VIA Interaction

Sunday, October 30, 2005

News item: "Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too"

A nice summary of the disruptive economic event that Google has become. As an ex-newspaper hand, I marvel at the danger that mid-sized local newspapers are in.

New York Times: Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too:

"Google soared in popularity in its first years but had no meaningful revenue until the founders reluctantly fell on that safety net and started selling ads. Even then, they approached advertising with the mind-set of engineers: Ads would look more like fortune cookies than anything Madison Avenue would come up with.

"As it turned out, the safety net was a trampoline. Those little ads - 12 word snippets of text, linked to topics that users are actually interested in - have turned Google into one of the biggest advertising vehicles the world has ever seen. This year, Google will sell $6.1 billion in ads, nearly double what it sold last year, according to Anthony Noto, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network. By next year, Mr. Noto said, he expects Google to have advertising revenue of $9.5 billion. That would place it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales after Viacom, the News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, but ahead of giants including NBC Universal and Time Warner.

"Not content to just suck advertising dollars from Web search, Google is using its windfall to pay for an eclectic range of ambitious projects that have the potential to radically disrupt other industries. Among other things, it is offering to build a free wireless Internet network in San Francisco, plans to scan nearly every book published and is testing a free classified advertising system it calls Google Base.

"More quietly, Google is also preparing to disrupt the advertising business itself, by replacing creative salesmanship with cold number-crunching. Its premise so far is that advertising is most effective when seen only by people who are interested in what's for sale, based on what they are searching for or reading about on the Web. Because Google's ad-buying clients pay for ads only when users click on them, they can precisely measure their effectiveness - and are willing to pay more for ads that really sell their products.

"HIDDEN behind its simple white pages, Google has already created what it says is one of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems ever built. In a fraction of a second, it can evaluate millions of variables about its users and advertisers, correlate them with its potential database of billions of ads and deliver the message to which each user is most likely to respond.

"Because of this technology, users click ads 50 percent to 100 percent more often on Google than they do on Yahoo, Mr. Noto estimates, and that is a powerful driver of Google's growth and profits. 'Because the ads are more relevant,' he said, 'they create a better return for advertisers, which causes them to spend more money, which gives Google better margins.' ..."

posted by Tim Beidel at 10/30/2005 10:47:00 AM

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Wednesday, October 26, 2005

News item: Engineers Report Breakthrough in Laser Beam Technology

New York Times: Engineers Report Breakthrough in Laser Beam Technology:

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 26 - A team of Stanford electrical engineers has discovered how to modulate, or switch on and off, a beam of laser light up to a 100 billion times a second with materials that are widely used in the semiconductor industry.

The group used a standard chip-making process to design a key component of optical networking gear potentially more than 10 times faster than the highest-performance commercial products available today.

The team reported its discovery in the current issue of Nature, which was published on Wednesday. Such an advance could have broad applications both in accelerating the already declining cost of optical networking and in potentially transforming computers in the future by making it possible to interconnect computer chips at extremely high data rates....

posted by Tim Beidel at 10/26/2005 03:49:00 PM

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Monday, October 24, 2005

The Killer App

I've been traveling - personal, business and educational. I caught a fantastic User Interface Engineering conference in Cambridge two weeks ago, and saw both Ohio State-Penn State and USC-Notre Dame. Finished off the crazy three weeks in the sixth row (center) for Bruce Springsteen in Worcester last Thursday.

As State College, Pa., South Bend, Ind., and even Worcester, Mass., are in the middle of nowhere, the last three weeks have been a crazy mash up of planes, trains and automobiles. Which worked for me twenty years ago - what could be the problem now?

I guess it's the work, not the play! Because all that travel has meant that every other waking hour (it seems) has been used to catch up with that. However, this bit today from Google's blog broke through: "Guess what just turned 34?

10/21/2005 03:19:00 PM
Posted by Paul Buchheit, Gmail Engineer

It's difficult to pin down the exact origin of email, but in October 1971, an engineer named Ray Tomlinson chose the '@' symbol for email addresses and wrote software to send the first network email.

At the time, it must not have seemed very important – nobody bothered to save that first message or even record the exact date....

posted by Tim Beidel at 10/24/2005 07:14:00 AM

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Wednesday, October 05, 2005

News item: Philadelphia to Be City of Wireless Web

Philadelphia to Be City of Wireless Web:

"Philadelphia yesterday announced a plan to build the biggest municipal wireless Internet system in the nation, the latest of a growing number of cities to treat high-speed Web access as a basic municipal service like water, electricity and trash collection.

"Philadelphia said Atlanta-based EarthLink Inc. will fund, build and manage the 135-square-mile network, which will offer low-income residents service for as little as about $10 a month and could threaten the profits of telephone and cable companies.

" 'Increasingly, city officials view broadband in the 21st century the same way they viewed electricity 100 years ago and telephone service 50 years ago. It's falling into the category of a necessary and essential social service,' said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, a nonprofit group that favors the development of municipal wireless." ...

posted by Tim Beidel at 10/05/2005 03:06:00 PM

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From Wiki to Productivity

New York Times: Collaboration

A nice overview of the way all these bottom-up technologies like blogging and wikis and even the open source model are improving productivity at companies large and small.

"The second round of Internet innovation appears to be here. Companies large and small experienced soaring productivity in the 90's as the Web made worlds of information available at the click of a mouse, and the Internet drastically reduced the cost of communicating and doing business with someone on the next floor or the next continent. That cost-cutting payoff continues to spread. But in the next wave, companies are embracing the potential of networked computing to let workers share their knowledge more efficiently as they nurture new ideas, new products and new ways to digitally automate all sorts of tasks.

Companies are drawing on collaborative models that first blossomed in nonbusiness settings, from online games to open-source software projects to the so-called wiki encyclopedias and blogs to speed up innovation. This networked collaboration is creating new opportunities and disrupting industries. New styles of work and, in business schools, new theories of innovation are rising.

"The big payoff for the future will be in helping knowledge workers to be more inventive and creative, and to get those innovations into the marketplace," said Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of managerial economics at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "That's where a wealthy nation like the United States is ultimately going to have to seek its competitive advantage."

Open-source software is a pioneering example of the kind of collaborative work made possible by the Internet. Networks of far-flung programmers share code and ideas to constantly improve and debug their software. So the open-source Linux operating system is challenging Microsoft's Windows, a product backed by one of the world's richest corporations.

The open-source formula is being applied in one field after another. Projects range from Wikipedia, an open-source encyclopedia, to Biological Innovation for Open Society, or BIOS, an open-source initiative in biotechnology. Corporations are rapidly adopting software tools intended to nurture collaborative work, including wikis, blogs, instant messaging, Web-based conferencing and peer-to-peer programs.

So far, economists say that only a fraction of the cost-cutting opportunity from networked computing has been captured. Looking ahead, they say, the United States must master how to use networked collaboration to accelerate innovation. ...

posted by Tim Beidel at 10/05/2005 10:42:00 AM

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Tuesday, October 04, 2005

A new breadth for networking

The New York Times's take on personal networking sites and "folksonomies."

"[T]here is a new, rapidly growing generation of networking sites built around purposes, not people.

These sites connect people by their interests and goals. Three such sites are del.icio.us, which lets users bookmark Web sites and share the bookmarks with others; 43things.com, which loosely connects users with shared goals like learning to play the guitar; and PledgeBank.com, a London-based nonprofit site that brings users together to participate in civic actions, like starting a political group or giving blood.

Connecting people online this way is not new. Dial-up bulletin boards in the 1980's, Usenet discussion groups from the 80's and 90's and blogs today all allow users to connect with like-minded people over topics that interest them.

Until recently, however, groups needed a critical mass to have such a Web presence, and finding them could be difficult. Idea- and activity-oriented networking sites create ad hoc homes for many small groups and interests, and make them more easily accessible.

The form of information classification used on del.icio.us has become known as "folksonomy," a play on the word "taxonomy," coined by Thomas Vander Wal, a Web production manager who is an avid user of del.icio.us.

Here is a look at these three genres ...

posted by Tim Beidel at 10/04/2005 08:46:00 PM

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Monday, October 03, 2005

Nielsen's newsletter readers ID their pet peeves

Jakob Nielsen asked readers of his newsletter to nominate the usability problems they found most irritating.

Here are the highlights:

1. Type legibility - landslide winner
2. Non-standard links
3. Flash!
4. Content not written for the Web
5. Bad search
6. Browser incompatibility
7. Cumbersome forms
8. No contact info
9. Frozen Layouts
10. Inadequate photo enlargement

Of those, the ones that we can personally vouch forare non-standard links (or at least things that don't look like links) and bad search. However, in recent customer interviews for a client, "no contact information" came up more than a few times...

posted by Tim Beidel at 10/03/2005 11:28:00 AM

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