Blog archives for May, 2007

Ostrich burger

In two hours’ drive from Silicon Valley and one hour away from Yosemite National Park, CA right on the intersection of Highways 140 and 49 there’s a Happy Burger Diner in Mariposa, CA. For $4.99 extra you can have any burger made with an ostrich patty, which I enjoyed tremendously, even though ostrich meat is a bit dryer than any meat I am used to.

SearchSIG on personal search

Spock, ZoomInfo, and Wink presented at tonight’s SearchSig. The event was hosted by Google on its Mountain View campus, and moderated by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. Each startup presented their own vision of personal search, with Spock collecting all sorts of personal information from public Internet sites, ZoomInfo crawling various directories and corporate sites in order to create a business-oriented people directory, while Wink is also parsing all sorts of public sites in order to aggregate a single profile, which they then allow the user to own.

If you like Arrington as TechCrunch writer, you’d definitely love him as panel moderator. He’s not confrontational, but he definitely cuts through marketing bs in order to get his questions answered. All participants kinda stumbled around monetization, but then agreed that currently they maintain somewhere between $1.50 and $2.00 CPM. ZoomInfo also sells premium subscriptions to some of the business-related information, and currently is profitable.

Not too many people are sure how to monetize the people search - you generally can show some contextual ads on the celebrity profiles, since you roughly know what the visitors are looking for, but search for a relatively generic name (your former coworker, classmate, etc.), and that opportunity is hardly monetizable. The Wink demo was particularly attesting to this, as the CEO was browsing the site, the only contextual ads that would show up on the right would be dating ads served by Google AdSense.

At the same time, many agreed the opportunity is there - anywhere between 1.5 billion and 2 billion searches a month are for people. If you saw Dustin’s slide from Facebook tech tasting, you know that Facebook alone generates 600 million searches a month (with actual share of people searches not being disclosed). Spock seemed to think it’s going to be great to allow people to tag other people, and Arrington pressured them into the scenario when someone would be tagged as “pedophile” or “unethical”, at which point the CEO did a little of arm-waving, referring to the “community process”. I want to see that tested when thousands of diggers would get a chance to tag anybody employed with RIAA/MPAA, or thousands of slashdotters get to tag an employee of SCO or Microsoft. It didn’t look like anybody had any good idea on dealing with tag spam, malicious tagging, or misrepresentation by claiming someone’s profile on Wink or Spock.

Overall, looks like the industry is in fairly early stage, with more questions than answers. Pressured by big search engines from one end, and social networks from another, people search engines need to come up with some winning value proposition that makes customers either reach for their credit card, or spend more time on the engines themselves, consuming some ads meanwhile.

Who’s the biggest innovation driver in the networking world?

The answer is, naturally, RIAA and MPAA, as Van Jacobson’s lecture at Google suggests. These organizations and their lawsuits have led to the quick improvements to the peer-to-peer mechanisms, introduced by the original Napster, and currently involving at the BitTorrent level. Van Jacobson regrets the falling levels of networking research that he observes right now, and points that the protocols that govern current Internet are not coping with the current congestion problems we might experience.

Not that the protocols are bad, it’s just that the problem has changed. Previously a lot of networking research went into delivering data from point A to point B, and from point B to point A. TCP/IP therefore perfectly accommodates two hosts on the Internet talking to one another. However, modern data consumption trends indicate that consumption is rarely happening between two equal hosts. More often than not a single host (CNN, NBC, YouTube) is serving requests from hundreds of thousands of other hosts (users), with no ways to optimize the delivery of the same content on the protocol level.

Van Jacobson also doesn’t like the idea of binary connectivity. You’re either on the Internet or you’re off. There’s no way to be on the network, retrieve the information from hosts and caches close to you, and be denied from retrieving information from further hosts, until you get a full connection. Overall, a pretty good lecture with lots of questions that nobody else seems to be asking, primarily because most of us are used to the current ways networking works, and don’t have any inspiration to change the status quo.

High score on Wii Tennis

This morning I reached 2018 on Nintendo Wii Tennis. The game is addictive at this level, and I have diligently been playing it, instead of switching to Super Paper Mario gifted to me recently. I wondered whether one could go above 2000, since the graph didn’t seem to support it, but apparently you can.

Starting in 1950s the game requires enormous amount of Zen-like concentration and you’re constantly playing a pair of partners with 1900 and 2000 personal score. They do not change, they just sometimes vary their tricks. The biggest effort is to get them to play your game, and not vice versa. My game was heavily dependent on the front guy doling out shots left and right, till the back person of the opposing team got tired or was out of range to reach for the ball.

There’re some pretty tough requirements to get to the 2000 level. If you have 1980, and you win the best of 5 with 3-2 in your favor, you lose points. If you win 3-1, you gain 0 points. You have to win all 3 games in the best of 5 right away, win them flawlessly, and preferably without any deuces involved. Talk about pressure.

The opponents, however, are prone to mistakes even at this skill level. If the ball has a chance of either going out or landing on the green, the opponent will always hit it, if they’re in the range. Also, when the front guy hits the ball high in the air, but he has to jump for it to reach it, the ball frequently goes out. Other than that not too many mistakes are allowed.

Online video editors reviewed

ExtremeTech reviews five online video editors: EyeSpot, Cuts, JumpCut, MotionBox, and One True Media. Their conclusion? “Jumpcut offers the strongest editing and enhancing tools of the services we tested for this roundup. Unfortunately, it’s still in beta, and we ran into some uploading difficulties.” EyeSpot wins the format wars with support for ASF, AVI, DivX, DV, FLV, MOV, MPEG, MPG, MP4, RM, WMV, 3GP, and 3G2.