Wed, February 24, 2010 at 12:14 PM About as Bladerunner-esque as I can imagine, a field of LED's hovering above a city depicting any image one could imagine in 3D. Technical hurdles to be overcome for sure but it'll happen and probably in the not too distant future. Read more at http://senseable.mit.edu/flyfire/
Thu, December 17, 2009 at 9:40 AM Wed, August 19, 2009 at 1:20 AM 
photographs courtesy Philip Greenspun
Barnes and Noble, the physical book store chain, is the master of the Just-Enough competitive response. Back in the dotcom years, when Amazon exploded into the scene and threatened to take over the book retail business, B&N put together its first online web site to stem customer defection to Amazon. Since then, it has done a decent but unspectacular job online, certainly has not done much to steal online market share back from Amazon. They have done an just-ok job at linking their online and brick/mortar stores, such as making the $25/year membership program good at both bn.com as well as the stores, and putting a few kiosks in the store for users to search for books on bn.com. Hardly innovative nor aggressive. If they really want to put pressure on Amazon, they'd sharpen their discount online, do a much better job of shipping book orders to the brick+mortar stores for pickup, etc. As it stands, B&N can offer "fast delivery" which means that they'll get the book into UPS's hand within 3 days of your online order. Well, 3 business days to be exact. This is the best they can do after a decade of competing against Amazon, who can ship the book out often within 24 hours, and with the $79 Amazon Prime program, can get the book in my hands within 2 days, from hitting submit button to my door steps, and often at a lower cost vs. B&N.
It just seem that B&N's strategy is to do just enough so that they can maintain leadership in the the physical bookstore business, while the world gradually and surely moves towards more online book purchases.
So it's not surprising that B&N seems to be following this same tactic when Amazon announced the Kindle. Hardly a runaway success yet, the Kindle nonetheless poses a strategic challenge to the physical, carbon-based printed book, and by extension remove the necessity of a physical book store.
B&N's tepid response is to offer a me-too version of the ebook reader, by joining into a strategic partnership with Plastic Logic to sell an ebook device, oene which won't hit the stores until 2010. In the meantime, it's offering software ebook readers for the iPhone, PC, and Mac, to go along with its nascent ebook store, which it was able to offered via an acquisition of Fictionwise earlier in 2009. It's enough to placate shareholders and offer something to go up against arch rival Amazon, but it feels like that it is again caught in reaction mode.
I wonder whether B&N just wants to milk its existing position for as long as possible, losing as few customers to Amazon as possible. Or is it that the management needs to have a big shakeup, and put in place folks with a little bit of the vision for the future?
The whole situation reminds me alot about the newspaper industry back a few years. They know the end was coming, and fast. And yet the complacency and/or the incompetency was so great, that they just did as little as possible to adjust to the rapidly changing trajectory.
Wed, August 19, 2009 at 12:38 AM 
Bing Shopping, previously known as Live Search Shopping, and before that MSN Shopping, had launched a cash back rebate program back in mid-2008, and yet very few people heard about it. The terms are pretty generous: you searched for the product via bing/live/msn shopping, and if you purchased the goods you get a percentage back of the purchase price.
What was surprising to me was how little known it was. Here you have one of the Big 3 search engines offering consumers 4-7% back for Buy.com purchases, as well as a whole slew of other stores like Overstock, Barnes and Nobles, Newegg, Walmart; not small potatoes on the eCommerce space. And as long as you click thru Bing to get to these retailers, you get the rebate back after a little bit of work. But it seems like nobody has ever heard of it; and that included me, living in the shadow of Redmond, with all the friends in the world working in Microsoft. Two weeks ago I haven't heard a peep about it, and I consider myself a shrewd bargain hunter.
And up until recently, that was a microcosm of what MSN/Live Search was all about. They couldn't get people to pay attention to them even when they were doing things right, or even when they were throwing money at you. They could have had the most amazing search technology in the universe and it wouldn't have moved the needle in search market share. I think Bing's marketing campaign and a rash of good press coverage have changed that, a little.
But back to the rebate cash-back program. This is not a new offering in the web. Shopping site Fatwallet has ran a cash back program for years. And if you look closely at the list of stores, you'll find alot of similarities between the participating stores on Fatwallet's list, and the Bing Shopping list. But Fatwallet is a bit of a niche site, for those bargain hunters who really go to alot of trouble to save a bit of money. Bing search takes the concept to a whole new level of accessibility.
I believe Fatwallet, an independent site without major financial backing, is able to offer the discount because these retailers offer to kick back some commission back to Fatwallet for driving traffic to their site. Add on the loss rate for users who don't bother claiming the cash back later on, Fatwallet was able to make a decent profit on the scheme. For example, if you go thru Fatwallet to Buy.com, you can collect upto 2.66% of rebate.
But that's meager compare to Bing's 4-7% rebate for Buy.com(which doesn't even count the ongoing "double days" promotion, where the rebate is doubled to 8-14%). It could very well be that the Bing folks are able to drive a harder bargain with Buy.com than Fatwallet was able to, or that Bing were able to throw in search advertising and other goodies to sweeten the deal to Buy.com, but I wouldn't at all be surprised that Microsoft is throwing money into the program out of their own pocket.
And it makes sense as an investment for Bing: Shopping is one of the key scenario for search engines, and if this cash back program can generate new user interest in using Bing rather than Google, or even better yet, get them to stick with Bing for the long haul, Ballmer would be happy to pay for the program within reason.
How long this last is anyone's guess though. Google Checkout had done something similar when they launched, running a promotion during the 2006 holiday season, where you get $20 off any $50 purchase. It generated a bit of buzz, and certainly enticed a good amount of folks to setup Google Checkout account, but I don't know that it fundamentally changed their competitive position vis-a-vis PayPal.
My take is that Bing's cash back program will help, but throwing money at users won't fundamentally alter the challenge that is facing Bing. And at some point, Ballmer is going to have to answer to shareholders about the cost of this program, and whether it is effective as a customer acquisition tool.
Tue, August 18, 2009 at 7:14 PM 
Whilst I was at Microsoft Live Labs I pitched a concept to create a badge that could be posted to your facebook, myspace page or blog that would constantly monitor your activity on your machine as well as across blogs, facebook, twitter, and other social services and provide a 'badge' for want of a better word that would give someone a view of who you are and how you spend your time online and with your computer. The pitch failed to get resourced but as always there's no such thing as an original idea and Aaron Zinman of the MIT Media Lab has put together a similar concept named 'Personnas' using sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. While lacking in some of the functionality I envisioned, (namely the local activity and allowing you to drill into the original data so you can see how it arrived at its conclusions and posting it to your facebook page, it's in the right ballpark.
Unfortunately in my case above the summary is a little confusing as there are a few sporting stars with the same name as I, and apparantly a criminal mastermind (unless the application has been monitoring my speeding) as I'm apparently a wee bit 'illegal'. Regardless it's a fun applicaiton to stick your name into and see what it spits out the other end. Wouldn't surprise me if it went viral as *everyone* has the vanity gene and googles themselves every now and again. An interesting and visually pleasing collation and analysis of your activity (and those with the same name) have been up to.
Check out your own Personna at http://personas.media.mit.edu/
Tue, August 18, 2009 at 4:02 PM 
If telling your friends about a cool new website or showing Mum how to get her wi-fi working is a little hard to achieve via mail or a blog you might want to consider screenr. At it's heart, screenr allows you to record up to 5 minutes of whatever is on your desktop without the hassle of installing another application and then spending time uploading it to a service and sharing the link.
screenr couldn't be easier. You hit the record button, a java applet loads in your browser and you simply drag the window to the size of the screen that you want to record. Hit record and whatever is shown in the viewfinder is captured, uploaded to the screenr servers and available for you to tweet or share as you please.
You can record any size you want up to 2560x1600 on a PC and 1920x1200 on a Mac and all screencasts are public requiring a twitter account to post.
Classic case of taking a task that many people perform on a daily basis and removing the friction to make it as simple as possible.
Viewing the public stream of screencasts reveals some really interesting new sites I hadn't heard of before and the small snippet format is perfect to get a taste of a new service. We'll be experimenting with this service in the future to show you folks fun stuff we find around the web on our travels.
Tue, August 18, 2009 at 3:12 PM Sweb Apps How To Video from magaly Chocano on Vimeo.
Swebapps fills a smart niche in the mobile app arena that we've seen previously in the early days of the web. While building a mobile application for the iPhone, Android or Windows Mobile platforms is relatively straightforward it requires specialist skills from a developer to build and is often a costly proposition.
Swebapps has cleverly targetted the small business niche who may not have the capital or know how to create an application for their customers. In much the same way Geocities made it simple for any individual or business to create an online storefront back in the 90's, Swebapps provides some simple but powerful functionality that can get a business up and running in the iPhone App Store in about 4 weeks for a few hundred dollars.
You design and submit your application using their online interface. First select your industry or type of business. Then select the buttons you would like your app to have such as 'Product Catalog', 'Directions', 'Events', 'Follow on Twitter', etc. Essentially common features that one would expect for any small business. Pricing is based upon the number of features or buttons you choose and Swebapps charges a $25 monthly hosting fee as well as upsell services for tracking downloads.
The functionality of the buttons is relatively simple but for many folks this will be all they need. There are limited customization options such as changing color schemes and uploading custom images for buttons and logos but you essentially operate within their framework.
All in all, it's a pretty good value for a business to get into the mobile space. Possibly starting here and expanding into a more custom application over time. In future iterations it would be great to see some more complex functionality implemented or opening it up to 3rd parties to build buttons and share in the revenue. But I think these folks are onto a good thing and will be interesting to see if they can market to the small business market and build traction.
Tue, August 18, 2009 at 2:30 PM 
First thing first: I absolutely hate the animated Booyah character. It reminds me of everything terrible about Clippy, the animated Office Assistant.
But that aside, the Booyah Society is an interesting experiment. Booyah is basically a life stream iPhone application that allows you to post twitter-like notes to your friends. For example, you may booyah "A great lunch at Belly Deli" or "Scored some major swag at the Labor Day Sale!" to celebrate small victories of life, and share it with your fellow Booyah users. These booyahs are classified into categories, such as Food/Dining, Travel, Fitness, Entertainment, Shopping, Work/School, Social, etc. Booyah encourages users to send these life stream notes by handing out Achievements, which are basically just icons of recognition, and attempt to put life streams into a gaming context where you earn kudos for your booyahs. I think it is an interesting idea, but I feel the way it's currently implemented is a bit superficial. Earning badges are not great rewards in and of itself; I don't think it'll do much to change user behavior. But the idea that life is a game has tremendous development potential, and Booyah should further develop the idea.
The second interesting aspect of Booyah is their recommendation engine for local events, and Booyah alert you to their availability. Today, for example, Booyah told me about a museum event at the Experience Music Project as well as an iPhoto/iMovie workshop at the local Apple store. The serendipitous nature of these alerts are interesting, particularly for events with a niche appeal and lower general awareness. I'm not entirely clear how Booyah finds and aggregates these events, nor is it clear why they chose these events for me; however, I think if they can build a good recommendation engine and tailor such alerts based on the types of events that users booyah about, it'd be a very interesting innovation in turning the life streaming on its head, and build commercial advertising opportunities for the life streams.
My biggest issue with Booyah is that it's yet another life stream service, and at least for me it's not worth adopting. I already tweet, I already sync my tweets to Facebook, and I just don't see myself adopting Booyah in my daily routine. If Booyah's experiments succeed, FB and Twitter will just adopt the Booyah model and squish it out of the market. For Booyah's and their investors' sake, I hope they have some defensive strategy, such as IP protection, against the bigger services intruding into their turf, or at least is able to go viral and build themselves a sizable user base, all before the competitors show up and muscle them out.
I think a far more likely scenario is that Booyah's experiments will proved to be ahead of its time, and will not find much user traction and will go gently into the good night. Twitter and Facebook is going to come back and visit this model in a couple of years and will probably find a much more receptive audience, vindicating the vision but alas too late for Booyah.
This is the kind of stories that has played out a thousand times in the tech industry, where innovation is still worshipped and respected. The road to true market success is often paved with dead bodies of early innovators, and I can't help but think that this may well be the fate awaiting Booyah.