05.10.08
Posted in Money, Responses, Search Engines at 5:29 pm by Brandon Wirtz
I like what I have seen of Powerset, but… and this is a big but, they have spent a lot of time learning how to search 2 sites. 2 sites that are well edited, are supposed to be reasonably encyclopedic.
That makes it Cool, but a long ways from done.
Consider the following Passages which mean exactly the same thing, but are written in the style of two very different bloggers.
Powerset leverages the power of Natural Language Search to discern what you are searching for. This allows it to determine the difference between positive and negative positions, so if you are search for "Plants that are not Vegetables" Powerset will return articles about Fruits, and Legumes.
The above is "Encyclopedic" but just as useful, and more typical of web pages is the following…
The dudes at Powerset have a Search Engine that pulls results using normal English. So rather than answers that are bogus because they have all of the words "Plants that are not Vegetables" it knows you are looking for fruits, or legumes.
The first is a LOT easier for a machine to parse. Any Yoda style post that would be fine for a human is going to wreak havoc with a "natural language" search.
Powerset searches with the Language of Nature they do. Results from the meaning of your words they find. Seeking "Plants that are not Vegetables" yields Fruits and Legumes, not mis-placed pages with those words upon them. MMMM
Teaching a computer to understand context in sentences with regular word order is not particularly difficult. Working with a sample size that is 1/1 millionth the size of the Internet is not easy, but is a small feat compared to what is needed to Index everything on the planet.
And to be entirely honest searching Wikipedia is easy because pretty much everything in it is a Noun. What do I mean by this?
Wikipedia is no help if you are looking for "Setting up Exchange Server" You don’t need natural language to parse this question. but finding the answer is hard. Because you will encounter all sorts of things that look like they are the answer in the real world. "I need help setting up an Exchange server" is going to appear, and there will be very technical looking things surrounding the statement, but it won’t be the answer to the question.
Conversely finding the answer to "who was the first president of the USA?" can be broken down.
Who = Person search
Was = In the past not the present
The = the question is singular
First = question implies there were more than one
President = a Noun likely what we are looking for.
Of = Modifier of President so subset of the answers
the USA = Specific Modifier
Run a search no results found, so you run parts through a Synonym engine.
the USA = United States
Poof you now have an easy task, search for "a person" with "first president" and "United States" hopefully in the same sentence.
I haven’t gotten to play with the tool, but would it get the equally "natural language" answer to "Who was Voted the First American President?" or "Who First Filled the Role of US President?"
Don’t get me wrong I think PowerSet has a future. But I think in the near term it is in Answering questions about "small" sets of data, not the web in general. eHow would be benefited, Microsoft Encarta, Project Gutenberg, and as more an more of these data sources were indexed Powerset can get better, and can be ready to deal with News Sites, and from there, it might be able to break in to Blogging, but it will take a very long time to make it work for the Internet in General.
Or Perhaps making people write in a style that is easy for computers to parse will be a good thing for SEO in the future.
This is a response to:
Michael Arrington: Powerset’s Dilemma: Go For It, Or Sell
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05.02.08
Posted in Money, Responses at 11:44 am by Brandon Wirtz
Sprint is coming in at a disadvantage in the race to get WiMax out, because they are not in the Triple Play business. AT&T will role out WiMax first to places that are already on U-Verse. This means they will be in places they are already fibre heavy. Sprint doesn’t offer Television and Data Services so they are at a disadvantage not having Points of Presence in as many neighborhoods.
AT&T U-Verse, and Verizon’s Fios give them not only a set of customers to get addicted to fast Internet everywhere, but the foundation to build fast Internet everywhere. Consolidating customers on to a single bill, solves multiple problems for the companies.
Single bill customers are only going to be data junkies at one location at a time. You are likely home, or not, so you are self load balancing. Where as a customer base that is on Comcast’s 50meg Cable Modem, leave the house and start sucking up WiMax Data. This means Sprint has to have pipe enough for Peak times for "out of house" and Comcast has to have enough for in home peaks. Where as AT&T or Verizon get to share pipe for both times allowing them to have less peaky bandwidth usage, which will save them big.
Single bill customers aren’t as likely to jump ship, or not pay a bill. If you break a contract and get put in to collections on your phone it doesn’t really hit you until you go to buy a car, or a house, but if you don’t pay your phone bill and your TV and Internet go down as a result you are a lot more likely to pay the bill, rather than miss an episode of American Idol.
I agree with Om Malik, selling backhaul bandwidth to Cellular providers who don’t have Pop’s in a given neighborhood will be big business, and selling shovels to gold diggers is always a safe bet. But I think Sprint is the biggest player who is going to need this service, They just need to buy Comcast, or RCN or both, or the other way around.
As the TCP convergence happens, you are going to see that guy with the fattest pipe in the most places will win. The thing that worries me is the digital divide between people who live in wired neighborhoods and those who don’t. Soon the economic, and educational divide will widen between those who live in places that have the infrastructure and those who don’t. (and I live in a place that doesn’t).
This is a response to:
4G Backhaul: A Problem for All?
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05.01.08
Posted in Money, Responses at 5:16 pm by Brandon Wirtz
So it would seem that the people who were Entrepreneurs 10 years ago still are.
I still have my Field Guide to the Dot Com Yettie, which explained how all the 29 year old Entrepreneurs (Young Entrepreneurial Technocrats) were running things. 10 years later the entrepreneur age is 39. Seems the old crowd is the new crowd.
I’m 10 years to young, but I was 10 years too young last time, and with no college degree and 3000 miles from home I don’t fit the mold.
Dawn Kawamoto is insane…
So, if you’re going to attend college with the idea of starting a tech company later, consider an Ivy League school in a state where the cost of living is low because chances are good you’ll remain in the area upon graduating, and employees often are the greatest expense to operations. That’ll help with the profit margins, since going to an Ivy League school may mean your revenue will be higher.
Dawn, Ivy League Schools tend to be in New England, not the cheapest place to get tech workers, but more importantly, not where you are likely to have the best selection of Tech workers either.
Picking a place that is cheap often means a place where the education level is lower. I don’t de-value my home town, the people are great, but you aren’t going to find a PHP programmer in Reading, MI, and you aren’t going to find a SQL Server Cluster Admin with load balancing experience in places with lower costs of living.
I would be much happier living back in Indianapolis, with my rent being 1/3 for a place twice the size. But I would not be recruiting top tier employees, and I’d have much harder time finding VC’s.
This is a response to:
Study: A profile of the U.S. tech entrepreneur
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04.25.08
Posted in Money, Responses at 11:13 am by Brandon Wirtz
37signals has an article Why I love working with family people, which talks about why you want more family people in your startup. I don’t entirely disagree, just mostly.
Family people have a family… The right team becomes family. I’m not saying you shouldn’t hire the married guy with 6 kids, who goes to church every Sunday, but you need balance in a group. You need people who can work on Thanksgiving, others that can lead and advise lend a paternal role to your group.
I am a 20 something and I can put 100 hours in during a week, hit a deadline and then take a day recover and come back and not miss a beat. You can’t do that to a "family person". I have no problem with working with family people and I appreciate having them on a team, but don’t compensate them the same way. I really like Hourly jobs, or performance pay, because when I work 100 hour week I get compensated. If I work 100 hours and someone else takes time to pick up their kids from soccer, go to Church and takes 3 days to go see Grandma at Thanksgiving, don’t pay them the same.
David says he can get things done when the objectives are clear and the work has meaning. Well David, I think it is more important to be able to define objectives and find meaning in the work. Often there are things that need to get done which don’t have clear objectives, and are menial. But the still need to get done.
David is writing a Bitch-meme likely because some whipper-snapper like me beat him out for something recently. David when company becomes your family the company succeeds. When your Team becomes your Family the Team Succeeds.
Managers that understand building a balanced team, build teams that not only succeed but grow, and stay together even as the members go to other jobs.
Having team members who work twice as hard, accomplish twice as much and only make the same amount or a little less, because when they signed on they had fewer years of experience only serves to create a chasm on your team.
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04.22.08
Posted in Money, Responses, Technology News at 3:15 pm by Brandon Wirtz
The problem with entirely human powered results is the amount of time it takes to build a library of results. At www.ISayHello.com we are focusing on finding the best places for categories of results, and then working to categorize every search term so that you get good results. We are also creating content for top results. This allows us to be relevant for everything, and great on the most popular results.
Granted with only 48 hours of being live we don’t have a huge assortment of customized results, but we are able to move much faster than most, because we aren’t focusing on re-writing 300 words from Wikipedia for every result, we are instead focusing on finding the best results on the web for large categories of data, and so tomorrow when we add 24k results for prescription medications those 24k results will be much better than they were today. And unlike Mahalo or Stumpedia the improvements to those 24k results didn’t cost us even a dollar an entry.
The model is in a lot of ways like Google’s where you "tune" the algorithm, except that we will also be tuning the layout of results, what items are on the page, and how we present data.
It is our goal that you could use ISayHello.com as your primary search engine. You can’t do that with ChaCha or Stumpedia, or Wikipedia.
This is a response to:
TechCrunch: Miss Tormenting ChaCha Operators? Let Me Introduce You To Stumpedia
Edit: Stumpedia has 3,981 links - 803 members - over 4,500 search terms… We launched with 108k tuned results, 1million links, and I have no idea how many search terms… and I expect to add 10k a day.
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04.13.08
Posted in Money, Responses at 12:08 am by Brandon Wirtz
Steve Hodson at win extra wrote about how advertising for bloggers has to change… Well Steve if you can’t take the heat, get a real job. The problem is not the blogging model, it is having to face the reality that not everyone with a microphone is worth paying to listen to.
Whether you have a talk show on the radio, or an op-ed column in a news paper if you can’t bring in an audience you aren’t going to get paid.
The blog model is the same as the radio or TV model. Your job is to move ads, and sell product, and if you aren’t bringing in an audience you are failing. I will clear well over $150k on my various blogs, before the additional money from consulting, contracting, and my work with Vista Research as an analyst.
Some of my blogs are to sell products, some are to sell ads, and some are to build my brandwidth. I have had to put a lot of hours in to finding the right formula for each of these spaces. This site for example is just for my personal brand and there for doesn’t have any ads. Which is a revenue model I’m more than ok with.
As to your comments about Adsense dominating the space, yes they are my primary source of revenue, but mostly because some of the other sources I play with aren’t as dependable. If I move $20k worth of ads I want to be certain I get paid at the end of the month. Adsdaq by contextweb is a company that has cut me 5 figure checks in a month and I like working with them. More than Google even. Kontera doesn’t earn me as much as Google, but have also been great to work with. (though they both suck a bit because when all of you sign up I will get squat for referring them)
Steve, when you and I got into the blogging space there were very few bloggers. I remember when RSS 1.0 changed the online diary space, and really made it possible to be a Robert Scoble and read 300 blogs on a regular basis.
Then everyone wanted to make 6 figures working from home in their pj’s ranting about everything that came to mind, and that separated the men from the boys, or the people in it for the love, from those in it for the dollars. I compromised. I now have blogs I write for money, and ones that don’t pay as well, but I enjoy.
There is plenty of gold still in those hills. But this is a cut throat space and as it is cheaper and easier to enter the space you have to keep upping the ante to stay on top, and make money at what you do.
This post is in response to:Advertising for bloggers has to change
Extension: In response to Quintura…
Well you guys get "It" in a sort of ironic way. You used your blog to promote your product, got a Techmeme link, and that put will help you move even more of your services. If Steve would attach himself to Affiliates, Sponsorships, and Blogging for a company there would be more jingle in his pocket, and that is before you start looking at alternate revenue streams…. That said I’d have said it was odd that Techmeme doesn’t see this as a Splog.
There is a difference between using your corporate Blog to bring value to your readers, and getting a lucky roll and having techmeme decide your ad is relevant because you wrote one sentence about the article that you are linking to, and two dozen on why your product will help you get 70% more of your audience to leave your site and go some where else.
If you were focused on helping monetize blogs, rather than monetize your install base, you’d offer features that helped drive traffic, keep traffic, and create interactions that outperform the revenue generated by traditional ad models.
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02.13.08
Posted in Money at 3:08 pm by Brandon Wirtz
I might have titled this piece the Perfect storm that caused the housing mess, but I think blaming terrorists is more likely to get you to read it.
The story really starts in the Dot Com Bust. Post Y2K the price of Housing was falling. They really started their descent in 1999 and when September 11, 2001 hit the economy and the housing market really slumped. While interest rates were approaching record lows, people were too worried about their jobs to go get houses, or be optimistic with how much they could afford.
In December of 2003 the Federal Funds Rate dipped below 1%. All of a sudden you could by a house on an interest only loan for a fraction of what the rent would cost. The availability of credit caused a surge in the housing market the value of homes increased nearly 8% a year for 5 years, meaning if you bought a $400k home in 2003 it would have risen to nearly $600k making you an easy $200k and saving you the money you would have spent on rent, meaning you could have easily made $200k with out spending any money that you wouldn’t have spent anyway.
We all know that as interest rates doubled, tripled and Quadrupled, so did the monthly payments, creating the mess we are in now.
But why are we looking for a Government bail out?
When the Dot Com’s went belly up and that bubble burst we didn’t bail out the fools who lost money on investing in stupid.com. We didn’t bail out the people who lost money in the Enron Fiasco.
So why are we bailing out the people who can’t afford to stay in the house they shouldn’t have been able to afford in the first place? Why not let the market correct itself, and those of us who can now afford the adjusted pricing can live the good life for a while?
Part of managing the economy is keeping growth of investments in check over all. Part of making the economy balanced, stable, and diverse is making sure that risk reward is maintained. If everyone can get 10% return on investment buy X, then no one will by Y at 5%. If 50% of the people can make a 25% ROI on X and 100% can make a 5% on Y there will be a better balance, as some people will choose the safer option.
Personally I would be happy to see all of those people with home foreclosures move in to apartments. If they want an economic bail out, it should be in the form of saying that lease agreements can’t bar them from renting based on a credit check. And if their house is worth less than when they bought it, well the bank and them will have to work something out, but I’m ok with bankruptcy court settling it.
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