Remember when I was bragging about getting a look at the technology in Ajay’s Juneja’s car? Damn it’s the coolest car I’ve ever ridden in (my son thinks so too, he got a look at it recently too). Well, today Michael Arrington of TechCrunch got a look and brags about the car too. His natural language speech processing system is really superb. I hear Microsoft has something similar in the works. I wonder how it compares? Is this stuff important? Oh, yeah! Bill Gates has been promising this kind of stuff for years. We’re about to see an explosion of voice recognition systems. Ajay says his is lightweight enough that he could run it on a small MP3 playing device, for instance. Oh, now you’re starting to see the commercial value of voice. “Play Black Eyed Peas Shutup” you could say. And it’d start playing.
New Memorandum stance, BlogTronix impresses
I’m going to make a real effort not to link to anything that’s already on Memeorandum. Why? Because that way new things will show up on Memeorandum. Sorry, Shelley Powers, that means I won’t link to you today either. 
(Which is a bummer, cause she made some good points about Memeorandum’s bias).
But, yesterday at the Blog Business Summit I saw two things that really are interesting. Here’s why. When I go to companies to speak, they keep asking me “how do I do something similar to Channel 9.” That isn’t easy. We had two developers working on that for quite a while. They started with Community Server from Telligent (Microsoft’s employee blogs are run on top of Community Server — we have more than 2,000 now and a TON of traffic, so it holds up very well. The new Xbox.com forums are built on top of Community Server as well). Our tech team on Channel 9 (Charles, Brin, Adam, and Jeff) mashed in video components and a Wiki and other stuff and then hacked the heck out of it to make it Channel 9. I’ve been hoping that a company would come out with a set of tools/service that would make it possible to do a Channel 9 style site.
BlogTronix is the answer. It’s awesome. Has all that and more (and has security built in so you can blog both internally and externally very easily). I’m going to get a test blog there and will write more after I actually can try it out.
The other thing that Steve Broback showed on stage was FeedFire. It lets you build RSS feeds out of sites that don’t have feeds. Steve writes about that tool here.
Update: I totally messed this post up, so here’s the fixed post.
Rick Segal has a couple must read posts
Rick, you gotta lay off the Scoble love or some people will think we’re having an affair or something. But, his posts are right on. One takes Macromedia to task for corporate speak. Another takes all corporations to task for the way we handle employees on their way out (heavily aimed at Microsoft cause Rick is a former Microsoftie and has been talking with tons of former MSFTies about their experiences). Oh, that’s so true! We suck at exit interviews and we don’t think creatively about the process at all. It should be like sending a kid to college. A little sad, yes, but our ideas are going out into the world to be used somewhere else. Might as well stock them up with tools so they can evangelize our stuff elsewhere. I like how Rick thinks.
Silicon Valley got my attention: the future of Web businesses
It all crystalized earlier this week when Ethan Stock, CEO of Zvents showed me his new Web-based business. See, I’m pretty slow. It took me four years to get blogging after Dave Winer first started his. It took me two more years to really get RSS’s relationship power. I still haven’t gotten OPML totally (although, I’m working on a directory of my blogs that’ll be pretty cool, so I’m fairly far along getting that).
On Monday night Steve Gillmor explained what he meant by attention (he started AttentionTrust.org). See, I thought what he meant was that attention was all about gathering the clicking behavior of people like you in a central database. Imagine when you go to Bloglines. Thousands of people visit that every day. They all click on links. Bloglines tracks those clicks. I thought that was attention data that Gillmor was talking about.
I was wrong.
And it took me seeing Zvents (and hanging out later with the smart folks from the content and advertising industries) for me to get it.
So, let’s dive in. Zvents is an event page. You tell it that you want to see a football game this weekend. It gives you a result back. So far, pretty basic stuff. But, click on an event. See the Google Map? Forget that it’s Google for now. Let’s call that a Web Buzz Building Gadget.
Now, see the Google Ads over to the right? Let’s call that a Web Monetization Gadget.
So, here’s the new Silicon Valley business plan. You build a service. Add a Buzz Gadget (Google/MSN/Yahoo are working on more to come). Add a Monetization Gadget (Google calls that their Web Advertising Platform — MSN and Yahoo are working on their own). Mix and mash and we have a business. Guess what? This business will be very profitable. Why? You develop it cheaply and if you did your job right, a boatload of people come and visit your service, like it, keep coming back, and hopefully they click on the ads (the more they click on the ads, the more money you make).
Now, that sounds cool, right? But here’s where attention could come in.
What is Zvents capturing? Well, they know you like football. They know you probably are in San Francisco this weekend. And, if you click on one or two of the events, they know you’re interested in them. Now, what if you see an ad for a pair of Nikon binoculars. If you click on that, then Zvents would be able to capture that as well.
Now, what other kinds of things might football fans, who are interested in binoculars, who are in San Francisco, want to do this weekend? Hmmm, Amazon sure knows how to figure that kind of problem out, right? (Ever buy a Harry Potter book on Amazon? They suggest other books for you to buy based on past customer behavior!!!)
It goes further. Let’s say this is 2007. Let’s say that Google (or Yahoo or MSN) has a calendar “branding” gadget out. Let’s say they have a video “monetization” gadget out. Zvents could build the calendar “branding” gadget into their page. What would they get out of that? Lots of great PR, and a Google (or MSN or Yahoo) logo in everyone’s face. But, they would also know where you’d be this weekend. Why? Cause you would have added the 49ers football game to your calendar. So, they would know where you are gonna be on Sunday. And, that you just bought binoculars. Over time Google/MSN/Yahoo would be able to learn even more about you and bring you even more ads. How?
Well, let’s say you’re Starbucks. Let’s say you make a deal with Google to put Starbucks ads on Google Maps. Let’s say the ads say “$.50 off of your next latte if you give this code: XZP1.” So, you go into Starbucks and give them the code. They punch that into the register. It reports back to Starbucks headquarters that you bought a latte because of the Google ad. Then, they report back to Google that you bought something (Starbucks will get a discount on their ads for this kind of reporting).
Now, Google knows you like coffee too. Oh, what Google knows!
It’s all attention. So, now, what if Zvents and Google shared their attention with everyone through an API. Now, let’s say I start a new Web business. Let’s call it “Scoble’s tickets and travel.” You come to my site to book a trip to London, let’s say. Well, now, what do I know about you? I know you were in San Francisco, that you like coffee, that you just bought some binoculars, that you like football. So, now I can suggest hotels near Starbucks and I can suggest places where you’ll be able to use your binoculars (like, say, that big wheel that’s in the middle of London). Even the football angle might come in handy. Imagine I made a deal with the local soccer team. Wouldn’t it be useful to put on my page “49ers fans get $10 off European football tickets.”
But, it gets even better. Now that the system is capturing my attention, and sharing it, my Web Gadgets (both branding and advertising) get better over time. They start to thrill me at some point. And, when I go to a search engine, it can see ALL my attention data and start suggesting things it thinks I’d like (sorta like Amazon suggests things to me).
Now, imagine my blog hooked into this attention system. Wouldn’t I get better ads along the right? Damn straight you would. And, let’s say I had a weather gadget on the right. Wouldn’t that show you YOUR city? Yes.
Wouldn’t it be able to see changes in your behavior over time and bring you even cooler stuff? Let’s say this system watched you for three years and then you started searching on pregnancy. Or “best price on diapers.” Or buying books on Amazon with titles like “Parenting.” And, Flickr could report to the system that you wrote “our new baby.” Oh, and it could watch everything you type on your blog.
Couldn’t the system know that you are likely a new parent? Couldn’t it bring up new kinds of advertising targeted at a new parent?
When I ran a camera store we sold diapers in our store. Why? So that we could get new parents into the store. Turns out that new parents buy a TON of camera gear.
My mind is racing from what you could do with this kind of data. I’m sitting with Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords. I bet that even ActiveWords could make use of such attention data.
Now I’m starting to get scared by this kind of world.
Beattie not finding startups with any depth
Russell Beattie, who works at Yahoo, has a great post today where he takes on a lot of the hype around new companies that are springing up like mushrooms around the world. I visited a few of these startups this week and I too didn’t find the next Microsoft or Google. But, if I took you back in time to 1998, would you have believed me if I said that Google would be a business with a $100 billion market cap within seven years? I don’t think so.
I look for small things that I’d like to use. And, there are definitely some things coming that fit that bill. I do judge everything by Jeff Sandquist’s seven day rule. What new apps are surviving your seven-day test?
Ben and Mena Trott say they are sorry
If you aren’t a geek who has to keep a data center running you might not appreciate the post that Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart, made yesterday. The business challenges facing all of us are deep and extreme as we deal with a world that doubles in size every few months (and for some services is on a far far steeper growth curve).
When you hear about employees leaving big and established companies for smaller startups, you don’t often hear about the long nights, the very real risk of failure. Silicon Valley is paved with the failures of entrepreneurs.
One thing, though, is that I really appreciate management that gives me the straight up unvarnished facts. That’s the kind of people I want to work for (and with). It’s the kind of people I want to bet my own business on.
Hey, Mena, remember eBay? They had similarly horrible days and went on to build a great business. Please do keep bringing us inside your company and letting us know how things are going.
