Category — business

Two months ago, I wrote on this blog:

I want an app that will show me all the stores near me that not only carry a particular product, but also let me sort by price and filter by availability…I realize this is not a trivial task, as it would entail mining tons of inventory data from an insane number of stores, many of which aren’t even tracking their inventory, and those that do are using a wide variety of systems. But here’s where the prediction comes in: this would be a perfect challenge for a company like Google to take on (I mean, hey, they mapped the freaking Earth, Moon and Mars already; no job is too big for them.)

Yesterday, Google announced “In Stock Nearby,” a new feature they added to Product Search for mobile.

We’re happy to announce that as of today, if you’re searching for a product that is sold by participating retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, or West Elm, you can just look for the blue dots in the search results to see if it’s available in a local store. If you see a blue dot, you can tap on the adjacent “In stock nearby” link, and you’ll be taken to the seller’s page where you’ll see whether the item is “In Stock” or has “Limited Availability” near you.

Official Google Mobile Blog: In stock nearby? Look for the blue dots.

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I used to listen to music. Sometimes I still do. Every once in a while I buy an audio book. But for the last few years or so, my preferred listening material, by far, are podcasts. And with my 1.5 hour round-trip commute every day, I have ample time to listen.

My favorites these days are Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech and NPR’s Planet Money. Below is a list of all the podcasts I listen to currently, and here’s an OPML file if you want to import these into  iTunes. But I also like hearing about others as well, so leave a comment to tell me which ones you like!

• this WEEK in TECH
• Security Now!
• NPR: Planet Money Podcast
• This American Life
• NPR: Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!
• WNYC’s Radiolab
• NPR: Car Talk Podcast
• The Moth Podcast
• The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe
• The Skeptics’ Guide 5X5
• FORA.tv – Video Program of the Week
• FORA.tv Technology Today
• Blog – Stack Overflow
• Directions Media
• A VerySpatial Podcast
• Buzz Out Loud
• BusinessWeek — Behind This Week’s Cover Story
• Best of YouTube
• More or Less: Behind the Stats

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Interesting article in the New York Times about the glut of iPhone apps and the consequences of having too many choices. Did you know that

The average iPhone or iPod Touch owner uses 5 to 10 apps regularly, according to Flurry, a research firm that studies mobile trends. This despite the surfeit of available apps: some 140,000 and counting.

I have 96 apps on my phone and a lot more that are deactivated in iTunes. But I’m not the average user. And although I think there’s something to be said for keeping things simple and limiting the number of apps on your phone, I also think that the fact that average users own only 5-10 apps is a clear failure of the App Store.

With 140,000 apps, the store needs to do a better job of organizing them and recommending new ones to you. According to the Times article “people tend to gravitate to the most popular” apps. This may be because popularity is a good correlate for quality, but I think it’s simply the only yardstick the App Store provides.

As innovative as the App Store is, it needs to get smarter and better organized–and quickly too. (I could say the same about the iTunes Music Store.)

via Skirting the Glut of iPhone Apps – NYTimes.com.

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Asked how local services tie into Google’s mobile vision, [Senior Vice President of Product Management Jonathan] Rosenberg touted the possibilities of location-based ads and commerce: “In mobile we are seeing that when phone numbers and coupons are offered people are much more likely to click on the mobile ad. Well, imagine if [a store's] inventory information is there so they can actually consummate a transaction locally. As that information becomes available, local is going to be much, much more powerful.”

via Google calls local services ‘hugely important’ to mobile future – FierceMobileContent.

TechCrunch presents a case for what may be the dark horse of next week’s Apple announcement:

This afternoon, Fox News “confirmed” that we’d being seeing the latest iteration of Apple’s hugely popular mobile OS for the first time. Should that be the case, there’s also a good chance we’ll see launch of a very important new feature: background applications.

It’s funny to be salivating over parallel processing, but this is the one thing that Droid Does (well) and by which the iPhone is really made lame.

Read Will Next Week’s Apple Event Finally Bring Background Apps To The iPhone?.

UPDATE: Boy Genius Report has a list of rumored new features for iPhone OS 4.0.

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Context Aware Computing. That’s the heading of one of the sections of Gartner’s recently released Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2010 and Beyond. I’d never heard this term before but apparently it’s well-studied in Computer Science. It deals with computer systems that are aware of the user’s operating environment, whether that be their location, their identity, what they’re doing, what time it is, etc.

According to Gartner analysts Nick Jones and William Clark, and I’m with them on this one, it “is about to have a transformational effect on business.” There are two technology trends that are converging to make this an enormous growth area: smartphones and cloud computing. In this same Gartner report, smartphones will overtake PCs as the primary web access device by 2013. And I think it might even happen sooner than that (I’ll go out on a limb and say latter half of 2011).

In the document, the analysts compare context awareness to search, in that it’s a keystone around which information is organized, though they say it differs from search in that it will be used to push information to users (while users pull information via search). I think this is all right on, and very exciting to watch. Now that all these sites have so much data about our habits, our networks, and now our locations, the next step is for them to deliver relevant  information to us based on contextual analysis of this data.

Read Gartner’s Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2010 and Beyond: A New Balance.

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Today Yahoo! announced that they would no longer be offering their free Shopping API, which could be used to display product search results for items available on Yahoo! Shopping.

The reason? Yahoo! has “decided to enter into a strategic partnership with PriceGrabber to power the Product Submit functionality of Yahoo! Shopping.” Umm, ok, but then Yahoo! goes on to say that PriceGrabber does not “offer a free web services API.” Zing!

In theory, APIs sound great. You can hit the ground running without having to build all your functionality from scratch, leveraging code written by skilled programmers from another firm as well as the large user base that firm has managed to acquire. It’s also smart business sense, as APIs attract developers, and developers are often early tech adopters who like to gab to their friends on Twitter and Facebook about the hip new websites they’ve been frequenting.

On the other hand if you build a business around an API, you are at the complete mercy of the company behind it. You could be fucked for any number of reasons: they decide to change their terms of service, they throttle usage, they geo-retard it, they decide to start charging to use the service, or they simply close up shop as Yahoo! did.

Lots of little companies like TweetDeck have been quite “successful” building their business standing on the APIs of giants (I put “successful” in quotes because it’s not clear to me how TweetDeck makes any money.) But it’s a huge business risk to be betting your entire business model on someone else’s code.

Better to build your own thing from scratch, and integrate with other services as icing on the cake rather than the delicious chocolate filling.

Read Yahoo! Shopping API Announcement Yahoo! Developer Network Blog.

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The New York Times on Saturday ran an interesting story about “customer innovation centers,” facilities that companies like 3M, Hershey and Pitney Bowes are using to work directly with customers to innovate on new products.

While they certainly sound a bit like so much MBA-type posturing, these innovation centers actually seem like they work. The companies show customers their latest research and in-progress products, and, often, the customers come up with novel ways of applying these new ideas to their industries.

Which got me thinking–this would be an interesting approach for a software company, especially one whose products span a wide range of uses (like Apple, Microsoft, or Google). They would invite users out to one of their big research centers, present some of their upcoming products, and elicit feedback on what they’re doing right, and in what other ways they could be applying their work. This isn’t about usability studies; this is about customer-focused innovation.

It’s so easy for software companies to work furiously in their little bubbles without enough contact with and insight on what it is that their customers are really trying to accomplish. I’d like to see some of these companies create customer innovation centers. I think they’d discover some interesting things.

Read Prototype – Seeing Customers as Partners in Innovation – NYTimes.com.

At the risk of sounding like one of those inspirational posters, I’m going to talk today about a decidedly non-technical subject: Integrity. There’s nothing more important to me, and I think to a successful life and career, than doing what you say and saying what you do. I put integrity above many other traits, since I think the others flow directly from it. Integrity leads to respect, empathy, honesty, humility, diligence–the list could go on and on.

It’s also a scarce resource, since for some reason it eludes most people. This puzzles me, because it’s really not that hard to do. If you’re finding it difficult, remember these things:

1. Be  on time
2. Return people’s calls and emails in a timely manner
3. Follow through on promises, but have the courage to say no
4. Lead by example
5. Always do things that in hindsight will make you proud

As Internet users, many of us blindly trust that companies are making reasonable efforts to protect our privacy and our data. And then you read a story like this and you consider never signing up for another “Web 2.0″ service again.

RockYou, social network application developer, suffered a major SQL injection attack in which a hacker was able to retrieve email addresses and passwords for millions of user accounts. To make matters worse, since RockYou integrates with other platforms like Facebook and MySpace, users’ passwords for those networks were exposed as well. Part of the reason why it was so easy for the hacker to obtain the passwords was that RockYou was storing them unencrypted in their database.

This is very upsetting on many levels:

1. It is beyond negligent to store your user’s passwords in plain text. Strong encryption is easy.
2. Better yet, let someone else handle authentication for you. That’s what OpenID is for.
3. After signup, RockYou would email its users with the username and password they’d just set up. Apparently it wasn’t enough to store the passwords in plain text, they also had to send it via an insecure protocol.
4. RockYou asked users to enter their credentials for 3rd party sites directly on their site, and they promised that they wouldn’t save those 3rd party logins. Needless to say, they were lying.
5. RockYou was informed of the vulnerability to SQL injection days before the hacker broke in and stole the passwords, and they didn’t act on it.

RockYou, you’re doing a heckuva job. This was the best that CTO Jia Shen could come up with:

“We started off as a small company and today we have a different engineering structure…But shame on us. If you make a mistake, then people can get in and it is a big hole…Our security approach in the future will have to be deeper.”

Umm. No shit.

So what does this mean for you and me? Well, unfortunately there’s no way to know how secure your information is on any given site. Privacy policies don’t generally specify that passwords are encrypted in the database, or that the site has been coded to guard against many types of SQL injections. So I guess the takeaways are: be wary of sharing sensitive information in general; use lots of different passwords for various sites you sign up for; and never enter your credentials for one site on another site. Ever. The message for developers is: let someone else handle your login process via OpenID.

Read RockYou Hack: From Bad To Worse