Lessons for eComm “Lightning Talk” speakers

Earlier this year at eComm 2009, I gave my “lightning talk”. At the end of the day, I have to accept that I did a terrible job.  An eComm “Lightning Talk” is a 5-minute presentation. My problem was, I really just condensed a 15 minute talk down to five minutes. While I did cut out a lot from the larger talk, I didn’t focus the presentation enough. I practiced and practiced the talk and successfully completed the presentation in five-minutes, but it tried to present too much information across too many directions.

If I give another such lightning talk, I will focus the entire thing down to one main point. In the above talk, I waste too much time on the “how” (the implementation) without enough focus on the “what” (the result). This is of course because I’m a geek and I find the “how” really interesting. But what is significant about the research I was presenting here is really the “what” - and I failed miserably in getting that point across. In fact, what this research was about was very much in tune with what Lee Dryburgh likes to call intention-based economics:

What we care about with intention based economics is human psychology and behaviour, both individual and in aggregate. … what we need to build for is access to ever more personal information, i.e. about the human behind the endpoint. Privacy does not exist looking long-term. Ever more personal information is the new currency, which underlies intention-based economics, and people will increasingly trade it for free access to services.

… telecom networks receive vastly more human attention coming in from the edges and transit much more “intention data” than Google, in the form of telecom signaling. But it’s latent, not acted upon and thrown away. They actually throw away their most precious asset and plan to continue charging for their long-term least worthy asset (voice transmission).

This research looked at “intention data”.  Instead of throwing away this telecom signaling information, as the telecom companies currently do, this research used the data to study actions of the “human behind the endpoint” to include historical analysis as well as making predictions, i.e. determining intent.

The signaling data of who is talking to who, combined with their locations, recent movements, and so on, can be used to predict future actions (intent). For example, a certain flurry of a certain kind of activity might suggest that a group of friends are probably going to go see a movie together. Advertisers would be interested in such fore-knowledge, one would think.

I think it’s particularly interesting that we were able to do this in the real world, using real  phones available today, and doing so without the user’s active involvement and without the permission or participation of the carrier, i.e. as an independent third-party with no special relationship to the carrier.  We did it by supplying users with modified edge-devices (phones) that provided “ambient awareness” streams. These phones didn’t require GPS - we used cell tower and bluetooth proximity for location data. We didn’t need a very large sample to get meaningful results. Everything we did in this research could be done by the carriers and of course they may be doing it already and we wouldn’t know. This research shows how practical intention-based economics is and that it may not be as far off or as abstract as we think.

This research basically turned humans into “sensors” emitting data about their location and, more importantly, who they are talking to (and texting with), all as a surreptitious side-effect of carrying around a mobile phone and performing their every day routines. In general, besides location, other behaviors are very powerful indicators (behaviors like “what are they taking pictures of?”). A single data point may not provide much insight, but when viewed over time, and in relation to other human actions and behaviors, it becomes incredibly powerful. With this power comes responsibility. As Lee says “Privacy does not exist looking long-term.” This research doesn’t attempt to answer that question. Rather, it explicitly intends to raise awareness that it must be addressed and, given the results we were able to obtain in this research in fairly short time and with relatively modest resources, it needs to be considered sooner rather than later.

<GRATUITOUS PLUG>

We did this research as contract work - if you’d like to learn more or perform similar research contact us here: sales@telEvolution.com

</GRATUITOUS PLUG>

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Whitepaper provides unconventional perspective on “videoconferencing”

I have released a brief whitepaper summarizing my contrary position with respect to “videoconferencing”. The paper is titled: Practical Applications of Low-cost Network-Based Video: Beyond Videoconferencing as a Substitute for Face-To-Face and is available at the following link: http://www.toyz.org/whitepapers/video_social2009.html

This paper was originally written in 2003 but I was not able to publish until now, for various reasons.  But I stand by the research and conclusions.

Some of the more controversial positions include:

The present work totally abandons video as a substitute for face-to-face communication, and in fact suggests uses that are not videoconferencing, in any existing sense, at all. Further, we conclude that another common application of videoconferencing, that implemented by most desktop software, specifically the person-to-person video call, is nearly void of utility, particularly for business communications.

Please look it over and flame away.

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SabSe Technologies Acquires Jaxtr

I find it sort of interesting that I had a post about Jaxtr sitting in my drafts, from back in December 2008. Back then, the one-time darling of VoIP whose investors included some of those investing in Skype before it, had reported that it had laid off 13 workers (about 30% of its workforce) and that the much heralded CEO, Konstantin Guericke, had stepped down.

That draft was titled “Jaxtr revisited” and referred to the company’s burn rate:

Jaxtr raised $10 million in their Series A in August 2007. In September 2007, I said they would burn through that within a year, and it looks like they did, because they had to take another $10 million in June 2008.

In that post, I was highlighting some potential trouble spots ahead for Jaxtr, including the fact that they’d soon need even more capital and there would be challenges raising it in this climate, especially with a continued “burn cash now for some future unspecified opportunity later” business model. I also discussed little details like the potential for rampant fraud, once they start charging. I never got around to publishing that draft.

Of course we don’t know if these things contributed to the sale of Jaxtr to SabSe Technologies, Inc. (www.SabSeBolo.com) announced yesterday, for an undisclosed sum, but it seems like they could have.

SabSe was co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia, an original co-founder of Hotmail. They are in the free conference calling business. All the access numbers listed on the website are in India. A large percentage of Jaxtr users are also in India and in Pakistan. I’m guessing SabSe makes money on termination and are hoping to use Jaxtr’s local numbers, in some related manner, perhaps expanding their conference calling services beyond India.

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Apple obsoletes PowerPC Macs

According to announcements today at WWDC, the next release of Mac OS X, OS 10.6 “Snow Leopard”, will not support PowerPC-based Macs.  I find this pretty annoying.  I like to get my money’s worth out of a machine. Now Apple is telling me I have to get a new machine if I want support, even though that old machine is still doing its thing just fine.

Yeah, I have Intel Macs; but I also have a number of PowerPC Macs, including my  main laptop, that work just fine. I’d like to be able to use the latest software on these machines too, but now I’m rev-locked.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It feels like blackmail. It doesn’t feel very “Green” throwing away a working machine that is otherwise adequate, but no longer compatible (with Apple’s business model).

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Another Twitter cynic

Serial CEO Peter D. Csathy says:

Twitter’s revenues will pale compared to the ever-growing expenses needed to scale the service. And, my prediction is that the Twitter nation will lose steam in its passion and the bloom will be off the rose.

So, Twitter — here’s a tweet in less than 140 characters — “SELL NOW!  Follow YouTube’s lead!”

It’s interesting when I see people talking about how they wish they had thought of Twitter first. As I see it, that misses a critical point.  First, you have to come up with the $55 million it has taken to create and operate the service (so far).  Do you have access to that kind of money?  If not, then the idea might not be enough.

It’s a myth that if just any schmo came up with a Twitter-esque idea that VC money will come rolling in.  There are plenty of other ideas that could have lost $55 million in the same amount of time on the cutting room floor (that never receiving funding and therefore went nowhere). @Ev was not just any schmo - he was already rich and had already made a bunch of VC’s a lot of money before he started Twitter. He may not know much about building scalable infrastructure - guess what it doesn’t matter - he knows how to raise money.  And that’s what matters.

Likewise, it’s a myth that the users (insane growth) come first “without spending money” and that the money comes after.  This happens one in a zillion times but  even in most of those cases, at least SOME money came in early. Many startups that have created the mythology that they had “amazing growth without any money” are BS. They raised a lot more money than people think before they had significant growth (Skype, Facebook, and Twitter all come to mind).

Twitter is cool (but also has issues) but it’s taken $55 million (and 45 people) to get here and they still don’t have any revenues or a published plan to get revenue, so the costs and requirement for more and more other-peoples’ money goes on. The founders themselves recently said “We’re one percent into Twitter.” Does that mean they will need $5.5 billion? They also said “if we described Twitter in three sentences, the first two would be about not putting too much fidelity on it, and the last sentence would be ‘we don’t know.’“

So before you start having Twitter-envy, you need to ask yourself, “do I have access to $50 million (or $5.5 billion)?” If not, then don’t worry about it - you were never going to build a high operating cost company like Twitter or Youtube anyway, whether you had the idea first or not.

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BEWARE: twittercut is a password stealing SCAM!

A quick search on twitter will show this site is bogus: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=twittercut

DO NOT sign up there (or even visit the site).  If you did sign up, change your Twitter password asap.

Here’s what the home page to the site says:

Welcome to TwitterCut.com.

TwitterCut.com is the best place for you to grow your twitter network and gain a ton of followers. We recommend giving it a shot, it’s free and will help you get the followers you need. This system is brand new, so the quicker you get involved the better it will be, fill out the form below and get started right away…

It looks like they stole some Twitter graphics there. I note that the Home, About etc. links are all no-ops.

The WHOIS record, gives the following:

Registrant:
Jordan EMbry
1646 thompson drive
owensboro, Kentucky 42302
United States

Domain Name: TWITTERCUT.COM
Created on: 21-May-09
Expires on: 21-May-10
Last Updated on: 21-May-09

Administrative Contact:
EMbry, Jordan  jembry13@gmail.com

I have not found a white pages listing for an Embry at the above address.  The domain is registered with GODADDY.COM, INC.

May or may not be the same person as:

• Jordan Embry - Bowling Green, KY | Facebook
• Jordan Embry - LinkedIn
• Jordan Embry (JordanEmbry) on Twitter (account suspended)
• Another Jordan Embry (ijordan89) on Twitter (also in KY)

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Twitter #fixreplies and “intelligent” networks

A few weeks ago, I said “Twitter is a “Stupid Network” (the good kind)”. It turns out I was wrong.

Twitter created the #fixreplies problem (see here and here) for themselves when they decided to treat these tweets specially from the start, breaking the end-to-end principle.

These are tweets by people I follow - they are public tweets, not direct messages. They are in the public timeline. If I follow that person, they should be in my timeline like any other tweet from that person (whose tweets I follow), regardless of the content of that message.

I follow this person.  That means I follow what they say, the updates they post. If Twitter never treated a post that starts with @ special in the first place, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.  In that case, if I wanted to filter such tweets, I could do that in my client, at the “edge”.

Now Twitter has pulled those tweets out and so I can’t “filter” them - I have to go looking for them.

This is the kind of mess you get yourself in when you go around breaking the end-to-end principle all will-nilly.

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#fixreplies hack - shows what Tweets you’re missing

UPDATE May 18 2009: fixed some bugs, removed Twitter API rate limit issues, and simplified usage to one simple HTML file

I put together a little hack that shows the tweets you’re no longer getting.

It’s pretty hacky and requires some manual labor to use, but some people may find it entertaining. I decided to do it all with Javascript so it requires nothing more than your own browser.  Also, that way I can provide all the code and let people see exactly how it works and perform whatever beautification they may want, etc.

Basically, it produces output like the following, showing the @reply tweets you didn’t see in your Twitter stream becaue you don’t follow the person the message is directed to.  In my case, it showed me 63 interesting tweets tonight. The output is something like this:

Each entry is shown with a link to the original Tweet on Twitter  so you can click to get the full details of the tweet.

How to use it

It is all in one HTML file: whatumissed.html.

You can copy and paste the above into a local file on your computer and open in your browser, or simply execute the version at mrblog.org directly (and “View Source” to see how it works):

http://mrblog.org/whatumissed.html

Notes:

1. It should be pretty easy to turn off the diagnostic data if you like by using visibility: hidden for the “statusmsg” div in the html/script.
2. There is no little CSS or other styling here - if you hack the code with cool CSS styling, please post back to me so others can benefit too.
3. If you make other hacks to this code, or have other suggestions for me, please let me know.

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Diversion: SF Giants 2009 HDTV games

I put a schedule like this together for 2008 and I’ve seen a number of hits looking for a 2009 version. Sorry for the delay folks, but here it is.

Once again, I combined data from the SF Giants site “broadcast schedule” and the Comcast Sports Net Bay Area site “Giants schedule” to produce a list of all games planned to be broadcast in HD this year. It assumes NBC and FOX are available in hi-def.

A ZIP file containing a CSV and ICS calendar can be downloaded here: hdgames2009.zip

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Twitter #fixreplies fiasco is telling

I’ve seen many people try to explain (or argue with someone) about why Twitter matters, what they use it for, why it’s cool. These conversations are often interesting in how they demonstrate that even people that love Twitter often can’t explain it to anybody. Sometimes I think these people aren’t even sure themselves what they get out of Twitter, or why they find it compelling.

And I think the #fixreplies fiasco shows that even the Twitter brain trust may not understand the value of their own service very well. We certainly know they don’t seem to have any idea how to make money with it.

For those that haven’t caught wind of this yet, recently Twitter stopped displaying public tweets that are deemed to be “replies” between your friends and someone who you do not follow. In the past, such tweets would be seen as sort of one side of a conversation. If you follow @Fred for instance, you might have seen something like the following in your Twitter stream:

Fred: @Mary I liked your idea about http:…

In this case, let’s say you don’t know who @Mary is. Since you like Fred, you might want to know who this Mary character is and what she’s about. A tweet like the above was a perfect opportunity to be exposed to new people that your friends engaged with. In other words, it was a great way to discover new potential friends. it was also a great way to see what your friends are talking about - what topics were so interesting to them that they were compelled to respond.  So they helped us stay more in touch with our friends, both in terms of who else they talk to and what they like talking about.

In addition to the tweet itself, it might also have said something like “in reply to Mary” which is a link to the original tweet by Mary that Bob is responding to.

By removing these tweets from my stream, Twitter has instantly made itself less valuable as a social tool. On Facebook, I can see when a friend comments on one of their friends’ items, even if that second person is not my friend. Friends of Friends is a major component of any social network and part of what separates a “social” site from just another web site.

Twitter argued that they had to do this for technical reasons. That makes no sense to me. What’s really special about this tweet by my friend Fred, as far as Twitter is concerned? Why are they treating it specially? In terms of the relationship to my stream, as a follower of Fred, how is it different than other tweets by Fred? Of course it’s not. So much so, that people have talked about simply inventing a new format for replies and not using @Mary anymore so that the message will appear in the stream. UPDATE: Twitter claims the “technical problem” is having to check every account’s preference every time a reply was posted was causing a huge strain on their database - so they removed the option and gave everyone the “most common” choice.

It also represents another step toward violating the end-to-end prinicipal , something that has gone toward greatly increasing the value of the Twitter network and separating Twitter from others. As I have said, dropping the end-to-end advantage is a big deal:

This end-to-end model permits myriad uses of the underlying network and fosters incredible innovation.

…

At first look, Twitter becoming more “intelligent” about the contents of tweets may appear to be a good thing. But it is a slipery slope. Once they start adding meaning to the 140 characters, the network becomes more restrictive. The more Twitter remains a “stupid network” the better, IMHO.

I think that fact that even Twitter themselves don’t understand what makes their service valuable tells us something. I hope they figure it out and don’t destoy the special thing they have created.

Update: an interesting counter-perspective: my thoughts on #fixreplies and the ‘dot fix by @HelloKit.

Also, see the whatumissed hack for a way to see these missed replies again: http://mrblog.org/whatumissed.html

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