Shared on NewsGator Online

Microsoft Buys Would-Be Google Killer Powerset

Dan Frommer — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

As rumored last week, Microsoft has acquired Powerset, a much-hyped semantic search engine startup. No official word on deal price, but it's rumored to be about $100 million. Why would Microsoft bet on Powerset? More from Peter Kafka's June 26 piece:

What are semantic search engines, and why does Silicon Valley love them? Semantic search, or "natural language" search, is supposed to divine searchers' intentions more accurately than today's standard offerings -- which means Google. And creating a search engine that works better than Google would have obvious benefits for whoever figures it out. Hence Hakia, Twine, etc.

We've been skeptical about the ability of semantic search to deliver results that are significantly better than Google's, and think that Google does a very fine job of figuring out what we're looking for. But we had previously assigned a value of $80 million to Powerset, predicated primarily on the idea that someone who wanted to take on Google would find the company attractive. Now that looks like a reasonable hunch.

From Microsoft's announcement:

More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).

We're buying Powerset first and foremost because we're impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset - Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan - we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.

That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.

Earlier: Report: Microsoft Buying Would-Be Google-Killer Powerset For $100M

The Japanese Have Built the Future: The "Idea Acceleration Chamber"

Casey Kazan Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:05:00 GMT

You've heard lots about genomic this and nano-that, but deep down we've all really known what high-tech was meant to provide: great big room-filling voice controlled displays.

Technology company Kayac have developed a prototype "idea acceleration chamber" called "Kage Roi". Microphones monitor conversations and search the web for relevant images and pages, displaying them directly on the meeting table, and even controlling the ambient lighting to match the desired mood.

Not since nuclear power has a technology with such an awesome potential for use and abuse come about. Once the idea is liberated from the corporate world and makes its way into the home, it could be the most awesome setting for parties and alcoholically-influenced discussions you've ever seen. You'll need good filters though - there'll always be someone who thinks its fun to say "but we should have a party for lemons because we have two girls but only one cup". If you don't know what that's about, be grateful and move on with the warning that the internet is a much nastier place than you think.

The sheer inventiveness of the idea comes from collaboration with a Keio University digital communications research lab. A place where you can apparently make a full time career out of "finding ways to surf the internet", and which presumably has to beat off job applicants with a stick. This sort of research is becoming increasingly common - while many struggle to make faster this and bigger that, others realise that outside of specialists there isn't any need to make some things better, but to blend them better with their human users.

It's entirely a triumph of ideas - the technology has existed for a while now. LCD projectors are getting cheaper and more power efficient all the time, and there's certainly no need to restrict the final product to a boring tabletop. Voice recognition software still isn't perfect, but the function here is flow, not transcription, so picking out keywords will be more than enough. The system even records everything so no great ideas are lost - like all those times you and your friends solved all the worlds problems, but could only remember a hangover in the morning.

Posted by Luke McKinney

The Idea Acceleration Chamber

Ask 37signals: How do you say no?

Jason — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:14:00 GMT

Greg asks:

When your product just launched and the user base is starting to grow, you’re happy about any positive feedback you receive from your first users. But just as soon, you start receiving feature requests from the same users. While it’s easy to say “No” to a feature as a team internally, I found it less easy to tell a customer that their suggestion won’t see the light of day anytime soon (for any number of reasons). How do you respond to such requests — especially when the feature “makes sense” as an extension but might be too much of a niche (a power-user feature) or not a top priority right now. The answer might be to just say it, but I thought I’d ask anyway to see what your experience has been and how users responded.

We say no to a lot of ideas — including most of our own ideas. But it’s important to remember that no can be temporary. No now may be yes later. Or it may be no forever. The trick is to figure out which camp a certain no falls into and then respond appropriately.

For example, if someone asks you to add something to your product that you absolutely know you won’t be adding (Gantt charts to Basecamp, for example), you can be clear. “We appreciate the suggestion, but we will not be adding Gantt charts to Basecamp. We’ve taken an entirely different approach to project management with Basecamp…” And so on. If you are going to give an absolute no, it’s nice to briefly explain the thinking behind that decision. It helps people understand that you’ve thought about the no.

However, if the idea sounds reasonable and interesting, but you just don’t have plans for it right now, you can turn that no into a thank you. “Thanks for sending the suggestion over. While we can’t guarantee we’ll be adding this feature, we can promise you we’ll review it and possibly consider it for a future version.” Even though we say no to just about everything by default, we do read and consider every suggestion. Some make it in, some don’t. Some show up in weeks, some may take years. Plans change, markets change, products change.

But most of all, being clear, direct, and honest is the best policy. Don’t string a potential customer along. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Just be clear and set realistic expectations. Telling someone yes when you really mean no is a recipe for a bad experience down the road.

The Coolest Internet Network Operation Centers [Network Operation Centers]

jesusdiaz — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:15:00 GMT

This is a shot of the interior of AT&T's Death Star, their stunning global network center in Bedminster, New Jersey—where they work to suppress good wireless reception and run their Random Billing Generator. It looks more amazing than NASA's, but it's not the only cool network operation center running the intarwebs, as you will see in the gallery. Updated: with specs on the Death Star in New Jersey after the jump.

Here you can see the network operation centers of Reliance Communications in India, Conexim in Australia, Lucent's Network Reliability Center in Aurora, Colorado, and Akamai's NOC in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

AT&T's center uses 141 giant wallboards to show the status of:

• 83,000 miles of fiber routes
• 538,000 miles of "backbone" fiber
• 47,000 cell sites serving 236 million people

This represents 14.5 petabytes of traffic every business day.

[Royal Pingdon]

NASA To Broadcast Landing On Mars Live On The Internet

Sun, 25 May 2008 15:14:25 GMT

Sean P. Aune via Mashable! shared by 11 people

Not only is NASA,the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, going to attempt to put another lander on Mars, but this time their doing it live on the Internet for all to see.

According to Michael Learmonth of Silicon Valley Insider, starting at 6 PM EST today, people can head to NASA’s website, or Second Life, to watch as NASA attempts to put the Phoenix Mars Lander down on solid ground. I only say “attempts” as missions to Mars have had a checkered past over the years, but the twin rovers of Spirit and Opportunity have certainly proven it can be done. If successful, the first message from Phoenix will be received at 8 PM EST to let mission control know that the lander has in fact touched down and the status of its components.

Phoenix will be landing in the northern arctic region of the planet where an ice layer is known to exist below the surface soil. The lander will be able to dig down to this layer, scoop up samples to put inside of its on board ovens, and then analyze the vapors to determine the mixture of liquid. In addition to this portion of the mission, it will also use an attached weather station to see what the climate is like in the far north, and use a mast-mounted camera to take pictures of the surrounding landscape.

The mission is expected to last 90 “sols”, or approximately 92 Earth days. As a possible comparison of Phoenix’s fortunes on Mars, Spirit and Opportunity were expected to last only 90 sols, but are now at 1562 and 1541 respectively.

Ping This!

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Google Founders Sign Elusive Deal with NASA
Google Earth and NASA Complete Project
Can NASA Attract a Younger Crowd with Social Networking Tools?
Zero Day Vulnerability Discovered in RealPlayer and Internet Explorer
Moby Makes Music Podsafe
Google Earth Enterprise Version Update Released
Google Sky Launches - 200 Million Galaxies on Your Desktop

Bugs in the Matrix

Jake — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:13:10 GMT

My wife introduced a theory to me years ago. She observed that certain odd themes tend to repeat themselves in high frequency over the course of about a week, then disappear back into obscurity.

Her theory was that if you apply numerology to these coincidences, you could translate chance into good fortune, e.g. using the coincidences to pick lottery numbers.

It was like she planted a seed. I started to notice coincidences, which led me to wonder if they’d always been there and I was finally connecting the dots. For example, I can’t tell you the last time I heard John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” before last week. Best guess is back in the ’80s.

Last week, I heard it twice. Once as sung by actors on “My Name is Earl”, then a couple days later while shopping at Fred Meyer.

This stuff happens pretty often, at least to me. I refer to these as bugs in the matrix because they don’t really make sense to me. If there’s a reason behind “Take Me Home, Country Road”, I’m totally missing it. Trying to discern meaning from these coincidences is a lot like trying to interpret dreams, impossible and maddening.

So, what constitutes a theme? These are highly subjective in nature, but I think anything that causes you pause when it’s repeated counts, songs, movies, words, names, any objects, etc.

My theory is that themes exist all around us, but we don’t notice them. I know, way off topic, but something interesting to me.

Does this happen to you? Sound off in comments.

Update: I had one this evening. I walked into a BBQ place, close to my house, reminding myself of a line from “The Lost Boys”, which I recently watched for the first time in probably 10 years. The quote is “One thing that always bothered me about Santa Carla . . . all the damn vampires.” Some places in Portland give you that vibe.

I walk in the BBQ place, and immediately Echo and Bunneymen’s cover of “People Are Strange” comes on the radio. I have only ever heard that song in “The Lost Boys” and on that movie’s soundtrack. This is a bit of stretch, but it fits the MO.

How to Unlock Your Creative Motivation

FreelanceSwitch.com — Fri, 23 May 2008 07:37:04 GMT

So, you’ve got a good idea; a creative solution for a brief. Or you’ve just won a pitch. Fabulous. Now you’ve got to build the thing. If you can do that with the effortless lubrication of motivation from start to finish you’re lucky (and a bit unusual). If, like most of us, you find there are parts of the process where drive is a struggle, read on …

Take a look at these five key motivations for the creative process and work out where the force is strong with you. Tailoring your work to suit your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses can mean jobs become rewarding activities rather than laborious headaches.

Most people are strongly motivated by only one or two of the following. It might help to imagine recent projects from your own work. Think of examples where you were involved in the job from start to finish and see if you can spot any patterns.

1) Competition. Being the best or unique. What gets you up in the morning is the idea of producing something better than anyone else is producing. You like standing out from the crowd or coming first in the pack. The best thing in the world for you would be first prize or recognition for being a pioneer. On the downside, you might get into difficulty or lose your motivation if you feel that you’re nowhere near the top of the pile.

2) Process. Building something step by step. You love being there behind the drawing board, notepad or wherever the working surface of your job takes you. Just doing what you do and practicing your skill is your motivation. You are keen to find ways to improve your craft. The best thing for you would be uninterrupted time to give your full attention to perfecting the project. On the downside, it could be that you love the making part so much you loose track of deadlines or get frustrated trying to achieve perfection

3) Product. Seeing the finished article. Even before you’ve started you can imagine the task completed. Pictures on a wall, pots on a shelf, an album being played. The rest, making the thing, comes second. Getting to a clear and defined end for a project is the best thing for you and the minutia of the building process might frustrate you; finish quality might suffer.

4) Effect. The audience’s appreciation of the product. What gets you out of bed and helps overcome those moments of low motivation is the idea that people will love and appreciate what you’ve made and that, somehow, you will get to hear some of that feedback. The best thing in the world for you would be for your fantasies of appreciation to come true. ‘They love it’ means ‘They love me’. However, you may be over-sensitive to negative feedback or no feedback at all.

5) Oversight. Controlling the whole process or team. You can see all of the stages needed to bring an idea to production. Your motivation is to oversee all of the work and ensure that it all joins up. This tends to only apply to groups working together. Ideally, you are clear about your own shortcomings but are good at recognizing specialists in Process and Product and getting them to do what you want, or by spotting those motivated by Competition or Effect and adapting your interaction accordingly.

You’re at your best when your role is clearly defined and recognized but it can be really frustrating to be stuck lower down the pecking order and unable to exercise your gifts.

Build on your strengths

Can you see how you can begin to restructure or craft your job to suit your particular strengths? Pick positions or tasks that naturally suit your motivation. Make the most of the stages of the job that you know you’ll really enjoy.

If Competition is your motivation, don’t be shy about it. That is the way you are wired up. Enter competitive bids and look for ways to improve your skill level but beware of disappointments if you don’t win.
If you are a Process person find jobs that give you enough time to use your skills. Don’t keep checking email and consider working the early shift free from distraction. Beware of tight deadlines that leave you thinking you could have done much better.
If Product is your primary motivation make sure you are involved in structuring the initial brief and finishing the job at the end. Be careful not to get stuck too early with a finished idea when it may need changing or ditching as you progress.
If you like the Effect of the work then make sure you are involved with the client or audience. Put up a pin-board of favorable comments and reviews. Of course, you must be careful not to take negative criticism too personally.
And if Oversight is your motivation then you need to find project management positions and to recognize the motivations of those you are leading. If you can’t find this in your working life then look for it in social or volunteering positions.

Work on your weaknesses

Recognize the stages of the process that you’re not strong in and plan around them accordingly. You might be able to avoid that stage altogether. If, for example, you are strong in Product and Effect motivation but weak at Process, you may be in a hurry to finish a job at the expense of quality. Simply knowing that could encourage you to take more care or you could work with someone else to check your work through the process stage.

Another strategy is to save your most focused and energized working time (early mornings or Mondays for example) for the stages of the process you are less motivated by – and to set small, clearly measurable targets for that working time.

If you are applying this model to your commercial work then there will always be the factor of extrinsic motivations to consider. Sometimes it can feel that we do jobs purely for the extrinsic motivations and take no intrinsic benefits at all. If you want to weave in some intrinsic motivations like those above you can always do so by reframing your attitude and spotting opportunities to enhance the aspects of the process that you are personally great at. We all have some opportunity to find moments during the day that suit our motivation – even if it is just making coffee.

Bruce Stanley ran away from the Circus to become a creativity and happiness coach. He specializes in finding ways to make work easier and loves providing “Aha!” moments through his resources.

Microsoft Unveils Telescope for the Masses

Irene Klotz, Discovery News — Wed, 14 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

A new online telescope offers people access to the best images of the cosmos.

How "Why Startups Fail" Fails

Jason — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:32:00 GMT

David Feinleib at Mohr Davidow Ventures pens a piece called, “Why Startups Fail.” Here are his four reasons with my thoughts below.

1. Spending too much on sales & marketing before they’re ready

This is exactly why we encourage new companies to stay as far away from venture funding as they can. VC’s encourage you to spend! And since software is virtually free, and hardware is dirt cheap these days, and you only need a couple people to get your company and product going, the only place to spend your money is on sales and marketing. And spend you do, cause there’s nothing easier in this world than spending other people’s money.

2. The market outpaces the startup’s ability to execute

I hear this one discussed a lot, but I rarely see evidence of its impact. The market doesn’t really move that fast. Things generally move pretty slowly. Consumers move even slower, and consumer loyalty is built through great experiences over time not through early availability. First mover or early advantage is overrated. Google was late to search, Flickr was late to photosharing, Facebook was late to social software. Being late gives you a chance to watch the market develop and spot what’s actually working and what isn’t. Take your time, build something valuable, and then go to market. No, you can’t wait 36 months to release something that’s 3 years behind, but if you’re a few months “late” (whatever that means), and you’re great, you’ll do just fine.

3. There is no Entrepreneur

This one I do agree with. Every great company has a great leader who is willing to make decisions, say “no” more often than “yes,” and see a clear vision through to fruition.

4. The market takes too long to develop

If the market takes too long to develop, there is no market… it doesn’t exist. Unless you have one of those rare products that can create a market, you’re dropping a product into a void. So don’t blame the market, blame the entrepreneur’s judgement.

(One other thing)

One more thing I want to comment on. At the end of the article there’s this sentence: “A startup that struggles for reasons beyond the entrepreneur’s control.” This deflects blame in the wrong direction. If the entrepreneur finds themselves in a situation they can’t control it’s almost certainly because they put themselves in that position — either by borrowing too much, spending too much, rushing too fast, creating a false sense of urgency, hiring the wrong people, attacking a market that doesn’t exist, or not focusing on generating revenue early enough. Natural disasters are out of our control, bad business decisions are in your control.

(And another thing)

“It’s not just how fast you run the race that matters. It’s how fast the race is run. When it comes to startups, speed wins.” That’s just ridiculous.

Nine Company Blogs That Are Fun For Anyone to Read

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:40:01 GMT

Here at ReadWriteWeb we spend a lot of time reading the blogs of companies we write about (send yours to tips@readwriteweb.com) and we've found that some of them are just plain fun. An interesting company blog can be a great way to draw in new people through relevant content of general interest - and some of them will stay to check out the service you provide.

Some companies just blog about updates to their own technology and that's good for existing users to see. Others are fun to read whether you're a user or not. Here are some of the company blogs we recommend reading for a good time.

37Signals

You can't talk about interesting company blogs without mentioning Signal vs. Noise, the wildly successful blog about design, usability and small business from the makers of project management service Basecamp. This blog could easily stand on its own as compelling reading even if there wasn't a company behind it selling services. Sure enough, it's even got an ad on it from the elite boutique ad network The Deck. Signal vs. Noise has 88k subscribers - making it fun and educational for those subscribers is great for the business of 37signals.

Ning

Ning powers niche social networks and the company's blog is a great place to find out about all kinds of groups that are actively using this technology. Some of them a real surprise. The International Society of Space Entreprenuers, the Eat Local Foods Coalition of Maine and the ASPCA Book Club all have social networks! Who knew? Now how about some data portability, Ning? If you want to read about the theoretical side of niche social networks, check out data portability lovin' competitor PeopleAggregator's blog, written by the company's prolific CEO Marc Canter.

Viddler

Viddler is a crazy feature rich video hosting service with a very good blog. In addition to feature announcements, the company posts a wide variety of videos that are interesting to watch. That's where I discovered this one below, for example.

Newsgator

RSS company Newsgator has a great blog about RSS use cases, data portability debates and other industry topics. Maybe I'm just an RSS head - but I really enjoy their blogging. Newsgator competitor Attensa also has a very good blog about all things RSS - but it sure could use some more updates!

A.viary

Collaborative design tool A.viary has a couple of very good blogs. Their idea blog is full of interesting content that regularly hits the front page of digg. These folks have some seriously juvenile gender issues going on, which I have given them a hard time about before, but their blog is still fun to read otherwise. Every post they put up is worth a look.

Adaptive Path

User experience and design firm Adaptive Path publishes a very thought provoking blog. I usually scan company blogs for announcements and videos - but their longer posts often convince me to stop and read. OLPC: The Beauty of Failure and Greedy Mobile Interfaces? I'll stop and read posts with titles like that.

Amazon Web Services

What could be more dreary than commoditized data processing and storage services? While that might sound boring, the AWS Blog does a great job of highlighting cool things that are done on top of Amazon Web Services. Lately they've put up posts about how AWS are being used by the New York Times to provide online access to 150 years of archives and by the little ShareThis widget that you've probably seen on hundreds of thousands of blogs around the web. Lots of charts, graphs and other fun stuff for nerds on this blog.

Strands

Here at RWW we've been following the mega-funded recommendation service Strands for several years. We find what they do fascinating. Their company blog is mostly about company announcements, but they have really interesting announcements. Last.fm on Nokia phones? Cool! The most interesting section of their blog though is the data portability category and throughout the blog you'll find some really deep thoughts on cutting edge innovation.

Articulate

Articulate is a an e-learning tools company with a very popular blog. More than 20,000 subscribers actively discuss topics like how to make a good screencast and how best to work with clip art. This was a new one to me but I've already enjoyed spending some time on this company's blog. What more could you ask from a company blog? Good content creates a community of advocates that share the blog with friends, some of whom undoubtedly will purchase the company's products.

These Are But a Few

There really are a fair number of interesting company blogs around the web. We'd love to hear about some of your favorites. Others that are worth checking out include Oracle Apps Lab for a fun discussion of web 2.0 in the enterprise, the Lijit blog on "searching the social graph" and the many fun blogs published by Adobe.

If you found this post of interest, you might enjoy reading our coverage of some of the top new social media company evangelists as well.

We hope you find some of these blogs worth subscribing to and we'd love to learn about other blogs that cover topics of general interest that even non-customers would enjoy reading.