Category — miscellaneous

Back in college, my friend Adam and I were a bit obsessed with an odd and intriguing book called the Codex Seraphinianus. Created in the late 1970s by the Italian artist, architect and designer Luigi Serafini, the book is ostensibly some kind of encyclopedia of a strange fictional world. And now, I’m happy to say, some really awesome person has digitized the entire thing and uploaded it online.

We first learned about it in Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas and, after that, eagerly sought it out in our college’s library. We found it there, and it was quite a sight–an immense volume, totally impenetrable yet beautifully illustrated. And to make matters even more interesting, all the text in the book is written in an as yet undeciphered script.

Unfortunately, the digitized version doesn’t really do the book justice. I think you have to see this thing in the flesh to truly appreciate it. But if you’ve never seen it before, it’s worth checking out online–as long as you promise to get your hands on the real thing at some point in your life.

Via Steve Laniel, via The Rumpus

Best Tweet: “Yo its really biqq ass snow fallinq riqht now” via @SLBzKIDDCASH

Rumors that Twitter will be launching an ad platform in about a month have me wondering whether I’ll stick around if that turns out to be true. Is Twitter a valuable enough resource to me that I’ll be willing to put up with ads mixed in with the content? I don’t know.

The keys to making online advertising effective are context and relevance. The reason why AdWords work so well is that it presents information that a user is already looking for. If I’m searching for cheese gift baskets from Google, and a few paid ads from iGourmet come up, I might just click on them. You could certainly argue that is a legitimate result to my search query.

What we do know is that traditional interruption-type ads, like banners or pop-ups, do not work online. These just get in the way of whatever it was I was doing on the internet in the first place.

I guess we won’t know till next month what kind of ads Twitter is planning on delivering, and Anamitra Banerji, head of product management and monetization at Twitter promises they will be “relevant and useful.” But ultimately Twitter is about communication, not search. What kind of ads could they possibly foist on me that would be relevant?

So consider this the start of the Twitter backlash. Indeed, depending on what kind of ads they end up deploying, I think the backlash against Twitter could make the backlash against Google Buzz look tame by comparison.

Via MediaPost Publications: Twitter Ad Platform ‘Imminent’

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Last year, rumors surfaced multiple times that Google was in talks to purchase Twitter for a hefty sum. Ultimately it was clear that, even if they were entertaining offers, Twitter decided not to sell. The last time the rumor came up was in December, at LeWeb 2009, when Google CEO Eric Schmidt didn’t exactly deny the rumors, saying instead that, “There have been no announcements.”

And then Google goes and releases Buzz, fewer than three months after the non-denial at LeWeb. I’m beginning to think it’s Google’s way of saying, “Ok, Twitter, you don’t want us to pay you half a billion dollars for your little company? Watch how long it takes us to build the same thing from scratch.”

Ok, so maybe this is a bit of a conspiracy theory, but why would Google have been in talks with Twitter if they’d been developing this for more than three months? While it’s possible that those acquisition rumors weren’t true, to me it’s far more possible that when Twitter refused to sell, Google just decided to show them up and build the same thing from scratch in a couple of months. You have to admit–the only thing hard about building a Twitter clone is scaling up to huge numbers of users. And, well, Google knows how to do that.

Bradley Horowitz, VP of product management at Google, recently told EWeek that the product was not meant to be a Twitter killer, but rather a complementary service. Do you believe him?

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The hype machine surrounding Apple’s imminent tablet announcement is in full effect, and I have to admit I’m as excited as the next fan boy about this product. I really hope it’s not $1000, as the rumor mills have been reporting, but I still think my wife wouldn’t be too happy if I told her I was going to blow even half a G on this thing. I may just have to pitch a tent in the Apple Store across from my office so I can get my hands on this thing at least once a day.

But among all the hype about it being a Kindle-killer, or a TV for the 21st century, or a revolution in tactile input, there hasn’t been too much talk about what I think it’ll be really useful for: maps. And with Apple’s acquisition of Placebase back in July of ’09, this very well might be a new and important feature of the device.

I recently wrote about the fact that paper maps still have some advantages over electronic maps, one of which is the form factor. It’s tough to see the big picture on a 3.5 inch iPhone screen, or even the slightly larger screens of more traditional navigation devices. The rumored 10″ screen of the tablet, however, would be a great size for viewing and interacting with digital maps, especially given the device’s portability.

Now, granted, I wouldn’t use this thing while I’m hiking or cross-country skiing, but it would be great in the car–not so much for the driver but for the passenger-seat navigator. Imagine turn-by-turn directions on a device where you could easily switch from a street-level view to a small-scale birds-eye view and back again. And check your email / surf the web at the same. And then of course when you’re on a long trip and you don’t need the immediate feedback from the map (you’re on an interstate for instance), you can hand your tablet to your kids in the back seat to play games or watch videos. Speaking of games, expect to see some really interesting multi-player games come out for this platform (something you really couldn’t do on iPhone).

In any case, if this device is anything like what the rumor mills have been implying, the potential implications for the location & mapping space are huge.

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Over the weekend, Yelp released an update to their popular iPhone app (which of course has always occupied a coveted and prominent place on my home screen). The big news is that they’ve implemented check-ins in the new app, a la Foursquare, Gowalla, and other location-based services.

Relative to Foursquare and Gowalla, Yelp has an indisputable head-start in the local food & entertainment space in terms of number of active users. As Lawrence Coburn duly notes on Location Meme, Yelp check-ins on Twitter are already coming in at one every two minutes (less than two full days after the release of the app), versus one per second for Foursquare.

But for me the real question is whether a given social network’s check-in service actually solves a problem. For Foursquare and Gowalla, I’m not sure it does. Those services treate check-ins like a game, with users on Foursquare competing for bragging rights by checking in to a given venue more than anyone else. The motivation behind Yelp’s check-in service is a bit more compelling. According to TechCrunch:

It…adds a new layer of credibility to those who do write reviews because other users can now potentially see that these users have been to the place they are reviewing numerous times.

I really think this is key; I think the novelty of Foursquare and Gowalla will wear off over time, unless they can create more compelling reasons for people to check in. That’s why I think that location-based services that focus on very specific niches, where checking-in and location-planning are essential to their needs, will be the ones that win in the end.

As for Foursquare and Gowalla, it will be very interesting to see how they react to this news in the coming weeks.

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Interesting article at The Globe and Mail about a little iPhone app that is helping to keep snow resorts honest:

The misinformation, suspected for years by skiers, is revealed in a new study by two ski-loving economics professors from the Ivy League’s Dartmouth College…It showed an obvious “weekend effect” in the industry’s snow reports. Ski areas, in general, were juicing the snow numbers by an average of 23 per cent on Saturdays and Sundays, the Dartmouth study discovered…

During the final season of the study, 2008-2009, skireport.com added a feature to its popular iPhone app that let skiers opine live from the mountain. The professors found that dispatches such as this one – “Jackson Hole DID NOT get 15” today … more like 0” – had an instant impact on the industry.

“The weekend effect drops to zero where the iPhone is heavily used,” said economist Eric Zitzewitz at Dartmouth. “Consumers are getting armed with ever-more data. Theres a deeper message, it goes beyond just skiing. When its easier for consumers to share information, all of a sudden we dont see the exaggeration.”

It’s tough to lie on the internet.

Read The killer app that busted ski-resort snow jobs – The Globe and Mail.

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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