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Open Thread: Should Tech Get a Turn-Off?

admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:55:00 +0000

Being a technology blogger is like having a license for an around-the-clock gadget and Web addiction. No one expects you to leave your house during the day. You’re allowed to spend the majority of your life in front of a glowing screen, and flipping out over WiFi issues is par for the course. And you’re never far from the Web, since your mobile is always in hand when you have to leave your laptop behind for some incomprehensible reason. But even with such a license in hand, I have to make a case for periodically disconnecting. What do you think? Sponsor More and more, I am trying to set aside unplugged hours and even days for Internet-free, mobile-free, “Luddite time.” Time for asking a stranger for directions, time for talking to the people you’re with rather than the people you “follow,” time for interacting with the world around you in ways that don’t include clicking, scrolling or downloading. Time that’s increasingly being destroyed by smart phones, “super” phones and what ever “super duper” devices are in the pipeline. Sitting in front of these glowing screens (as most of us do) for around eight hours a day for work and additional hours for leisure can’t be good for us as living, breathing organisms. Have you ever spent the whole day absorbed in the web – the rabbit holes of YouTube, the breadcrumb trails of Wikipedia, the party line of Twitter and the bottomless virtual library of blog posts – to find yourself startled by actual human interaction, in a strange and unrestul intellectual state. With enough consecutive days of online-only living, you might realize you’re making more connections between online entities and content, but you’re losing opportunities to have fresh, original thought or observations about your own world. I’m not saying that the Internet makes you stupid. I am saying that, if left to run wild across the vast territories of the Web, your mind can turn into a laboratory hamster, frantically pulling levers and running in wheels while his environment remains essentially static and his motivations essentially artificial. Another detriment to a constantly wired life is that you’re not truly present with the folks around you every day, and you begin to forget how polite, normal people communicate. You become too easily distracted by notifications from your mobile, glazing over and tuning out to parse your RSS feeds while real conversations are going on without you. And being accustomed to ignoring your surroundings in favor of your online life numbs you to the fact that often, your friends are doing the same to you. If you’ve ever sat through a dinner with your significant other or a group of geek friends as you all happily tapped away on your mobiles, you know this is true. And while being able to buck conventional table manners and geek out together is a wonderful thing, aren’t you cheating yourself out of valuable face-to-face interaction by doing so? And very often, an preoccupation with the Web leads to a total loss of perspective. If you have ever stayed awake until 2 or 3 in the morning entrenched in a furious debate on Scoble’s FriendFeed over something that the entire world had completely forgotten 12 hours later (guilty!), you have definitely lost perspective. Not typically the most empathetic people, we begin to give more attention and emotion to minor tech events (Google Wave, anyone?) than to major world events. If it didn’t trend on Twitter and hit Digg’s front page, we tend to not notice or care. Although the social web can occasionally be used as a power for good, notably through efforts such as those carried out during the Iranian election/debacle or on World Aids Day, this circle is notoriously self-obsessed and navel-gazing to the obfuscation of much more important matters. Finally, being constantly online is probably fairly bad for your health. A few of the people I’ve spoken to tonight tell me that to distract themselves from Internet obsessions, they turn to physical activity, such as gym workouts, yoga or running. These dear souls are escaping the sedentary lifestyle to which we’ve all grown fairly accustomed and which most certainly has negative effects on how we look, how we feel, our metabolism and energy level and so much more. And although mobile and AR technologies are making it easier for us to get out and about while still connected, more often they act as a tether to larger, more stationary devices. I personally want to spend many hours in 2010 offline and off my mobile. I want to do things like watch an old movie, go for a walk, have a dinner date or read an honest-to-god newspaper without checking in on Foursquare or posting an “overheard” on Twitter. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m aging. Many of my contemporaries say their sole offline time is sleeping. I’ve certainly lived that way, too, and I spend many days now online for 14-18 hours. But I don’t want every day to be like that. What about you, dear readers? Do you currently plan for and enforce offline hours for yourself, your significant other or your family? If so, how and when do you take your breaks? Or are you a tireless defender of the Internet junkie lifestyle? Most importantly, what do you see as the explicit benefits or detriments of being online around the clock – or of taking periodic furloughs? Let us know your opinions and best practices in the comments. Discuss

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Open Thread: Should Tech Get a Turn-Off?

How Google Will Infiltrate the Real-World: Mobile Coupons, Barcodes, and Visual Search

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:36:00 +0000

The rapid growth of the mobile web is a force that could be disruptive to Google, a company that built its search engine for a desktop-based world. On the handheld, all bets are off. Anyone with an innovative concept for improving mobile search could gain ground, possibly even overtaking Google as the top search provider for mobile devices. But don’t worry – Google hasn’t been ignoring this trend. The company has been busy prepping various initiatives designed to get people googling from their mobile phones. From scannable barcodes to an innovative visual search app that lets you perform searches by taking photos, Google is slowly revealing how they plan to dominate search in the real world too. Sponsor Google Does Barcodes (Again) Google hasn’t given up on barcode scanning just yet. Although a failed Print Ad program featuring barcodes for newspapers was shut down at the beginning of the year, that hasn’t stopped the company from giving barcodes another go. This time, the venue isn’t the old-fashioned newspaper, but local businesses. Through Google’s Favorite Places program, over 100,000 of the U.S.’s most popular local businesses will receive stickers sporting Google’s logo, a scannable barcode and a message reading “we’re a favorite place on Google.” Business owners can post these decals to their store windows to show off their respectability and popularity – and you can bet many will. Customers scanning the barcode will be taken to that store’s “place page” which reveals various details about the business including hours of operation, reviews, photos, directions, phone numbers, brands carried, menus (if a restaurant), and even mobile coupons if available. In addition, users can “star” (rate) the establishment and submit their own review, if desired, turning Google Local Businesses into a Yelp -like user-generated reviews service. While this initiative has a better chance for success in introducing barcode-scanning to the U.S. market than the Print Ad program did, there’s still going to be some confusion on the part of consumers as to how to get started. Google notes in their Favorite Places FAQ that many modern smartphones including the iPhone, Blackberry, Droid, and other Android devices offer barcode scanning applications, but no links or suggestions are provided. This leaves consumers with having to figure it out on their own. In addition, feature phone owners whose more basic devices include cameras may also wonder if there is software for their phones, too. In some cases there is , but the less tech-savvy mainstream user base has no way of discovering that without taking the time to do some research on the topic. Perhaps Google should have introduced a cross-platform barcode-scanning application of their own? If they had, it could have definitely helped push the technology adoption forward. It’s almost surprising that they haven’t yet done so especially considering that their latest search rival, Microsoft, has. With Microsoft Tag , for example, you can create your own barcode-like “Tag images” as well as download mobile Tag-reading software. Mobile Coupons As mentioned above, the Favorite Places’ barcodes will link to pages that support mobile coupons, assuming the business chooses to offer them. However, these coupons aren’t limited to “favorite” businesses – any business listed on Google Local Search can use this feature. Announced late last month , Google introduced the mobile coupon feature to their Google Local Business Center program which lets any company offer coupons that consumers can access right from their mobile phone. At checkout, the shopper just needs to show the coupon on their mobile’s screen to receive the discount. Visual Search via Mobile Photos Google Visual Search is an upcoming technology still in development which was revealed on CNBC’s ” Inside the Mind of Google ” segment on December 3rd. This innovative mobile application aims to provide an even more intuitive way for interacting with the real world via your mobile phone. With Visual Search, users with phones running Google’s own mobile operating system “Android” will be able to take a photo of their location and use that to trigger a Google search. In order for this to work, advanced algorithms have to match the photo with those stored in a massive database on the backend. Initially, this service could be used to provide information about various landmarks, businesses, or other notable locales, but really the possibilities are endless. Eventually, the same technology that recognizes landmarks could recognize other objects, too, like products on store shelves, billboard ads, or street intersections. It could even

Ex-Microsofties Launch $500 ‘Meaning Machine’ For Large Data Sets

admin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:20:26 +0000

Dominic Pouzin is a worldly, smart guy. After doing school and internships in France, the UK, South Korea and India, he moved to Atlanta where he took a job in the NBC (Nuclear, Bacteriological, Chemical) protection field. “I designed statistical models, programmed robots, and implemented access control stations for nuclear plants,” Pouzin says on LinkedIn. He left that field to become a software engineer at Microsoft and this week launches his own startup company with a collection of former Microsoft co-workers. The new company is called Data Applied and offers “data mining in the cloud” – it applies automated algorithms to large sets of data in order to extract patterns, preconditions and outliers. Commercial licenses cost under $500 and are aimed to bring the kind of power to sales, marketing, engineering, social sciences or non-profit organizations that only banks and insurance companies used to be able to afford. Sponsor There’s a Data-Centric World Emerging Data visualization tools are not uncommon online and there’s a growing number of large data sets available for analysis these days. Microsoft unveiled a marketplace for data sets last month called Dallas . GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham says data represents a big part of Microsoft’s hope for the future. “Microsoft isn’t just selling software anymore,” she writes, “it’s selling itself as a clearinghouse for information.” Higginbotham points out similarities between Dallas and a startup we’ve covered here extensively called InfoChimps . Amazon started offering large sets of public data through its Web Services division last year as well. We’ve got high hopes that social networking data will be made more available for aggregate analysis, as a bird’s-eye-view of society’s interactions. We’ve written here before about how all of this data to be analyzed may or may not be put to good use ( Web 3.0 Might Be Really Stupid ) and Nicholas Carr recently wrote a provocative blog post about the consequences of data-driven recommendation on free will and human thought. You’ve Got the Data, Now What? Countless organizations have data sets of their own but that doesn’t make extracting valuable information from them easy. Microsoft itself unveiled a similar looking service last month called Pivot , but it’s invite-only for now and not thoroughly explained. We’re familiar with DabbleDB , but Pouzin says Data Applied takes things much further than data visualization. “Simple reporting and dashboards are boring,” Pouzin says. “They force analysts to manually visualize all possible combinations in the hope of finding some interesting facts. We do that automatically!” Data Applied performs a whole lot of data visualization functions as well, it’s social and offer a multitude of related features while running on one or more computers. Can it really pull unforeseen patterns and meaning out of large sets of data, though? That sounds like a tall order to fill, but if enough numbers can be crunched that the mind of a human consultant is in fact unneeded – then Data Applied could be bringing to market a very valuable service. Discuss

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Ex-Microsofties Launch $500 ‘Meaning Machine’ For Large Data Sets

Creathor Venture: European VC Moving to Federated Model for Global Expansion (RWS Interview)

admin — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:00:49 +0000

Creathor Venture is a 25-year-old venture capital firm based in Germany and Switzerland. That makes it unusual. In 1984, when it started, not a lot of VC funds were in Europe. So, we decided to speak with Cédric Köhler in Creathor’s Zurich office. As innovation accelerates and globalizes, we wanted to find out how a smaller regional fund like Creathor can compete with much larger Valley-based firms that have a global footprint. And of course, we wanted to find out what’s hot on the European tech scene. Read on to find out. Sponsor Aka Aki: European Play in the Web’s Golden Triangle First, what’s hot? In short: mobile + social + real time. That sounds like it was created by a random buzzword generator. But the combination can be very powerful. This is what Fred Wilson calls the Web’s golden triangle . When Fred talks about this, Foursquare is probably at the front of his mind. He is an investor, and Foursquare is as hot as it gets. This area is hot for a reason. Mobile devices reach more people and occupy more of their time than desktops or laptops could ever do. But to reach people effectively on mobile, you need mobile-native services, built for the limitations and advantages of the small screen. (Standard HTML apps retro-fitted to mobile are like the talking heads in early television.) Mobile is inherently social: you use it to communicate with people. It has to be real time (or “just in time” if we want to be accurate), because the small screen demands a filter that shows only what is relevant right now. (Yes, that does pre-suppose great filtering capabilities.) When Cédric talks about mobile + social + real time, he is thinking about Aka Aki, in which Creathor has invested . The way Cedric puts it, Aka Aki “adds the dimension of time” to location-based services. This addresses the question, “Which of my friends is within shouting distance right now .” FourSquare is from New York, and Aka Aki is from Berlin. With location-based services, location matters. Specifically, density matters. People will use the service if it connects them to people they know locally. If I am in Rhinebeck, New York, discovering that I have friends in Manhattan, Zurich and San Francisco who are online right now does not help me. I am only interested in the friends in Rhinebeck. This is an argument for a territory-based expansion model. You become dominant in one area, and then expand to neighboring areas. This is the way business worked for centuries before the Internet. Then the Internet heralded the death of distance. You could create a site and get readers from all over the world. With mobile location-based services that connect you to people in the real world, the old territory-based expansion is returning – with a twist, of course. German, Then French, Then English? Aka Aki started in Berlin. As this blog from March 2007 shows, it was early to the game of mobile + social + real time. It got its first round of funding from Creathor in December 2007. Then, in October of this year, it got a second round from INNOVACOM , the leading French VC (with Creathor joining in that round as well). That is a natural expansion model. Aka Aki did well enough in Germany to raise a second round and then uses that to grow geographically. In this context, bringing on a French VC made a lot of sense. Insta-Site: The No-Barrier-to-Copying World Cédric gave us a good perspective on the early-stage investing scene in Europe. Like other European VCs, he pointed to the rash of copy-cat ventures in the Web 2.0 era. These have been referred to, more politely, as “concept arbitrage”: someone sees a service doing well in one location and creates a version for their location. While “copy cat” is a derogatory term, Cedric was keen to point out that it has been a valid strategy in the past. As he puts it, “If I have a successful pizza shop in one location, I could probably create a successful one in another location”. In the Internet business, many successful exits have been based on this model. But VCs around the world who we have spoken with tell us that this game is pretty well over. The reason? Well, it’s all our fault. Bloggers and tweeters spread ideas so fast that the time needed to exploit a concept arbitrage has shrunk to nothing. The tools for building and deploying a website have also dramatically shrunk the time and cost to market. 1. Get idea on Monday, 2. Launch on Friday, 3. Move out of dorm room on Sunday. In the world of close-to-$0 insta-sites, the copy-cat model is being challenged. This is just like the arbitrage strategies on Wall Street. When friction goes, profits eventually wither as well. But Don’t Underestimate Local Nuance We can still see big wealthy countries where the US Internet giants have not become dominance for one reason or another. For example, Google does not dominate search in Korea or China. What looks like a tiny bump from 30,000 foot can be a massive obstacle when you are in the war on the ground. This is even more true in the world of social media. By definition, social involves cultural norms, and they differ around the world (thank goodness for that, homogeneity is terribly boring). When social + mobile + real time connects people in the real world, the differences can be even more striking. We are all humans with similar basic needs, but the cultural differences between, say, Germans, the French, Americans, Brits, Chinese, Indians and Koreans (to name just a few) are significant. The Globalization Challenge for VCs The top-tier VCs on Sand Hill Road know that innovation is going global and that the biggest markets and best ventures may no longer reside within a few miles of their office. So, the big VC funds are setting up branch offices around the world. This is the traditional multi-national model. The problem is that it might not work as well in the VC world, where personal relationships matter so much and yet you have to make decisions very fast. The multi-national model does not easily square that circle. Venture capital is not a naturally scalable business. VC funds have to decide between staying local (i.e. being a small firm of partners who can meet face to face every Monday in their office) and going global. The business does not scale well. If you bring in more partners, you won’t be able to maintain the situation in which all partners agree on every deal. That would create way too much overhead and friction. Fast decision-making overrides the standard layers of corporate management approval. On the other hand, if local partners are making the investment decisions, what value would they get from being part of a big global fund (one in which the folks way over at head office take a big chunk of their profit)? Is branding really that important? Smart entrepreneurs know that a fund’s name (i.e. its brand) is much less important than the individual partner who they deal with. This is a strategic dilemma for big funds. Federated Best-of-Breed VC Creathor, along with other smaller regional funds, is moving towards a federated model. As Cedric puts it, “We are partnering more with other funds.” In one sense, this is nothing new. VCs have always worked together on deals. But in the past, this usually meant two VCs on Sand Hill Road meeting at a Palo Alto coffee shop. Now, it means a Swiss fund working with a French fund (or a New York or Indian or Chinese fund). European VCs have to innovate in this way. They cannot win on the multi-national model: their funds are not big enough for that. As the markets move East – to China and India, for example – VCs have to “be there.” Similarly, a VC in Asia needs to work with VCs in Europe and America. It will be interesting to see how the globalization of innovation plays out and what new models emerge. Discuss