jamesk2

Specific applications and platforms can have a short shelf life but really each application that is made can teach you things that can be used towards progressing towards the long terms goals for your company or humanity.

I'm developing a twitter application. Twitter might or might not be a fad. I can't see so far into the future and while my prognosticating skills are decent, I'm not 100% certain. Hell, I thought friendster was hot.

Anyway by developing this one application, I am learning about social tools (which I've never done before), neural networks, semantic analysis, markov models and a hell of a lot of stats techniques I previously did not have a lot of usefulness to me. In the grander sense, I was more comfortable with deterministic techniques rather than probabilistic techniques.

If Twitter goes down for good, I lose some time but I take that new knowledge and make the next app that gets me closer to my 20 year goal.

Thanks jrockway for clearing that up.

So if people get used to using GV on iPhone, Blackberry and Palm, it would make switching to GV on Android trivial. There would almost no transition costs.

I get tired of my iPhone (or more likely pissed off at Apple for something) then I could just take my GV #, make some settings changes, then buy an Android phone and be off.

Easier switching is better for us, maybe not so much for Apple or AT&T.

GV is a VOIP application. Maybe I've read too much TechCrunch but it seemed to imply that it would use the data network and not use minutes.

Are you sure it used your minutes and SMS instead of VOIP and SMS through google's accounts?

Google Voice is a threat to AT&T and every other potential carrier for the iPhone. Maybe AT&T didn't really have anything directly to do with GV being yanked but it sure isn't going to make carriers around the world happy to have the iphone on their network if it can go around their revenue generating functions.

I'd love to have the iPhone on Verizon but how much will they want the iPhone if it is a trojan horse that makes them lose MMS,SMS and international long distance revenue?

Stephen Baker's book, the Numerati, covers what data geeks are doing with stats, data mining, semantic analysis, machine learning...

Here's a link to some of his talks on the subject: http://thenumerati.net/index.cfm?catID=4

Google should create a translation module for dead languages. Why stop at scanning old books? Scan some ancient tablets Sergey!

I remember suggesting this to Steve Case when he was CEO of AOL. It was before paypal and it would have made a lot of sense for AOL to become the micropayment processor since they already had access to their subscriber's credit cards. I'm glad they really didn't move on it though, because they could have killed the movement of large content companies going to the web with it. Why publish free on the web when you could have made money for articles on AOL? AOL at the time was the largest ISP.

Yeah, in a way Apple doing this is a zoomed fractal version of what is happening with China. They make and sell lots of stuff and they use the money to build out their financial industry. It's also what GE (GE Capital), Sears (Discover Card) and to an extent Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway which started life as a textile company.

His site sounds like digg's recommendation system or what reddit tried to do with their recommendation system.

It's really hard to be second mover without a significantly better algorithm or lots of money. In the search engine space, Google had that better algorithm and Bing has lots of money and an equivalent algorithm. He had neither. So unless he was able to come up with a working "compatibility" algorithm, it was going to be a really though haul.

Chalk it up as a lesson learned. Good luck on your next startup. I appreciate the honesty. On my startup, I have to keep focusing on making the product work well rather than being distracted by those other "gaping loops" like scaling, marketing and monetization. Those are useless without the product.

Its probably safe but if you are a U.S. based company, why take chances with a country whose leadership is not very friendly to America?

Would the people funding your company be understanding if Gaddifi decides your company is unacceptable for some reason and turns off DNS for your .ly domain? Would having the majority of your traffic just disappear be a potential problem for you?

Getting your circulation going helps relieve both eye strain and wrist pain. I've had both on very stressful projects. Get into the habit of working on your cardio. It's been shown that cardio does help with stress management and brain function.

The .ly TLD is Libya. Is it safe to use .ly domains like bit.ly does? Will Libya just jack the domain name Cuba style?

Here's a video about Pythagoras and the musical ratios developed on a single string "guitar" - very interesting for math + music heads.

http://bit.ly/tuAvW

I think we're disconnected on this because my point is that branding Yahoo results pages with the Bing logo is horrible for Yahoo.

And yes, while luxury brands use many parts not specifically made by them, they do not promote another brand who is a competitor.

Another analogy maybe? If the Apple iPhone had a splash screen that said "Powered by Microsoft" it would harm the brand. Apple knows this and while my mac is powered by Intel, there's never any "Intel Inside" branding.

Porsche 911 Turbo: ENGINE BY VW

or - Your 130 thousand dollar automobile is made by the same people who make your kids 15 thousand dollar automobile.

It would turn a lot of people off Porsche and boost VW's brand image.

I think many people are aware that major brands OEM parts from all over.

But there isn't a sticker on the dashboard saying one of the most expensive parts is from a specific maker.

My main point is that Yahoo is transferring a lot of brand equity to Bing. If there was no Bing branding on the SERPs then this would be much less of an issue.

And really, some hackers pop the hood and look at engines but really do most people? Do most people even know how to change their own oil or even bother to?

Hypercard was the gateway drug to programming for me. From Hypercard to Macromind Director to PERL. Sometimes I kick the programming habit but I always seem to go back. Now it's Python.

Just looking at the homepages of Google vs. Yahoo - it's clear that Google's focus is search. On Yahoo's home page, search is just a feature on a page littered with tons of bandwidth hogging widgets.

But Bing is clearly a search engine. That's the central focus and that's what people will remember. It might not be "top of mind" for most of us but it's going to be top of mind to a lot of Yahoo users soon enough.

The market's immediate reaction: "Yahoo Shareholders Transfer $2.9 Billion To Microsoft Shareholders" - http://bit.ly/yn2TT

Bing on Yahoo search results pages is a product endorsement. Users will become familiar and comfortable using a Bing branded product. Bing Sports is a text ad on the current "sports" search results page. It'll go from, WTF is Bing to, "oh Bing, they have sports news"

It is like BMW switching to Toyota engines and putting a little sticker on the dashboard that says Powered by Lexus. How long will BMW last when that happens?

In the sequel, he's now a web 2.0 social fiance application with a neural network that does realtime stock market transaction processing.

I went to see the original when I as at Atari Computer Camp decades ago. Yes, there was one and we learned logo and basic.

I liked programming then but after the movie I felt like I had a mission. Live Code.

And I'm actually on that mission still today.

I suppose this is to compete with twitter which fulfills any realtime news needs I have.

I clicked the link and now I feel dirty. When will I stop clicking on linkbait headlines?

Python is fantastic but Learning Python might be a bit steep for someone who's not familiar with programming at all.

Strangely, I think this youtube lecture series from Stanford is fantastic. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMDCCdjyW8

It's java but the lecturer eases you into the most important concepts with an understanding of how to engineer readable, reusable code. So watch it free. Then buy Learning Python. If there is an equivalent python learning video on youtube, I haven't found it.

The real difference between what I pay for and what I won't pay for is not so much "long tail" vs. popularity but "specialness" which include exclusivity, insight and trust.

Walt Mossberg of the WSJ is really popular in tech so it's not very "long tail" but he has the exclusivity, insight and trust worth paying for.

From the article: "An active user, as defined by HubSpot, may be a member 3 or 6 months old who has abandoned his account"

"What’s interesting are the population metrics stating that 44.5% follow 1 or more people and 47.29% have 1 or more follower. Firstly, they never took out “inactive users” (even according to there own erroneous definition)."

NorCal, SoCal, NY are expensive places to start a company and almost never show up on these types of articles.

But yet most of the biggest names in tech come from these areas. Y Combinator moved to NorCal for some good reasons.

Pro-Business means more than less laws and low taxes. I wish there were more articles focusing on things like VC money flow, startup activity, tolerance for non-traditional idaes, creativity and the cheapest ramen/pizza options.

Hey, I'm that James in Santa Monica.

Come to the next L.A. Web App Meetup or another meetup. http://web.meetup.com/34/ was the last one I went to.

You will get a chance to meet a lot of people who are looking for partners. I met 2-3 people there last time who are exactly in your shoes.

Also, a VC/Incubator called the Mail Room was one of the sponsors.

BTW, there were several disheartened announcements for rails developers... "We've got jobs for rails developers... if there are any left in l.a., southern california, southwestern u.s.... buhler?"

There is a danger in using short term revenue boosters. Twitter is wrestling with this exact issue. It's a rare site that I would return to that has pop up ads. i.e. nba.com

Most sites don't have enough good original analysis for me to tolerate that sort of disruptiveness.

It's a danger for all companies in the web startup space.

Kurzweil is a genius but maybe he should try not to put such specific dates on his predictions. It makes it easy to say he was wrong by detractors.

Does this mean that google was not an innovator?