Look Beyond

The Launch of the $100 Laptop

Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT's Media Lab, unveiled its $100 wireless laptop computer at the United Nations Technology Summit in Tunisia this week.

It hopes to make millions of the devices, the size of a text book, to give to the poorest people in the world with units ready for shipment by the end of 2006 or early 2007.

Michael Parekh's post contains the specifications for those interested.

Google Base

Google, after much speculation, yesterday announced the launch of Google Base.  The service can best be described as a (currently free) hosted database allowing anyone to upload and categorise content on literally any subject.  Google then makes this information searchable online.

There's been much written in the blogosphere about Google's strategy and what it means for online classified advertising sites such as Craigslist and eBay, and other community oriented sites such as Flickr, delicious and Typepad.

In his post, Fred Wilson comments that he believes Google's strategy is to control the posting, subscribing, tagging and search ecosystem.  His bet is that loosely coupled and functionally rich online services, such as those listed above, will win the day.

Michael Parekh considers Base from a different perspective in his excellent post.  He contrasts the evolution of Google with that of Yahoo which began life as a human-powered directory.  Michael and John Battelle (author of The Search) both observe that Google's first objective is to augment its search results.  Though unlike Yahoo, which originally adopted a centralised human-powered directory, Google is aiming to leverage potentially millions of us to contribute content to its universe.  And once it has critical mass it can look to monetise the content in some way.

There are concerns about the potential for Base being overwhelmed by spam which Google will have to overcome.  A number of people (see example) have also commented that unlike the majority of other online content sharing services, there is a short delay (around 10 minutes) from the posting of content before it can be viewed.  And of course, many of people have posted about the rather clunky and functionally poor interface - I agree, but it can only improve.

Regardless, this is a fascinating move by Google and one I'm sure many will be watching over the coming days, weeks and months.  It may yet be seen as a significant event in the development of the semantic web.

Google Announces Personalised Search

Google announced late last week that it has launched a beta version of personalised search.  The service, which requires a Google account, works by serving results based upon both the search query entered by a user and their previously searched terms. 

By analysing a user's search history, the search engine attempts to determine more relevant results, especially when dealing with words with ambiguous meaning such as 'bat' or 'bank'.  Not only does this deliver a better user experience, it allows Google to display more relevant ads.

Although this service has the potential to improve a users experience, it raises privacy concerns as Google will now be monitor a user's search history.  In an attempt to allay these fears, Google offers functionality allowing the user to exclude a page, site or any search result from their search history.

Content Companies That Matter

Barry Graubart, Chief Marketing Officer of Leadership Directories, is currently compiling his top 50 "Content Companies That Matter".

To date, Barry has nominated 13 companies, an intriguing mix of pure play content providers and technology firms.  Go check out Barry's nominations supporting rationale here.

The Search

I have just finished reading The Search, a fascinating book which provides an historical context to the search industry, dominated today by Google, and how in such a short period the search culture has permeated many facets of our day to day lives.

The book explores the evolution of search technology, the business models which today underpin their success and concludes by considering how search might evolve in the years ahead.

John Battelle, the book's author, is a seasoned technology veteran.  He is co-founder of Wired magazine and founder of The Industry Standard and is currently the program chair for the Web 2.0 conference and a columnist for Business 2.0.

We now all take search for granted - a means for us to quickly navigate the web to find answers to our questions and curiosities.  In 2003, Piper Jaffray, an investment bank, estimated the world conducted about 550 million searches each and every day and forecast annual growth of 20%. 

But how do search engines work?  What are searchers typically hoping to find when using a search engine?  Why does Google have so much influence in our connected world?  And will we ever see "perfect search"?

It's these questions and more that Battelle addresses in The Search.  The book is well researched and an easy, insightful and thought-provoking read.  I highly recommend it to all online searchers - the book is a must read for those in the information, research and technology sectors.

So go buy The Search and check out Battelle's Searchblog.

The Poverty of Attention

The guys over at Union Square Ventures posted an intriguing insight coming out of their recent USV Sessions event.  During the session Umair Haque quoted Herbert Simon, a cognitive psychologist who made significant contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence, economics, and philosophy.  In 1971, Simon made the following observation:

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.)

The proliferation of information on the web means there is more content published, by more organisations and individuals, and made more easily accessible and interactive than ever before.  But as Fred Wilson points out in his post, our capacity to consume and contribute information hasn't increased as the world has gone digital.  Indeed, it has also been exacerbated by the wealth of both good and poor quality information we have to sift through to find our "information nuggets".

Consequently, we either focus our attention around a few trusted sources and communities or spread it more thinly across a larger universe.  And in order to absorb new content and services as our attention capacity is reached, we have to ditch the least valued of our existing "attention grabbers".

So what does all this mean?

Search services such as Google and content tagging services a la delicious allow us to more simply and quickly locate content online.  And RSS makes it easier to be kept abreast of changes to content on our favourite sites.  But we still end up having to process lots of uninteresting content in order to find those snippets of information of real interest.

As John Battelle comments his book The Search, search technology is at best 5% solved.  So such technology has a future part to play in assisting with the surfacing, filtering and notifying of relevant content based upon our past clickstream, rather like Amazon makes recommendations based on our past purchases and similar purchases by other customers.

Should this become a reality, we will be able to utilise our attention more efficiently, allowing us to focus only on consuming content we want to consume.  But ultimately, as our attention capacity is limited, there's only so much relevant content we can digest resulting in an ever increasing attention deficit.

1 Million Video Downloads on iTunes

Earlier last month I commented on Apple's announcement that it was launching a legal video download service on iTunes.  The service initially comprised a catalogue of 2,000 music vides, 5 TV shows (including Lost and Desperate Housewives) and 6 short Pixar movies.

Apple announced yesterday that in the first 20 days since launch, it has sold more than a million videos - quite an accomplishment.

Since then, there has been a lot of debate in the media and some scepticism surrounding the demand for such a service and also whether the movie studios would play ball.

Apple didn't provide a breakdown of sales by category so it's not possible to determine the precise demand for the non-music related content.  And as we're still the novelty phase, it's a little premature to reach a conclusion as to the long term demand.  That said, I suspect the guys at Apple are quietly encouraged.