirt, pants, watch, handbag etc etc and see them together, share them, vote on them comment...  The site only has a view 'social' features today (comment, copy, fav, friends etc) but those are easy enough to add as needed.  The FaceBook app is simple and works- it like most FB 'apps' is an interactive ad for Polyvore.  I couldn't get the 'clipper' to work - i.e. I couldn't add my own images of products I found while surfing the web.   There were plenty of images from what appears to be thousands of sites already indexed in Polyvore so not the biggest of deals.

The team at Polyvore has done a great job and is destin to be an Alexa Mover/Shaker. An interesting fact is that one of the co-founders of Polyvore was instrumental in developing Yahoo Pipes - an other rocket.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It sounds offensive

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is destined to be a game changer in the out tasking space. The unfortunate thing is its name. It sounds offensive to me and makes me wonder if Turkish people are also offended or if there is some sense of national pride.

From MetaFilter: 

"In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen’s "Turk" was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. Excuse me?"

Even with a cunning character behind the name I am not so certain I'd like it if say China created an offering called the Mechanical American as a play on the "convincing the UN something exists when it doesn't"  (e.g. WMDs).

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 08:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...or releasing source code

While catching up on some reading I ran into this post (hat tip to read/write).  When diving in a bit further the source code libraries for .NET are being released but under the MS-RL license instead of GPL or other common open source licenses. I'll need to check in with my colleagues to debunk that one but it doesn't sound like open source.

The issue for start-ups and adopting .NET hasn't been .NET licensing as much as the SQL Server licensing that comes with it...

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 05:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3)

Amazon's Mechanical Turk Is A Game Changer

Amazon has not only changed the ground rules for start-up software companies with EC2/S3 but it has also changed the ground rules for any company that needs an elastic workforce. Ok that may be a bit overstated.  It is not out of the realm of possibility for tasks that may be completed regardless of geography. Amazon calls the service a Mechanical Turk.  They launched the service last year (need fact check maybe I should set up a HIT) and now have 65k Human Intelligence Task (HITS) requests currently open awaiting completion.

The concept behind mturk is simple- businesses put tasks that need completion along the price they will pay for a completed task by a qualified individual. People then select tasks (called HITS) to preform (assuming they are qualified) , and get paid for completing them. e.g. transcribe a pod cast, paying .50$ should take 10 mins.

It seams to me that this human intelligence task marketplace hasn't yet enough liquidity and I'd imagine many HITS go unfilled - but that may be just a matter of time or the addition of an auction style pricing engine. Many of the MTurk HITS are Amazon looking for people to test the accuracy of  their search results.

One of the more interesting HITS I found was this one asking for help reviewing satellite imagery in an effort to local Steve Fossett. 

I'll be testing this in my 'spare time' as it could be a cost effective way to find the errors in my book prior to the next print run. 

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...but not for fast service

I recently evaluated SnagIt CollageComplete and FastStone Capture for screen shots. FastStone got my business because the two features I wanted were simple to use - watermark our logo into the screen shot, and select a window within the screen for capturing.  SnagIt CollageComplete is a bit over kill for my needs and FastStone is cheaper. The free trial ran out today so I forked over ~20$ for a 'lifetime' license. Paypal processed the transaction (which was nice because my wallet is downstairs) no problems. Here's the rub, I have not yet received the registration key.  I've been refreshing my inbox for an hour now - nothing. I emailed support - nothing.

So much for finishing the deck for tomorrow's presentation.

UPDATE - The registration code was received an hour and a half later.  

UPDATE II - The kind folks at TechSmith (i.e. SnagIt, Betsy Weber specificly) read this post, sent me a license key to their product, sought feedback on how to improve SnagIt etc etc. So , determined to use SnagIt I launched what I called SnagIt in my original post only to find out that I actually used/evaluated CollageComplete! Yikes. Betsy must have thought I was a real cheap-skate when during and IM session last night I told her SnagIt was too expensive at 39$. For the record CollageComplete is 149$- a bit more than I was willing to invest. So, I will offer to return the SnagIt License Key to the folks at TechSmith and will definately purchase from them Camtasia Studio!

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Break resistant wine 'glasses'

The other day a friend of mine told me about a new (new to us) type of wine glass that is break resistant. Sounds too good to be true. I'm going to make a trip to the wine shop to check these out before making a purchasing decision. I like a thin (think sharp) edge at the top of my wine glasses. It will be interesting to see how thin these glasses are. - I am down to three pinot glasses from 8 in less than a year.  It sure would be nice if these work out.

To the four readers of this blog - have any of you drank from a Titanium wine glass? 

Schott Zwiesel Set Of 6 Diva Tritan Crystal Burgundy/pinot Noir Wine Glasses Brand: Schott Zwiesel         Price: 64.95

Product Information

These glasses are shaped for wines like a burgundy or Pinot Noir. Special, too, is the construction of the glass - it's made of a special material, titanium crystal, that's resistant to breaking and chipping. The set includes six glasses. The Diva Tritan by Schott Zwiesel is a breakthrough in crystal glass! After years of extensive research, Schott Zwiesel has revolutionized the wine glass with an incredibly pure, hard and clear crystal glass that's highly resistant to chipping and breaking even at its most sensitive areas - the rim and at the points where the stem joins the bowl and the foot. The glasses stand up to daily use and thousands of cycles in your dishwasher, without any blemishes or loss of brilliance.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Circos adviser gets busy

Found this post on UnderTheRadar's blog.  It seams like Boopsie is smok'n!

It's nice to see a Greg Carpenter an (IP contributor and now informal) adviser to Circos, once again with a hit on his hands.  Way to go Greg!

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Score 1 for the underdog - well sorta

There is something about Google that while admirable is spooky. Yesterday I decided to try and go a month without using Google (except for checking our Google Analytics accounts). In its place I'll be taking Ask.com for a drive.

My first impression of Ask was positive. I liked the binoculars, the ease of bookmarking and saving search results (session based i.e. without logging in), and to my surprise - this search result:

While I like the fact that my blog entry on Thermage is the top result I expected something more like this:

Stock quotes are one of my most common queries for search engines. Fortunately, it appears that Ask is just behind on figuring out that THRM, a recent IPO, is indeed a ticker symbol. Old standbys like YHOO, GOOG etc return the appropriate stock price and graphs on Ask. 

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 08:11 AM | Permalink