elruso.com Blog

NewsMap: Treemapping for Google News

2006-07-12T18:54:10Z

Signal vs. Noise points to an interesting application of treemapping: NewsMap. It displays news stories, grouped by section, as rectangles whose size is proportional to significance of the story:

A similar concept has been employed (much earlier) in SmartMoney’s Map of the Market:

Both of those are good tools to deal with information clutter, although I think the Map of the Market is more useful in real life due to several levels of depth (you can drill down to individual sectors).

Todo lists galore and a short review of Rough Underbelly

2006-06-23T04:33:27Z

SolutionWatch posted a great review of 25 TODO lists. I’ve tried Remember the milk but for some reason it didn’t click with me. The one I find interesting is Rough Underbelly (those Web 2.0 names, sigh…). Unlike other lists, you assign either 1, 2, 5, or 10 points for each task depending on its importance (the following list is from Printable CEO):

You then maintain the list as any common to-do list but the points done each day are tallied automatically and can be displayed as a chart.

I think it’s a great idea especially for people whose time is somewhat flexible and some measure of productivity is important: especially when there is a big difference between “Check data on slide X” and “Set-up a structure for a presentation”.

One suggestion for improvement would be custom legends (e.g. 2 points=”My Action X”) because having to maintain mental mapping of actions to points can get bothersome and kind of defeats the original purpose of Printable CEO.

Joe’s Goals: to-do list with a twist

2006-06-14T18:33:27Z

Via ichris.ws comes a link to a to-do list with a twist: Joe’s Goals. Instead of adding things you need to do, you add stuff you try to avoid and keep a score:

You get 1 point for completing a “do” and -1 for completing a “don’t” and get to share the daily score with your friends (not sure I’d want to though

On a more conventional note, for work I’m a heavy user of a very simple Backpack by 37signals.

Update: Seems there’s already slightly more complex version of Joe’s Goals as a Win/Mac application: Sciral Consistency

Google Spreadsheets: After trying the beta

2006-06-08T05:04:21Z

In my earlier post I argued why Google Spreadsheets is not a threat to Excel in any way or form. Now that I had chance to try it out myself, I’m more convinced than ever.

It’s actually barely usable for any serious kind of work (which is where most of the cash in Excel cash cow comes from):

No autofill – I unsuccessfully tried to drag a range (1, 2, 3 for example) down to fill out, say, 20-30 consecutive numbers. No luck. Ctrl-D/Ctrl-R shortcuts for copying right/down do work though.
No charts – Much less important than other things I’ve mentioned, but still a significant omission (Excel charts are not perfect by any measure though)
No offline access – One of great points mentioned by Ian Landsman

In my humble opinion, this is a case of just too much blogosphere hype with little real substance.

Update: iRows seems to be more useful, though less sleek than Google Spreadsheets: autofill, charts are included. And it supports collaborative editing to boot.

Google Spreadsheets: Not really a threat to Excel

2006-06-06T15:48:21Z

Vinny Carpenter takes a quick look at the just-launched Google Spreadsheets. Although some people think this is an Excel challenger. I, however, don’t think it’s a threat to Excel power base at all.

Although it’s well known that most of the time Excel is used for fairly basic tasks, most of the biggest users (consulting, corporate finance, investment banking) use a very wide subset of functions including:

External database queries
PivotTables (extremely important)
Large, complex spreadsheets (30+ sheets in a single workbook)

Which Google Spreadsheets is unlikely to offer in the short term (although I’m willing to be proven wrong). Most importantly, data that ends up in the spreadsheets is of confidential and/or proprietary nature and wouldn’t be on an online service.

That doesn’t mean that Google Spreadsheets won’t have its users, it’s just not a threat to most of the core Excel customers.

Fun interface to boring data as a business?

2006-06-01T20:52:56Z

Juice Analytics has a great post about huge gap in quality and ease-of-use between consumer-oriented reporting interfaces and those typically found in enterprise software. Zach makes the point that the enterprise reporting, besides coming last in the development process, usually puts raw data above insights and values quantity over quality.

Doug McClure wonders whether this represents an underserved business niche for some new start-up explore. I’d say hell, yes!

Presenting information has a lot of know-how and it’s definitely transferable. It doesn’t matter whether you’re displaying sales of widgets or inventory of beef cows, time series is still a time series and the thing people making decision want to know is the same. It’s the “so what” or “why do I care”. And typical enterprise reporting interface sucks at doing that.

One could easily imagine a start-up staffed with people who know how to extract the “so what” from a data dump, people with interface design skills and yes, some graphic designers to make looking at it all much less a chore.

Any takers?

Talkety, callback phone to phone

2006-05-26T21:39:55Z

Talkety is a new VoIP-based phone service which works in a fairly novel manner:

Talkety will connect any two phones, cellular or landline, by number. With ease and effectiveness, all one must do is type in his number, the number he wishes to dial, click “connect” and let Talkety do the rest.

The caller’s phone rings. By answering, the call is triggered, and the second phone rings at the other end, connecting the two individuals with clarity.

No software or hardware needed and rates are fairly competitive (e.g. 5 cents per minute Mexico-U.S. and 3 cents U.S.-France vs. zero and 2.5 for SkypeOut).

Some people have commented that you still need to pay your local phone service fee but that’s only an issue 1) if you live in a country/area where naked DSL is available or 2) you’re not using it mainly for long distance calls where the savings usually are greatest.

At last an alternative for Mexico street-level maps

2006-05-25T16:22:14Z

It used to be that the only option to check Mexico City/Monterrey street-level maps online was fairly mediocre (compared to Google Maps et al.) Guia Roji site (no smooth map scrolling was particularly annoying). Checking out local.live.com after reading TechCrunch article I found out to my delight that it finally had street-level maps at least for Mexico City and Monterrey. Images below are linked to map locations.

The only issue is that I couldn’t get search for streets to work (it searches for places such as stadiums and parks just fine) which somewhat limits its usefulness. If someone knows what I’m doing wrong, feel free to comment.

Yahoo! Analyst Day: Why it pays off to read analyst presentations

2006-05-23T03:30:04Z

Deviant Abstraction points to a very interesting 188-slide presentation of Yahoo’s strategy. As Nicolas Toper seems to be right about blogosphere silence, I’ll try and make some noise. A lot of people underestimate the value of investor presentations to gain insight into corporate strategy and this one is particularly tedious and long (they usually run at 20-30 slides)
There’s a lot to be perused there, but the most interesting idea is this strategy, summed up in a list:

Use Yahoo’s huge user reach (500M+ users) to build up a critical mass
Use that critical mass to launch/strengthen a social network-type application e.g.

Yahoo! Answers (social search)
Flickr (integration into Olympics and general news coverage)
Now almost 30% of Y! web search page views

Take advantage of “social search” to strengthen traditional search (happened in Taiwan where Yahoo! won market share from Google)
Monetize (the average revenue per user went from 35 cents per month in 2001 to 79 cents in 2004)
Rinse and repeat.

Read/WriteWeb is the other blog with interesting analysis of other parts of presentation

Snap, new search engine with a useful twist

2006-05-19T21:00:52Z

Via NogzBlogz comes a pointer to Snap, a very interesting search engine. Although it all starts with a simple search box:

Results page is a pleasant surprise with easy keyboard navigation (Up, Down, Enter) and page thumbnail fairly quickly displayed on the right side. Based on few searches I did, results quality is not bad at all and seeing a preview of the page helps immensely.

Update: Wisdump wrote a very nice review of Snap, including some very valid critique

Tags: web-20