In this article I will be discussing the concepts and true meanings of advertising and marketing. In understanding these concepts we will have a better understanding of what these words mean and how to better put them to use.
When you think of the words advertising and marketing you usually come to the conclusion that they are the same things. This is a mistake that many entrepreneurs fall into which is why many business owners fall into a pit of watching advertising dollars skyrocket with limited return. Before I get into depth of which method is better, we must first analyze what each one means individually.
Advertising basically means to make something generally and publicly known. Regardless of what you do, you must make your product or service known in order to be utilized by consumers. Without having your product brought to the attention of the public, people will not be able to know that you even exist. Without the knowledge of existence the consumer will have no information to obtain your services.
Marketing on the other hand means to expose for sale in a market. The word marketing itself brings about a much stronger sales term then just advertising. Marketing emphasizes the sale of a product or service within a marketplace. Instead of just making your services publicly known, you are directing your services for sale through a consumer marketplace.
Many businesses owners fall short because they put these two words in the same category. These two words have different meanings which undoubtedly will bring about different results. When you are advertising you are just trying to make your product known. When you are marketing you are distributing your services for sale to a marketplace.
I will not say as marketers or as advertisers. I will say as sales people. The reason why I say as salespeople is because regardless of what type of business you are in, whether it is products, services or a combination of both, you are a sales person. Many people dislike the view of being a salesperson, but even if you are not the individual doing door to door sales, your are still a sales person. When you interact with your customers you are selling yourself with customer service and care. When you run an ad campaign, you are using your ads to be the sales person to attract new prospects to you. In everything we do, even to obtain employment, we are selling ourselves.
With growing competition within every industry, it is impossible to not flourish within any chosen industry without sales. Your sales may not be direct pitches, but that still does not mean that you are not constantly selling yourself. The key to generating sales is by combining advertising and marketing together. We understand the definitions of what sales and marketing mean, now let us combine these words to see what the end result would be.
When combining the words sales and marketing together, we have the result of to make something publicly and generally known to expose for sale in a market. This meaning alone has a much more powerful meaning then just advertising and marketing individually. With this result, marketing and advertising working hand in hand with one another will not only publicize your business but also have a better opportunity of obtaining new clientèle.
When seeing the true meanings of the words advertising and marketing we can form a different opinion of what they really mean. As we explore these meanings we can clearly see their different objectives. When bringing these words together and seeing how they not only can work together to reach our sales goals, but stand stronger together then alone, we can see the true potential and power of these concepts. Now that we can understand the power behind these concepts we have to put these concepts to work for us.
I hope you enjoyed this article and it helped you understand the true concepts of marketing and advertising. Look for my next upcoming article which will display detailed information to further improve your marketing and advertising campaigns.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Ninetendo gives Sony a run for its money !
Ninetendo says 600,000 units of its new Wii video game console were sold in the eight days after its release in the Americas. Wii-related merchandise, including accessories and games, has garnered 190 million U.S. dollars since the Nov. 19 launch.
You can grab a Wii from here
The Wii machine costs 250 dollars, about half the price of Sony's PlayStation 3's least expensive version. PS3 went on sale in the United States two days before Ninetendo offered Wii.
Many fans of both systems congregated at retailers hours up to five days in advance of the launches to guarantee they were among the first to claim ownership of the highly anticipated machines.
"We've shipped retailers several times the amount of hardware the other company was able to deliver for its launch around the same time -- and we still sold out," Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said in a statement.
The consoles are also being offered on Internet auction sites such as eBay for several times their retail price tag.
Sony has not revealed how many PlayStation 3 consoles it has sold in North America so far, but has said it aims to ship one million units by the end of the year.
Microsoft has shipped more than six million of its Xbox 360s since launching it in November 2005.
You can grab a Wii from here
Monday, November 27, 2006
Google defends against copyright case
Google defends against Belgian newspaper copyright case by launching spirited defense of caching, summarizing and fair use.
Google Inc. launched a robust defense of its practice of caching and summarizing newspaper articles on its news search engine Google News in a Brussels courtroom on Friday.
The world's most popular search engine had been accused of copyright infringement by a group of French-language Belgian newspapers.
Lawyers for Copiepresse, the association representing the newspapers, said Google was giving away archived articles that the newspapers charge readers for, and was therefore undermining the papers' business model.
Google currently faces copyright lawsuits on a number of fronts. Agence France Presse has sued the company for indexing and republishing AFP news stories taken from the Web sites of its customers. Some authors and publishers in France and the U.S. are suing it over its Google Book Search tool, which displays whole pages from books in the public domain, and excerpts from books still under copyright. And a French film production company has sued the company for distributing a film through its Google Video service.
At issue in the Belgian case is the way Google's news search sites present headlines and excerpts of news stories taken from other Web sites, grouping together stories that Google's software determines are about the same event.
The hearing finished by early afternoon. The judge said she would give her verdict early in the new year.
(Read complete story at Computerworld )
Google Inc. launched a robust defense of its practice of caching and summarizing newspaper articles on its news search engine Google News in a Brussels courtroom on Friday.
The world's most popular search engine had been accused of copyright infringement by a group of French-language Belgian newspapers.
Lawyers for Copiepresse, the association representing the newspapers, said Google was giving away archived articles that the newspapers charge readers for, and was therefore undermining the papers' business model.
Google currently faces copyright lawsuits on a number of fronts. Agence France Presse has sued the company for indexing and republishing AFP news stories taken from the Web sites of its customers. Some authors and publishers in France and the U.S. are suing it over its Google Book Search tool, which displays whole pages from books in the public domain, and excerpts from books still under copyright. And a French film production company has sued the company for distributing a film through its Google Video service.
At issue in the Belgian case is the way Google's news search sites present headlines and excerpts of news stories taken from other Web sites, grouping together stories that Google's software determines are about the same event.
The hearing finished by early afternoon. The judge said she would give her verdict early in the new year.
(Read complete story at Computerworld )
Friday, November 24, 2006
Sony recalls digital cameras
Sony has recalled digital cameras because of sensor glitch, this is another event showing inefficiency on Sony's part after the dell battery recall. I think Sony's brand image is not only detiorating and also falling below a minimum standard. If this continues then it wont be long when companies like LG and Samsung overtake Sony and its brand.
News from Forbes ....
Sony Corp will recall eight models of its Cyber-shot digital cameras because of a defect, the company said. Sony said users might have problems viewing images when trying to take photographs due to a glitch with the image sensor. It declined to say how many digital cameras would be affected by the recall.
The affected cameras -- DSC-F88, DSC-M1, DSC-T1, DSC-T11, DSC-T3, DSC-T33, DSC-U40 and DSC-U50 models -- were sold at home and overseas between September 2003 and January 2005, Sony said.
'In high-temperature and humid circumstances, the digital cameras may fail to show an image through the viewer,' a company spokeswoman said. She said the company would exchange defective parts free of charge.
Monday, November 20, 2006
The race to create a 'smart' Google
Everything you buy online says a little bit about you. And if all those bits get put into one big trove of data about you and your tastes? Marketer's heaven.
The setup:-
"If a girl says she likes 'The Big Lebowski,' instantly, I think 'stoner.' " That's Matthew Kuhlke speaking. We're sitting at a table full of grilled meat and jug sodas on a late-summer weeknight in midtown Atlanta. "She hangs out with a bunch of guys. She dates them a little bit, but she really just likes the attention."
Also at the table: Kuhlke's business partner, Adam Geitgey. Kuhlke and Geitgey grew up in nearby Augusta and finish each other's thoughts the way lifelong friends often do. The pair of unattached, hormonal twentysomethings also have a knack for turning conversations toward dating. "If all a girl likes are romantic comedies," Geitgey adds, "I'd be worried that she's going to be co-dependent, emotionally needy."
I've invited Kuhlke and Geitgey to the restaurant of their choosing to talk about movies and personality. They opted for the Vortex, a bar and grill with a skull for a logo and a rash of thrift-store salvage covering every last bit of wall space. Chairs dangle from the ceiling; a skeleton sits atop a motorcycle near an aluminum camel. As the wait staff buzzes around in hipster flair - piercings, tattoos, dog collars - the former Georgia Tech roommates explain the underlying premise of their company, What to Rent.
The site administers a personality test to visitors and recommends DVDs based on the findings. To demonstrate the connection between movies and personality, the budding entrepreneurs have been describing prototypical fans of everything from "Raging Bull" to "Finding Nemo." Now they'll attempt something more difficult: They'll each pick someone in the restaurant and, without ever talking to them, divine their single favorite movie.
Once they make their picks, my plan is to corner the unsuspecting strangers and see how perceptive these film nerds really are.
Recommender systems like Whattorent.com are sprouting on the Web like mushrooms after a hard rain. Dozens of companies have unveiled recommenders recently to introduce consumers to Web sites, TV shows, other people - whatever they can think of.
The idea isn't new, of course. In a time of impersonal big-box stores and self-checkout stations, independent shopkeepers compete by doing this sort of thing every day.
What does the fact that you drive a Prius and buy organic baby food say about you? At the farmer's market, it says, "Grass-fed ribeye, heirloom tomatoes and line-caught salmon." In the local appliance store, you're looking for a low-energy, front-loading washer with matching dryer. For those shopkeepers, it's more than a parlor trick. It's good business.
We don't just buy products, we bond with them. We have relationships with our things. DVD collections, iTunes playlists, cars, cell phones: Each is an extension of who we are (or want to be). We put ourselves on display through our purchases, wearing our personalities on our sleeves, literally and figuratively, for the world to see.
And if you don't subscribe to this sort of materialism - if you don't define yourself by the clothes on your back or the neighborhood you live in - well, that's just another brand of expression.
In the real world, we use apparent information, coupled with context, experience and stereotypes, to size each other up. This sort of intuition is useful and often accurate, but it's also fallible.
Online, the picture becomes clearer. Consumers now routinely rank experiences on the Web - four stars on IMDb for "The Departed," three stars on Epinions for a Roomba vacuum, a positive eBay rating, a Flickr tag. Each time you leave such a mark, you help the rest of us make sense of all the look-alike, sound-alike stuff on the Web.
You also leave a trail. For the company that can decipher all that information, the opportunity is staggering. That company will know you better than the shopkeeper knows you, better than the credit bureau or, arguably, even your spouse. It will pinpoint your tastes and determine the likelihood that you'll buy any given product. In effect, it will have constructed the algorithm that is you.
New kids in town
There's a sense among the players in the recommendation business - from newcomers like MyStrands and StumbleUpon to titans like Yahoo (Charts) and Sun (Charts) - that now is the time to perfect such an algorithm.
The Web, they say, is leaving the era of search and entering one of discovery. What's the difference? Search is what you do when you're looking for something. Discovery is when something wonderful that you didn't know existed, or didn't know how to ask for, finds you. When it comes to search, there's a clear winner - a $145 billion company called Google (Charts).
But there is no go-to discovery engine - yet. Building a personalized discovery mechanism will mean tapping into all the manners of expression, categorization, and opinions that exist on the Web today. It's no easy feat, but if a company can pull it off and make the formula portable so it works on your mobile phone - well, such a tool could change not just marketing, but all of commerce.
"The effect of recommender systems will be one of the most important changes in the next decade," says University of Minnesota computer science professor John Riedl, who built one of the first recommendation engines in the mid-1990s. "The social web is going to be driven by these systems."
Amazon (Charts) realized early on how powerful a recommender system could be and to this day remains the prime example. The company uses a series of collaborative filtering algorithms to compare your purchasing patterns with everyone else's and thus narrow a vast inventory to just the stuff it predicts you'll buy.
"Personalized recommendations," says Brent Smith, Amazon's director of personalization, "are at the heart of why online shopping offers so much promise." So far, the company has struggled to deliver on that promise. Its system favors popular, obvious items and tends to come off less like a trusted shopkeeper than a pushy salesman: If you liked the novel "The Corrections," you'll see suggestions to buy "The Discomfort Zone" and everything else Jonathan Franzen has written. If you bought a gift for a baby shower, you're bound to get a stream of recommendations for cheap plastic toys and birthing blankets.
The new generation of recommenders will do better. Some employ filters that factor in more variables. Others analyze the contents of what they're recommending to grasp why you like something. A third category, hybrid recommenders, combines both strategies.
To tap into some of the brainpower gathering in the recommender space, Netflix (Charts) recently established the Netflix Prize, offering a $1 million bounty to anyone who can improve by 10 percent the efficacy of the company's recommender system.
A few days before the contest was officially announced, VP of recommendation systems Jim Bennett expressed doubt about whether anyone would reach the goal ahead of the ten-year deadline, but said it'd be well worth the $1 million if someone did. Five weeks later, 37 registrants had already posted improvements to the Netflix system. Two contestants were just short of halfway to the goal.
The magician's secrets
Back at the Vortex, Kuhlke and Geitgey discuss how their parlor trick works. They'll draw on their knowledge of cinema and their experience categorizing hundreds of films - by star power, plot complexity, etc. - at What to Rent. "When you watch a movie, you interact with it like you're interacting with another person," Kuhlke says. "You're forming a relationship."
Geitgey goes first. He scans the crowd and homes in on a target, a guy delivering meals and clearing dishes.
On their site, Kuhlke and Geitgey use a series of odd questions to determine a user's personality. "How much money would it take for you to wear a neon-green fanny pack for the rest of your life?" Or: "What do you like better, reading a book or watching TV?" Here, it's all about observation. This is what Geitgey sees: tattered jeans, a steel bracelet, a few tattoos. The target may be gathering dishes but seems too authoritative to be a busboy. He appears to be in his late 20s and is working, Geitgey surmises, "in a youth-trendy restaurant in the part of the city where people that age who don't have real jobs hang out."
Geitgey makes a few leaps. "Those are the kind of guys who barely made it through high school because they couldn't focus, but spend most of their time reading light philosophy books by singers-turned-writers like Nick Cave," he says, insisting that the target is trying to square budding intellectualism with his physical image.
So. Which movie? "He would be interested in things that have an underlying philosophy but are also physically intense," Geitgey concludes. " 'Starship Troopers' fits that exactly - a bit of mild antiestablishment philosophy with some bad-ass bug-killing."
Musical taste
In a few short years, Pandora has become the most efficient new-music discovery mechanism in history. That's not saying much, really. Consider the alternatives: scouring magazines for reviews, flipping through albums in the record store, listening to radio stations all play the same songs.
At Pandora.com, you type in the name of a band or song and immediately begin hearing similar tunes that the site's recommender system - a.k.a. the Music Genome Project - has determined you'll enjoy. By rating songs and artists, you can refine the suggestions, allowing Pandora to create a truly personalized station.
Unlike collaborative filtering engines, Pandora understands each song in its database. Forty-five analysts, many with music degrees, rank 15,000 songs a month on 400 characteristics to gain a detailed grasp of each.
A former musician and film composer, founder Tim Westergren came up with the idea for Pandora while scoring movies for directors. "They weren't musicians, so no one was saying, 'I like minor harmonies and woodwinds,' " he says, leaning back in his chair at Pandora's Oakland headquarters. "So it was my job to figure out their musical taste. I developed a genome in my head, and would say, 'Okay, you like this song; do you like this one?' "
Four million people now use Pandora the same way those directors used Westergren. Let's say I type in Bloc Party, a pop/punk band that's part Franz Ferdinand, part Sonic Youth. The next tune I hear might be from We Are Scientists, a Brooklyn indie band with, Pandora determines, similar "electric-rock instrumentation, subtle use of vocal harmony, and minor-key tonality."
Next I get a catchy song from a pop-punk/emo band called Fire When Ready, which stands at No. 225,301 on Amazon's music sales list. It's safe to say that few consumers are searching for this band. But on Pandora, it's only a few degrees of separation from Bloc Party.
To draw a line from Bloc Party to Fire When Ready, the Music Genome Project combs through hundreds of thousands of songs and millions of pieces of user feedback. It's an impressive technological accomplishment but not nearly as impressive as the implications.
If Pandora can nail me as a fan of a band that few people have ever heard of, and my musical tastes are an intimate expression of who I am, then Pandora could introduce me to a lot more than music. Take it from Jason Rentfrow. "If you know I like Ahmad Jamal," Rentfrow says, referring to the 64-year-old jazz musician who played piano for Miles Davis, "that'll stimulate other information that you can infer about me."
The perfect holiday shopping guide(ster)
So Rentfrow likes sophisticated jazz. What sort of picture does that paint? If you think he's intelligent, articulate, a bit geeky and soft-spoken and wears glasses, well, you'd be relying on stereotypes. And you'd be right.
Of course no person is one-dimensional. Rentfrow also likes the rap group A Tribe Called Quest. With that information, you would probably redraw his caricature. Now maybe he seems younger and more open-minded. Revealing a list of his 50 favorite artists would flesh him out even more.
Rentfrow is a 30-year-old psychology professor at the University of Cambridge (Britain). To study the links between musical taste and personality, he and University of Texas psychology professor Sam Gosling administered personality tests to 74 students and instructed each to submit a list of ten favorite songs, which were then played for another set of volunteers.
After listening to the songs, the second group ranked each person on 28 characteristics. Rentfrow then compared those results with the earlier personality tests. Music turned out to be a poor predictor of emotional stability, courage and ambition, but accurate on extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, imagination and even intellect.
An ongoing study conducted by Rentfrow at www.outofservice.com, where 90,000 people have taken a music/personality quiz, pushes the point even further, tying taste to political leanings, demographics, lifestyle, favorite authors - movies even.
As recently as a decade ago, when musical preference was the province of a stack of CDs in the living room, such research may have been a dead end. But music recommenders can now draw lines from musical tastes to all sorts of things. Rentfrow and Gosling explored the connection between music and personality out of scientific curiosity. But the connection could have broad applications in business. Goodbye, context-based advertising. Hello, personality-based advertising.
Educated guesses
Geitgey's made his choice: "Starship Troopers." Now it's Kuhlke's turn. He's spotted a waitress. She's in her late teens or early 20s, black hair in a bob, very cute. She looks at the floor as she walks and avoids eye contact with customers. "She's unhappy," Kuhlke surmises. "She's working around all these jerks who just want to have sex with her."
Geitgey chimes in, suggesting she wasn't popular in high school and is shaking off her past by working in a cool place. Kuhlke cuts him off. "This place is the Applebee's of cool!" he insists. "If it was really cool, it wouldn't be a chain and there wouldn't be a paid parking lot across the street."
So what? "So she'd pick the wrong movie," he continues. "She'd like an old-school romantic comedy, but she'd pick 'Breakfast at Tiffany's,' a totally crappy movie. She's cool enough to know she should pick Audrey Hepburn, but not cool enough to pick the right movie, 'Roman Holiday.' "
The waitress is obviously attractive, maybe the prettiest woman in the restaurant. And she does seem bothered by - or at least indifferent to - her surroundings. But that hardly makes her prone to ill-informed choices. Kuhlke reconsiders. Maybe she would like 'Roman Holiday.' He clearly wants her to say 'Roman Holiday.' Flustered, he jumps off the romantic comedy train altogether.
She's disaffected, he insists, throwing his arms in the air. "Girl, Interrupted."
Big brother online
Just back from a visit to his childhood home in Kiev, Max Levchin is in his South of Market office holding up a propaganda handbill that he picked up in Moscow. He wants to mount it on a wall at his new startup, Slide. The poster features a railroad worker staring out from a caboose and a headline that Levchin translates aloud. "Literally, it says 'Night - not a hindrance to work!' " he says, mocking a sinister laugh, "though the implication is clearly, 'Keep working, bitches!' "
Levchin's team doesn't really need the reminder. The 31-year-old CEO drinks eight espressos a day and possesses a work ethic that's famous around Silicon Valley. He often arrives in the office by six and is still there 12 or even 18 hours later. After co-founding the online payment service PayPal in 1998, he battled fraudsters before taking the company public in 2002 and selling it several months later to eBay (Charts) for $1.5 billion. "The crux of PayPal is a risk-management company," he explains. "We perfected the ability to say, 'The odds of you stealing money are X.' "
Levchin cross-referenced traffic patterns, auction histories, user interactions, geography and a thousand other factors to root out fraud. "I would obsess on multivariate analysis. I'd have printouts and printouts graphing the relationship between any two variables," he says. "For a long time we didn't even patent this stuff because it was so secret."
These days, Levchin has the typical angst of a second-time entrepreneur. He's obsessed with proving that his first success wasn't a fluke, and he wants to exploit the biggest opportunity he can find. He's using what he learned at PayPal, not to root out fraud but to create the best recommender system he can imagine, one that will cover the entire Web, pulling content of all kinds - music, movies, gadgets, blogs, news stories, cars, one-night stands, you name it - filtering it according to individual preference and delivering it to the desktop.
Instead of quantifying the odds of your stealing money, he's building a "machine that knows more about you than you know about yourself."
If Slide is at all familiar, it's as a knockoff of Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Users upload photos, which are displayed on a running ticker or Slide Show, and subscribe to one another's feeds. But photos are just a way to get Slide users communicating, establishing relationships, Levchin explains.
The site is beginning to introduce new content into Slide Shows. It culls news feeds from around the Web and gathers real-time information from, say, eBay auctions or Match.com profiles. It drops all of this information onto user desktops and then watches to see how they react.
Suppose, for example, there's a user named YankeeDave who sees a Treo 750 scroll by in his Slide Show. He gives it a thumbs-up and forwards it to his buddy" we'll call him Smooth-P. Slide learns from this that both YankeeDave and Smooth-P have an interest in a smartphone and begins delivering competing prices. If YankeeDave buys the item, Slide displays headlines on Treo tips or photos of a leather case. If Smooth-P gives a thumbs-down, Slide gains another valuable piece of data. (Maybe Smooth-P is a BlackBerry guy.) Slide has also established a relationship between YankeeDave and Smooth-P and can begin comparing their ratings, traffic patterns, clicks and networks.
Based on all that information, Slide gains an understanding of people who share a taste for Treos, TAG Heuer watches and BMWs. Next, those users might see a Dyson vacuum, a pair of Forzieri wingtips or a single woman with a six-figure income living within a ten-mile radius. In fact, that's where Levchin thinks the first real opportunity lies - hooking up users with like-minded people. "I started out with this idea of finding shoes for my girlfriend and hotties on HotorNot for me," Levchin says with a wry smile. "It's easy to shift from recommending shoes to humans."
If this all sounds vaguely creepy, Levchin is careful to say he's rolling out features slowly and will only go as far as his users will allow. But he sees what many others claim to see: Most consumers seem perfectly willing to trade preference data for insight. "What's fueling this is the desire for self-expression," he says.
As Levchin and his charges set out to build a new type of search engine - a new Google - one question becomes obvious: Where's the old Google? VP of engineering Udi Manber refuses to comment on whether there's a recommender system in the pipeline. But it's a safe bet something is coming.
Google's director of research, Peter Norvig, is an advisor to CleverSet, a recommender company in Seattle. Steve Johnson, CEO of Boston-based recommender system ChoiceStream, which provides the collaborative filtering engine behind AOL.com, Blockbuster.com, iTunes and Directv.com, says he's been talking to Google about building a system for YouTube.
"Google needs to go to a preference-based search paradigm, and I believe they're moving in this direction," Johnson says.
Payoff
Kuhlke and Geitgey never had Google-sized ambitions for Whattorent.com. The co-founders, who recently took day jobs as software engineers on opposite ends of the country, didn't expect their site to be a huge moneymaker. They were a couple of undergrads trying to save their pals from the movie geek's ultimate nightmare scenario - walking around Blockbuster with no idea what to rent. They accomplished that much. But they may have also helped pave the way for a whole new way for marketers to get inside your head.
We've paid the bill at Vortex, and it's the moment of truth. We approach the guy with tattoos, who, as it turns out, is the restaurant manager. We tell him what we've been up to and ask him to tell us his favorite movie without thinking.
"Brianna Loves Jenna," he says with half a smile and a lift of the eyebrows. Everyone laughs. New rule: no porn. Then the guy crosses his arms, pauses for a moment, and exclaims, "Starship Troopers!"
High-fives all around. Geitgey nailed it.
Now the waitress. We haven't seen her talk to anyone since we walked in. Kuhlke and Geitgey hang back as I approach her. For the first time all night, the woman who will be remembered as "Audrey" lifts her cheeks to reveal a smile that comes both from a set full of wonderful white teeth and a pair of impossibly green eyes.
"Roman Holiday,"
(Article from CNNMoney.com By Jeffrey M. O'Brien, Fortune writer)
The setup:-
"If a girl says she likes 'The Big Lebowski,' instantly, I think 'stoner.' " That's Matthew Kuhlke speaking. We're sitting at a table full of grilled meat and jug sodas on a late-summer weeknight in midtown Atlanta. "She hangs out with a bunch of guys. She dates them a little bit, but she really just likes the attention."
Also at the table: Kuhlke's business partner, Adam Geitgey. Kuhlke and Geitgey grew up in nearby Augusta and finish each other's thoughts the way lifelong friends often do. The pair of unattached, hormonal twentysomethings also have a knack for turning conversations toward dating. "If all a girl likes are romantic comedies," Geitgey adds, "I'd be worried that she's going to be co-dependent, emotionally needy."
I've invited Kuhlke and Geitgey to the restaurant of their choosing to talk about movies and personality. They opted for the Vortex, a bar and grill with a skull for a logo and a rash of thrift-store salvage covering every last bit of wall space. Chairs dangle from the ceiling; a skeleton sits atop a motorcycle near an aluminum camel. As the wait staff buzzes around in hipster flair - piercings, tattoos, dog collars - the former Georgia Tech roommates explain the underlying premise of their company, What to Rent.
The site administers a personality test to visitors and recommends DVDs based on the findings. To demonstrate the connection between movies and personality, the budding entrepreneurs have been describing prototypical fans of everything from "Raging Bull" to "Finding Nemo." Now they'll attempt something more difficult: They'll each pick someone in the restaurant and, without ever talking to them, divine their single favorite movie.
Once they make their picks, my plan is to corner the unsuspecting strangers and see how perceptive these film nerds really are.
Recommender systems like Whattorent.com are sprouting on the Web like mushrooms after a hard rain. Dozens of companies have unveiled recommenders recently to introduce consumers to Web sites, TV shows, other people - whatever they can think of.
The idea isn't new, of course. In a time of impersonal big-box stores and self-checkout stations, independent shopkeepers compete by doing this sort of thing every day.
What does the fact that you drive a Prius and buy organic baby food say about you? At the farmer's market, it says, "Grass-fed ribeye, heirloom tomatoes and line-caught salmon." In the local appliance store, you're looking for a low-energy, front-loading washer with matching dryer. For those shopkeepers, it's more than a parlor trick. It's good business.
We don't just buy products, we bond with them. We have relationships with our things. DVD collections, iTunes playlists, cars, cell phones: Each is an extension of who we are (or want to be). We put ourselves on display through our purchases, wearing our personalities on our sleeves, literally and figuratively, for the world to see.
And if you don't subscribe to this sort of materialism - if you don't define yourself by the clothes on your back or the neighborhood you live in - well, that's just another brand of expression.
In the real world, we use apparent information, coupled with context, experience and stereotypes, to size each other up. This sort of intuition is useful and often accurate, but it's also fallible.
Online, the picture becomes clearer. Consumers now routinely rank experiences on the Web - four stars on IMDb for "The Departed," three stars on Epinions for a Roomba vacuum, a positive eBay rating, a Flickr tag. Each time you leave such a mark, you help the rest of us make sense of all the look-alike, sound-alike stuff on the Web.
You also leave a trail. For the company that can decipher all that information, the opportunity is staggering. That company will know you better than the shopkeeper knows you, better than the credit bureau or, arguably, even your spouse. It will pinpoint your tastes and determine the likelihood that you'll buy any given product. In effect, it will have constructed the algorithm that is you.
New kids in town
There's a sense among the players in the recommendation business - from newcomers like MyStrands and StumbleUpon to titans like Yahoo (Charts) and Sun (Charts) - that now is the time to perfect such an algorithm.
The Web, they say, is leaving the era of search and entering one of discovery. What's the difference? Search is what you do when you're looking for something. Discovery is when something wonderful that you didn't know existed, or didn't know how to ask for, finds you. When it comes to search, there's a clear winner - a $145 billion company called Google (Charts).
But there is no go-to discovery engine - yet. Building a personalized discovery mechanism will mean tapping into all the manners of expression, categorization, and opinions that exist on the Web today. It's no easy feat, but if a company can pull it off and make the formula portable so it works on your mobile phone - well, such a tool could change not just marketing, but all of commerce.
"The effect of recommender systems will be one of the most important changes in the next decade," says University of Minnesota computer science professor John Riedl, who built one of the first recommendation engines in the mid-1990s. "The social web is going to be driven by these systems."
Amazon (Charts) realized early on how powerful a recommender system could be and to this day remains the prime example. The company uses a series of collaborative filtering algorithms to compare your purchasing patterns with everyone else's and thus narrow a vast inventory to just the stuff it predicts you'll buy.
"Personalized recommendations," says Brent Smith, Amazon's director of personalization, "are at the heart of why online shopping offers so much promise." So far, the company has struggled to deliver on that promise. Its system favors popular, obvious items and tends to come off less like a trusted shopkeeper than a pushy salesman: If you liked the novel "The Corrections," you'll see suggestions to buy "The Discomfort Zone" and everything else Jonathan Franzen has written. If you bought a gift for a baby shower, you're bound to get a stream of recommendations for cheap plastic toys and birthing blankets.
The new generation of recommenders will do better. Some employ filters that factor in more variables. Others analyze the contents of what they're recommending to grasp why you like something. A third category, hybrid recommenders, combines both strategies.
To tap into some of the brainpower gathering in the recommender space, Netflix (Charts) recently established the Netflix Prize, offering a $1 million bounty to anyone who can improve by 10 percent the efficacy of the company's recommender system.
A few days before the contest was officially announced, VP of recommendation systems Jim Bennett expressed doubt about whether anyone would reach the goal ahead of the ten-year deadline, but said it'd be well worth the $1 million if someone did. Five weeks later, 37 registrants had already posted improvements to the Netflix system. Two contestants were just short of halfway to the goal.
The magician's secrets
Back at the Vortex, Kuhlke and Geitgey discuss how their parlor trick works. They'll draw on their knowledge of cinema and their experience categorizing hundreds of films - by star power, plot complexity, etc. - at What to Rent. "When you watch a movie, you interact with it like you're interacting with another person," Kuhlke says. "You're forming a relationship."
Geitgey goes first. He scans the crowd and homes in on a target, a guy delivering meals and clearing dishes.
On their site, Kuhlke and Geitgey use a series of odd questions to determine a user's personality. "How much money would it take for you to wear a neon-green fanny pack for the rest of your life?" Or: "What do you like better, reading a book or watching TV?" Here, it's all about observation. This is what Geitgey sees: tattered jeans, a steel bracelet, a few tattoos. The target may be gathering dishes but seems too authoritative to be a busboy. He appears to be in his late 20s and is working, Geitgey surmises, "in a youth-trendy restaurant in the part of the city where people that age who don't have real jobs hang out."
Geitgey makes a few leaps. "Those are the kind of guys who barely made it through high school because they couldn't focus, but spend most of their time reading light philosophy books by singers-turned-writers like Nick Cave," he says, insisting that the target is trying to square budding intellectualism with his physical image.
So. Which movie? "He would be interested in things that have an underlying philosophy but are also physically intense," Geitgey concludes. " 'Starship Troopers' fits that exactly - a bit of mild antiestablishment philosophy with some bad-ass bug-killing."
Musical taste
In a few short years, Pandora has become the most efficient new-music discovery mechanism in history. That's not saying much, really. Consider the alternatives: scouring magazines for reviews, flipping through albums in the record store, listening to radio stations all play the same songs.
At Pandora.com, you type in the name of a band or song and immediately begin hearing similar tunes that the site's recommender system - a.k.a. the Music Genome Project - has determined you'll enjoy. By rating songs and artists, you can refine the suggestions, allowing Pandora to create a truly personalized station.
Unlike collaborative filtering engines, Pandora understands each song in its database. Forty-five analysts, many with music degrees, rank 15,000 songs a month on 400 characteristics to gain a detailed grasp of each.
A former musician and film composer, founder Tim Westergren came up with the idea for Pandora while scoring movies for directors. "They weren't musicians, so no one was saying, 'I like minor harmonies and woodwinds,' " he says, leaning back in his chair at Pandora's Oakland headquarters. "So it was my job to figure out their musical taste. I developed a genome in my head, and would say, 'Okay, you like this song; do you like this one?' "
Four million people now use Pandora the same way those directors used Westergren. Let's say I type in Bloc Party, a pop/punk band that's part Franz Ferdinand, part Sonic Youth. The next tune I hear might be from We Are Scientists, a Brooklyn indie band with, Pandora determines, similar "electric-rock instrumentation, subtle use of vocal harmony, and minor-key tonality."
Next I get a catchy song from a pop-punk/emo band called Fire When Ready, which stands at No. 225,301 on Amazon's music sales list. It's safe to say that few consumers are searching for this band. But on Pandora, it's only a few degrees of separation from Bloc Party.
To draw a line from Bloc Party to Fire When Ready, the Music Genome Project combs through hundreds of thousands of songs and millions of pieces of user feedback. It's an impressive technological accomplishment but not nearly as impressive as the implications.
If Pandora can nail me as a fan of a band that few people have ever heard of, and my musical tastes are an intimate expression of who I am, then Pandora could introduce me to a lot more than music. Take it from Jason Rentfrow. "If you know I like Ahmad Jamal," Rentfrow says, referring to the 64-year-old jazz musician who played piano for Miles Davis, "that'll stimulate other information that you can infer about me."
The perfect holiday shopping guide(ster)
So Rentfrow likes sophisticated jazz. What sort of picture does that paint? If you think he's intelligent, articulate, a bit geeky and soft-spoken and wears glasses, well, you'd be relying on stereotypes. And you'd be right.
Of course no person is one-dimensional. Rentfrow also likes the rap group A Tribe Called Quest. With that information, you would probably redraw his caricature. Now maybe he seems younger and more open-minded. Revealing a list of his 50 favorite artists would flesh him out even more.
Rentfrow is a 30-year-old psychology professor at the University of Cambridge (Britain). To study the links between musical taste and personality, he and University of Texas psychology professor Sam Gosling administered personality tests to 74 students and instructed each to submit a list of ten favorite songs, which were then played for another set of volunteers.
After listening to the songs, the second group ranked each person on 28 characteristics. Rentfrow then compared those results with the earlier personality tests. Music turned out to be a poor predictor of emotional stability, courage and ambition, but accurate on extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, imagination and even intellect.
An ongoing study conducted by Rentfrow at www.outofservice.com, where 90,000 people have taken a music/personality quiz, pushes the point even further, tying taste to political leanings, demographics, lifestyle, favorite authors - movies even.
As recently as a decade ago, when musical preference was the province of a stack of CDs in the living room, such research may have been a dead end. But music recommenders can now draw lines from musical tastes to all sorts of things. Rentfrow and Gosling explored the connection between music and personality out of scientific curiosity. But the connection could have broad applications in business. Goodbye, context-based advertising. Hello, personality-based advertising.
Educated guesses
Geitgey's made his choice: "Starship Troopers." Now it's Kuhlke's turn. He's spotted a waitress. She's in her late teens or early 20s, black hair in a bob, very cute. She looks at the floor as she walks and avoids eye contact with customers. "She's unhappy," Kuhlke surmises. "She's working around all these jerks who just want to have sex with her."
Geitgey chimes in, suggesting she wasn't popular in high school and is shaking off her past by working in a cool place. Kuhlke cuts him off. "This place is the Applebee's of cool!" he insists. "If it was really cool, it wouldn't be a chain and there wouldn't be a paid parking lot across the street."
So what? "So she'd pick the wrong movie," he continues. "She'd like an old-school romantic comedy, but she'd pick 'Breakfast at Tiffany's,' a totally crappy movie. She's cool enough to know she should pick Audrey Hepburn, but not cool enough to pick the right movie, 'Roman Holiday.' "
The waitress is obviously attractive, maybe the prettiest woman in the restaurant. And she does seem bothered by - or at least indifferent to - her surroundings. But that hardly makes her prone to ill-informed choices. Kuhlke reconsiders. Maybe she would like 'Roman Holiday.' He clearly wants her to say 'Roman Holiday.' Flustered, he jumps off the romantic comedy train altogether.
She's disaffected, he insists, throwing his arms in the air. "Girl, Interrupted."
Big brother online
Just back from a visit to his childhood home in Kiev, Max Levchin is in his South of Market office holding up a propaganda handbill that he picked up in Moscow. He wants to mount it on a wall at his new startup, Slide. The poster features a railroad worker staring out from a caboose and a headline that Levchin translates aloud. "Literally, it says 'Night - not a hindrance to work!' " he says, mocking a sinister laugh, "though the implication is clearly, 'Keep working, bitches!' "
Levchin's team doesn't really need the reminder. The 31-year-old CEO drinks eight espressos a day and possesses a work ethic that's famous around Silicon Valley. He often arrives in the office by six and is still there 12 or even 18 hours later. After co-founding the online payment service PayPal in 1998, he battled fraudsters before taking the company public in 2002 and selling it several months later to eBay (Charts) for $1.5 billion. "The crux of PayPal is a risk-management company," he explains. "We perfected the ability to say, 'The odds of you stealing money are X.' "
Levchin cross-referenced traffic patterns, auction histories, user interactions, geography and a thousand other factors to root out fraud. "I would obsess on multivariate analysis. I'd have printouts and printouts graphing the relationship between any two variables," he says. "For a long time we didn't even patent this stuff because it was so secret."
These days, Levchin has the typical angst of a second-time entrepreneur. He's obsessed with proving that his first success wasn't a fluke, and he wants to exploit the biggest opportunity he can find. He's using what he learned at PayPal, not to root out fraud but to create the best recommender system he can imagine, one that will cover the entire Web, pulling content of all kinds - music, movies, gadgets, blogs, news stories, cars, one-night stands, you name it - filtering it according to individual preference and delivering it to the desktop.
Instead of quantifying the odds of your stealing money, he's building a "machine that knows more about you than you know about yourself."
If Slide is at all familiar, it's as a knockoff of Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Users upload photos, which are displayed on a running ticker or Slide Show, and subscribe to one another's feeds. But photos are just a way to get Slide users communicating, establishing relationships, Levchin explains.
The site is beginning to introduce new content into Slide Shows. It culls news feeds from around the Web and gathers real-time information from, say, eBay auctions or Match.com profiles. It drops all of this information onto user desktops and then watches to see how they react.
Suppose, for example, there's a user named YankeeDave who sees a Treo 750 scroll by in his Slide Show. He gives it a thumbs-up and forwards it to his buddy" we'll call him Smooth-P. Slide learns from this that both YankeeDave and Smooth-P have an interest in a smartphone and begins delivering competing prices. If YankeeDave buys the item, Slide displays headlines on Treo tips or photos of a leather case. If Smooth-P gives a thumbs-down, Slide gains another valuable piece of data. (Maybe Smooth-P is a BlackBerry guy.) Slide has also established a relationship between YankeeDave and Smooth-P and can begin comparing their ratings, traffic patterns, clicks and networks.
Based on all that information, Slide gains an understanding of people who share a taste for Treos, TAG Heuer watches and BMWs. Next, those users might see a Dyson vacuum, a pair of Forzieri wingtips or a single woman with a six-figure income living within a ten-mile radius. In fact, that's where Levchin thinks the first real opportunity lies - hooking up users with like-minded people. "I started out with this idea of finding shoes for my girlfriend and hotties on HotorNot for me," Levchin says with a wry smile. "It's easy to shift from recommending shoes to humans."
If this all sounds vaguely creepy, Levchin is careful to say he's rolling out features slowly and will only go as far as his users will allow. But he sees what many others claim to see: Most consumers seem perfectly willing to trade preference data for insight. "What's fueling this is the desire for self-expression," he says.
As Levchin and his charges set out to build a new type of search engine - a new Google - one question becomes obvious: Where's the old Google? VP of engineering Udi Manber refuses to comment on whether there's a recommender system in the pipeline. But it's a safe bet something is coming.
Google's director of research, Peter Norvig, is an advisor to CleverSet, a recommender company in Seattle. Steve Johnson, CEO of Boston-based recommender system ChoiceStream, which provides the collaborative filtering engine behind AOL.com, Blockbuster.com, iTunes and Directv.com, says he's been talking to Google about building a system for YouTube.
"Google needs to go to a preference-based search paradigm, and I believe they're moving in this direction," Johnson says.
Payoff
Kuhlke and Geitgey never had Google-sized ambitions for Whattorent.com. The co-founders, who recently took day jobs as software engineers on opposite ends of the country, didn't expect their site to be a huge moneymaker. They were a couple of undergrads trying to save their pals from the movie geek's ultimate nightmare scenario - walking around Blockbuster with no idea what to rent. They accomplished that much. But they may have also helped pave the way for a whole new way for marketers to get inside your head.
We've paid the bill at Vortex, and it's the moment of truth. We approach the guy with tattoos, who, as it turns out, is the restaurant manager. We tell him what we've been up to and ask him to tell us his favorite movie without thinking.
"Brianna Loves Jenna," he says with half a smile and a lift of the eyebrows. Everyone laughs. New rule: no porn. Then the guy crosses his arms, pauses for a moment, and exclaims, "Starship Troopers!"
High-fives all around. Geitgey nailed it.
Now the waitress. We haven't seen her talk to anyone since we walked in. Kuhlke and Geitgey hang back as I approach her. For the first time all night, the woman who will be remembered as "Audrey" lifts her cheeks to reveal a smile that comes both from a set full of wonderful white teeth and a pair of impossibly green eyes.
"Roman Holiday,"
(Article from CNNMoney.com By Jeffrey M. O'Brien, Fortune writer)
Sunday, November 19, 2006
To Zune or not to Zune ?
Microsoft's new Zune media player, which goes on sale today, is aimed directly at Apple's wildly successful, music industry-changing iPod. But how does it stack up?
The main innovation is WiFi-based sharing of songs and digital photos wirelessly between two or more nearby Zunes. There's also an integrated FM radio tuner, something the iPod lacks. The display of the Zune is bigger, and the screen automatically shifts to a wide, horizontal view for videos and pictures.
Battery life of the Zune is about the same as the video iPod, as is the cost (the Zune costs $250. A comparable 30GB iPod with video costs $249) The Zune Marketplace uses a point system in which most songs cost 79 Microsoft Points each - the equivalent of 99 cents - the same that iTunes charges for most songs.
Microsoft explains that this Zune is just the first of what will be an entire family of media devices. Will the Zune eventually become a Voice Over IP phone? Will it be able to download music wirelessly from the Zune Marketplace? Will smaller, flash memory-based Zunes -or Zunes with larger storage capacity emerge any time soon? Only Microsoft knows. For now, though, the questions are: Should you buy a Zune? Should you switch from an iPod?
(- Peter Lewis from Fortune)
Thursday, November 16, 2006
What's Next For Digg ?
One of the biggest darlings of the "Web 2.0" generation is Digg, a tiny San Francisco-based company whose social news site ranks the day's top stories based on users' votes.
Kevin Rose, a former TechTV star, founded Digg in 2004 and got Internet veteran Jay Adelson--who helped build Netcom, one of the first U.S. Internet service providers, and founded networking firm Equinix (nasdaq: EQIX - news - people )--to join as the company's chief executive. Since then, the site has grown from relative obscurity to a big hit: Adelson says Digg gets about 1 million visitors a day and ten million unique visitors a month. (That number is much higher than rankings from Web measurement firms like comScore Networks; Adelson says those companies don't present an accurate picture of his audience.)
Privately funded Digg is consistently rumored as one of the next big Internet acquisition targets, especially following Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube last month. After speaking to information technology executives at the Forbes CIO Forum, Adelson sat down with Forbes.com Tuesday to chat about Digg and the new Internet boom.
Q: You've done your time in big-business IT and now you work for a cool tech media startup. What do CIOs think of you?
Adelson: I've been involved in entrepreneurship and starting businesses since 1992. I've done it the traditional way. I've been a CIO. I've spent millions of dollars on back-end systems, and I invited these large integration firms to come in and often fail at executing a back-end system. When the CIOs in the audience see me, they see Digg and a Web 2.0 company doing things completely with open source, executing faster, and there's an assumption that they have: "Well, if I do what Jay did with Digg, I would lose my job because my CEO would never take me seriously if I used these very secure, stable, well supported open source products." I just think that's a shame.
Q: When Google bought YouTube, some content creators complained because they didn't get a share of the windfall. To an extent, social Web sites are completely a product of their users. Should they get paid for their contributions?
We believe that for a community to be strong, it has to be based on other motivations. To participate in a community means you have a passion about something, and you want to participate as a result of that passion. Once you start compensating the community members, you start creating these hierarchies where one person is worth more than another person. And that's the opposite of a level playing field. It can work for smaller communities and ones that are less dependent on equality and neutrality. We don't believe it works for Digg.
Q: Is Digg for sale?
No. Digg is not for sale. Our focus is entirely on execution. The only way that Digg would ever be for sale is if someone came to me and could help me achieve my goal ten times better than what we can do alone. There's been a lot of rumors out there, and it's mostly stirred up because of the YouTube acquisition. Basically if you're a Web 2.0 company right now, somebody's going to come up with a rumor.
Q: Silicon Valley rumor mill blog ValleyWag wrote yesterday that you will be ditching Federated Media Publishing, your ad provider, for greener pastures. Is this true?
No. We're not pulling out of Federated Media. We're extremely happy with the relationship we have with them, so I have no idea where that comes from. We've seen incredible results from their team, especially in recent months. This is one of the issues with this new blogging community. There's no real way to do fact checking. There's no infrastructure to accommodate some of that. There are a lot of bloggers who do [check facts], but you have to be careful with the rumor mill, especially in the Web 2.0 space.
Q: You've grown tremendously. How often do you change the Digg gears to keep the system working right?
We watch the interactivity of the community in real time. So we are constantly reactive to what we think are trends or things that impact diversity. For example, every now and then we'll make a change to the algorithm which might take in some new factor. Maybe it has something to do with speed or history or the particular category or the time--or whatever. All these factors we've learned over two years how to tweak so that the users feel that results are better--not our subjective decision, but rather the community's. "Diggs" are an incredible factor--we can see what people are attracted to. We have a sense of what people like and what they dislike. The stories will change depending on how we tweak some of those things and how we visualize them as well.
Q: There's a lot of talk about how blogs and sites like Digg will revolutionize the news industry. But many of Digg's popular stories are from big companies like The New York Times and CNet. How do old and new play together on Digg?
Different content has different purposes. What's great about the editorial model is that it generates reporting. There's an economy around a reporter who goes out, who has editors, and gets paid to go out and do investigative reporting. There's also a publication cycle associated with those traditional outlets. Something like The New York Times will release a paper in the morning. You'll notice on Digg around the times of publication cycles, you have lots of stories from those traditional media outlets because the reporting is good and the writing is good.
But the news world, and frankly the content on the Internet world, is a live medium. It's changing every minute of every day. So other sources of news and information like blogs are fantastic for filling in those gaps. Since Digg doesn't treat one better than the other, once in a while a blogger will surface who is a great writer and actually does do a certain amount of investigative reporting, and that blog will rise to some degree of popularity.
Q: Will Digg always be a niche product for techies or can it attract a mainstream audience?
We started with technology and had that sort of underground, hip-tech culture. Kevin Rose, who founded Digg, came from TechTV, so there is that technology basis. But right now, there are more non-tech stories submitted than tech stories. The activity of politics is probably our second most popular section on all of Digg. These are not traditional IT or tech people who are contributing to this. The opportunity certainly extends beyond tech.
The first month we started Digg, we knew we were going to do other types of content, and users were submitting other types of content and [their stories were voted off the site] because it was known to be a technology site. Once we said it was OK, suddenly a flood of other users came in.
What's next for Digg? What can Diggers look forward to?
Well Digg as a company was never originally founded to focus entirely on news. News is a great content to leap off of, because it's changing constantly. We talk about it constantly, and in a way it's self-serving because the media is an incredible group to disintermediate. There are a number of types of content that disintermediation can apply to. If you can think of a content object on the Web, something that you go to the Internet to discover or learn something about, or buy or anything, I can apply Digg to those different forms of content. How I do it, the user interface behind it, it's all going to be slightly different, but I think in the next six months you'll see us branch out to a lot of other things besides news. We're busy, all 17 of us, we're cranking away as fast as we can.
Q: You have a broadcasting and film background, and you work in Internet television. What's your favorite TV show?
Right now it's probably Heroes. My wife and I watch that every Monday. We love that show. We like traditional television. I'm a sucker for crime drama. Battlestar Galactica is probably one of the best produced shows out there. I'm sci-fi fan. Then again I also love the niche programming that's available like This Old House.
That being said, I think there's room for a whole new opportunity of on-demand media, which is what Revision 3 is all about, our other company. With television, there's a point of time when I'm very passive, when it's being served to me. There's other times when I want to be proactive, when I want to go get that content from my cell phone or from my TiVo. What content is available for me out there? One of these days you're going to ask me not "What is my favorite TV show?" but "What do I watch the most?"
(this interview was conducted by Forbes.com)
Kevin Rose, a former TechTV star, founded Digg in 2004 and got Internet veteran Jay Adelson--who helped build Netcom, one of the first U.S. Internet service providers, and founded networking firm Equinix (nasdaq: EQIX - news - people )--to join as the company's chief executive. Since then, the site has grown from relative obscurity to a big hit: Adelson says Digg gets about 1 million visitors a day and ten million unique visitors a month. (That number is much higher than rankings from Web measurement firms like comScore Networks; Adelson says those companies don't present an accurate picture of his audience.)
Privately funded Digg is consistently rumored as one of the next big Internet acquisition targets, especially following Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube last month. After speaking to information technology executives at the Forbes CIO Forum, Adelson sat down with Forbes.com Tuesday to chat about Digg and the new Internet boom.
Q: You've done your time in big-business IT and now you work for a cool tech media startup. What do CIOs think of you?
Adelson: I've been involved in entrepreneurship and starting businesses since 1992. I've done it the traditional way. I've been a CIO. I've spent millions of dollars on back-end systems, and I invited these large integration firms to come in and often fail at executing a back-end system. When the CIOs in the audience see me, they see Digg and a Web 2.0 company doing things completely with open source, executing faster, and there's an assumption that they have: "Well, if I do what Jay did with Digg, I would lose my job because my CEO would never take me seriously if I used these very secure, stable, well supported open source products." I just think that's a shame.
Q: When Google bought YouTube, some content creators complained because they didn't get a share of the windfall. To an extent, social Web sites are completely a product of their users. Should they get paid for their contributions?
We believe that for a community to be strong, it has to be based on other motivations. To participate in a community means you have a passion about something, and you want to participate as a result of that passion. Once you start compensating the community members, you start creating these hierarchies where one person is worth more than another person. And that's the opposite of a level playing field. It can work for smaller communities and ones that are less dependent on equality and neutrality. We don't believe it works for Digg.
Q: Is Digg for sale?
No. Digg is not for sale. Our focus is entirely on execution. The only way that Digg would ever be for sale is if someone came to me and could help me achieve my goal ten times better than what we can do alone. There's been a lot of rumors out there, and it's mostly stirred up because of the YouTube acquisition. Basically if you're a Web 2.0 company right now, somebody's going to come up with a rumor.
Q: Silicon Valley rumor mill blog ValleyWag wrote yesterday that you will be ditching Federated Media Publishing, your ad provider, for greener pastures. Is this true?
No. We're not pulling out of Federated Media. We're extremely happy with the relationship we have with them, so I have no idea where that comes from. We've seen incredible results from their team, especially in recent months. This is one of the issues with this new blogging community. There's no real way to do fact checking. There's no infrastructure to accommodate some of that. There are a lot of bloggers who do [check facts], but you have to be careful with the rumor mill, especially in the Web 2.0 space.
Q: You've grown tremendously. How often do you change the Digg gears to keep the system working right?
We watch the interactivity of the community in real time. So we are constantly reactive to what we think are trends or things that impact diversity. For example, every now and then we'll make a change to the algorithm which might take in some new factor. Maybe it has something to do with speed or history or the particular category or the time--or whatever. All these factors we've learned over two years how to tweak so that the users feel that results are better--not our subjective decision, but rather the community's. "Diggs" are an incredible factor--we can see what people are attracted to. We have a sense of what people like and what they dislike. The stories will change depending on how we tweak some of those things and how we visualize them as well.
Q: There's a lot of talk about how blogs and sites like Digg will revolutionize the news industry. But many of Digg's popular stories are from big companies like The New York Times and CNet. How do old and new play together on Digg?
Different content has different purposes. What's great about the editorial model is that it generates reporting. There's an economy around a reporter who goes out, who has editors, and gets paid to go out and do investigative reporting. There's also a publication cycle associated with those traditional outlets. Something like The New York Times will release a paper in the morning. You'll notice on Digg around the times of publication cycles, you have lots of stories from those traditional media outlets because the reporting is good and the writing is good.
But the news world, and frankly the content on the Internet world, is a live medium. It's changing every minute of every day. So other sources of news and information like blogs are fantastic for filling in those gaps. Since Digg doesn't treat one better than the other, once in a while a blogger will surface who is a great writer and actually does do a certain amount of investigative reporting, and that blog will rise to some degree of popularity.
Q: Will Digg always be a niche product for techies or can it attract a mainstream audience?
We started with technology and had that sort of underground, hip-tech culture. Kevin Rose, who founded Digg, came from TechTV, so there is that technology basis. But right now, there are more non-tech stories submitted than tech stories. The activity of politics is probably our second most popular section on all of Digg. These are not traditional IT or tech people who are contributing to this. The opportunity certainly extends beyond tech.
The first month we started Digg, we knew we were going to do other types of content, and users were submitting other types of content and [their stories were voted off the site] because it was known to be a technology site. Once we said it was OK, suddenly a flood of other users came in.
What's next for Digg? What can Diggers look forward to?
Well Digg as a company was never originally founded to focus entirely on news. News is a great content to leap off of, because it's changing constantly. We talk about it constantly, and in a way it's self-serving because the media is an incredible group to disintermediate. There are a number of types of content that disintermediation can apply to. If you can think of a content object on the Web, something that you go to the Internet to discover or learn something about, or buy or anything, I can apply Digg to those different forms of content. How I do it, the user interface behind it, it's all going to be slightly different, but I think in the next six months you'll see us branch out to a lot of other things besides news. We're busy, all 17 of us, we're cranking away as fast as we can.
Q: You have a broadcasting and film background, and you work in Internet television. What's your favorite TV show?
Right now it's probably Heroes. My wife and I watch that every Monday. We love that show. We like traditional television. I'm a sucker for crime drama. Battlestar Galactica is probably one of the best produced shows out there. I'm sci-fi fan. Then again I also love the niche programming that's available like This Old House.
That being said, I think there's room for a whole new opportunity of on-demand media, which is what Revision 3 is all about, our other company. With television, there's a point of time when I'm very passive, when it's being served to me. There's other times when I want to be proactive, when I want to go get that content from my cell phone or from my TiVo. What content is available for me out there? One of these days you're going to ask me not "What is my favorite TV show?" but "What do I watch the most?"
(this interview was conducted by Forbes.com)
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
What's behind the Xbox 360 ??
What is behind the Xbox 360 being able to deliver movies and Television programs ??CineForm(R), Inc. and Wafian(TM) Corporation today announced that Xbox 360(TM), the videogame and entertainment system from Microsoft, has selected the Wafian HR-1 direct-to-disk recorder running CineForm Intermediate(TM) image processing software as part of its production workflow to bring standard and high-definition TV shows and movies to Xbox Live(R) Marketplace in the U.S.
Beginning November 22nd, Xbox 360 gamers can access standard and high-definition content available for download using the VC1 compression format. The originating content, which derives from various tape and disk-based sources, is first pre-processed using advanced CineForm Intermediate software running on the HR-1. The processing includes adaptable inverse telecine algorithms to remove duplicate fields, plus optional de-interlacing and spatial image resampling. The result is a 10-bit CineForm Intermediate file that is archived for future use, and is also used as the source for coding into the VC1 distribution format.
"Our need to prepare nearly 1000 hours of content before launch on November 22nd placed big demands on our project team," said Scott Stacey, Program Manager for Xbox Live Content Distribution. "The high quality bar of our HD and SD video delivery, combined with the need for super fast turn-around required us to invent a new content creation workflow. As we evaluated multiple options, it soon became apparent that the high visual quality and comprehensive feature integration delivered by the CineForm-Wafian solution provided the best workflow for our demanding requirements."
"It's exciting to play an important role in an industry-leading program like Xbox Live Marketplace," said David Taylor, CEO of CineForm. "But our development clock was running from the first phone call. To meet the aggressive Xbox Live production schedule, we needed to quickly develop new features for our CineForm Intermediate software and successfully integrate them into the HR-1. But we couldn't be happier with the result -- we're now well prepared to support the industry's growing need for content reformatting, archiving, and delivery."
"We're excited to have HR-1 recorders play a key role in the Xbox Live Marketplace ingest process," said Jeff Youel, President of Wafian Corporation. "The HR-1 platform provides a powerful and flexible tool for ingesting hours of HD and SD video into the superior CineForm Intermediate format. Unique features like record triggers, real-time inverse telecine and SD de-interlacing developed in partnership with CineForm, make the HR-1-based workflow compelling, simple and efficient."
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Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Diamond Xtreme Sound 7.1 24 Bit Dolby Digital Live Sound Card -XS71DDL
Diamond Xtreme Sound allows the user to experience high level, theater quality sound while watching videos, listening to music, and playing games all in true 7.1 channel surround sound. This is an essential upgrade for anyone interested in increasing their computer audio experience while freeing up valuable computer system resources.
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