Ten minutes, ten critical slides when presenting to angel investors. This pitch is tailored to pique their interest enough to land a follow-on meeting.
Amazing video of a harp player.
If we are to stop the senseless acts of terrorism and violence, we need to give those terrorists a reason to value their lives and preserve them by staying outside the battlefield. Tom Friedman has a different take on the implications of taking out bin Laden. Will Ferrell of SNL fame has a different take too.
Interesting metrics on how people are using tablet devices and the impact of their usage on other connected devices.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Friday, April 29, 2011
News round-up for Apr 29, 2011
A new version of the Boeing jumbo jet 747-8 is in production to be released next year. In the last four decades, this family of aircraft has transported 3.6 billion passengers, or the equivalent of over half the world's population.
On a related topic, Gilt Groupe is reporting that iPad alone generates 4% of its revenues. Pretty impressive!
NFC is still a few years away from becoming reality because of (1) the switching costs for customers. They need to be re-trained and become comfortable in paying with their smartphone, (2) costs incurred by merchants to make their POS NFC-aware, (3) incentive for handset manufacturers to include NFC in their devices.
Is Groupon really worth the astronomical valuation, especially given intense competition, lack of differentiation and barriers to entry? They probably wish they had just taken google's buyout offer.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
What does Watson's Jeopardy win mean to the internet?
During the week of Valentine's day earlier this month, IBM's Watson, a Jeopardy playing supercomputer, handily beat two human contestants - Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter - who until now were the most successful winners. IBM announced that they will sell the question-and-answer natural language processing technology to hospitals and call centers.
IBM fed Watson the entire contents of Wikipedia, dictionary, thesaurus and the internet movie database, without any special processing or categorization. Watson's technology enables it to assimilate the raw data and store it in a form that enables rapid retrieval. Contestants will ring in the buzzer as soon as Alex Trebek has finished asking the question so Watson has very few seconds to determine the right answer. While Ken and Brad had to listen to the question and manually ring the buzzer, Watson also had to manually ring the buzzer but it was fed the question in a text form as soon as it appeared to all contestants on the video display. Watson proved to be incredibly quick at the buzzer, especially in the first of two contests, but the point is not about winning. It is about how much natural language technology has progressed to the point that tricky questions with metaphorical and alliterative undertones can be parsed and processed by a computer. What does all this mean to internet technology?
First, I should point out that a San Francisco-based company, Powerset, released a search engine back in 2008 that used natural language technology to provide answers and relevant links. For instance, asking "How many days to christmas" will result in a number, not a page full of web links that the user has to view and hunt for an answer. Microsoft bought Powerset in 2008. Today when you search for the same query on Bing, you get back a page full of web links, as does Google. So for some reason, Microsoft has not meaningfully leveraged natural language search technology. Google and Microsoft should fear Watson. Google's primary value proposition is serving relevant search results and it appears Watson is much more capable of meeting that customer need if deployed correctly.
Internet forums depend upon humans to respond to each other. Today, on average, there is a low probability of getting a timely and high quality answer. Ask Watson "What kinds of plants will do well in my backyard" and it gives you a useful set of recommendations, along with a confidence score, much like how it showed its confidence score for each of the top three answers it determined for every question on Jeopardy. Sites like Yahoo Answers, Amazon's Askville and Ask Jeeves should be worried.
IBM has already announced it will serve call centers where this technology makes a lot of sense. In particular, this will be valuable to companies that have a wealth of knowledge base that Watson can mine. FAQs on websites will still have to be curated manually to meet stylistic guidelines and for now Watson is unlikely to encroach into that space.
IBM fed Watson the entire contents of Wikipedia, dictionary, thesaurus and the internet movie database, without any special processing or categorization. Watson's technology enables it to assimilate the raw data and store it in a form that enables rapid retrieval. Contestants will ring in the buzzer as soon as Alex Trebek has finished asking the question so Watson has very few seconds to determine the right answer. While Ken and Brad had to listen to the question and manually ring the buzzer, Watson also had to manually ring the buzzer but it was fed the question in a text form as soon as it appeared to all contestants on the video display. Watson proved to be incredibly quick at the buzzer, especially in the first of two contests, but the point is not about winning. It is about how much natural language technology has progressed to the point that tricky questions with metaphorical and alliterative undertones can be parsed and processed by a computer. What does all this mean to internet technology?
First, I should point out that a San Francisco-based company, Powerset, released a search engine back in 2008 that used natural language technology to provide answers and relevant links. For instance, asking "How many days to christmas" will result in a number, not a page full of web links that the user has to view and hunt for an answer. Microsoft bought Powerset in 2008. Today when you search for the same query on Bing, you get back a page full of web links, as does Google. So for some reason, Microsoft has not meaningfully leveraged natural language search technology. Google and Microsoft should fear Watson. Google's primary value proposition is serving relevant search results and it appears Watson is much more capable of meeting that customer need if deployed correctly.
Internet forums depend upon humans to respond to each other. Today, on average, there is a low probability of getting a timely and high quality answer. Ask Watson "What kinds of plants will do well in my backyard" and it gives you a useful set of recommendations, along with a confidence score, much like how it showed its confidence score for each of the top three answers it determined for every question on Jeopardy. Sites like Yahoo Answers, Amazon's Askville and Ask Jeeves should be worried.
IBM has already announced it will serve call centers where this technology makes a lot of sense. In particular, this will be valuable to companies that have a wealth of knowledge base that Watson can mine. FAQs on websites will still have to be curated manually to meet stylistic guidelines and for now Watson is unlikely to encroach into that space.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Improving LinkedIn's Usability
As a long-time user, I've found LinkedIn very valuable in not only nurturing my professional network but also in researching job opportunities and job functions of current employees in target companies. They filed an S-1 with the SEC on Jan 27, 2011 as the first official step on the road to an IPO. LinkedIn is looking to raise $175 million and use the net proceeds in, among other things, further product development. Here are my thoughts on improving LinkedIn's usability and further its relevance to users.
Over the years, I've added almost 500 contacts to my network but it has been ages since I worked with most of them. I recently located a contact in a target company and we were related to a mutual contact who I requested to introduce me. It turned out that my friend worked with that person a few years ago and has been out of touch. It would be useful if LinkedIn shows a recency indicator for each connection. Users can use that either as a reminder to reach out and strengthen the connection or to retire the connection over a period of time. Fewer strong connections are more useful than many weak connections.
"Jobs you may be interested in" - only the 8th job opportunity suggested is the first one in my location. Tweak the prioritization of results to weight local jobs higher, perhaps run an A-B test to measure conversion. Along that same vein, if I've run keyword searches in the past, factor that into the recommendation. The current algorithm appears to disregard that, making the list less interesting.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Old Spice ad campaign - Made to Stick
What makes the recent Old Spice advertisement campaign so memorable?
During the recent world cup soccer finals, I recalled seeing an advertisement for Old Spice that "broke my guessing machine". A well built and good looking black man (Isaiah Mustafa) was the spokesperson, not a white man surfing the tube of giant waves. Among all the advertisements that day, this one stuck in my mind. Days later, I read about this ad campaign becoming one of the most followed and watched videos on YouTube. Borrowing ideas from Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
, here is why I think the message stuck.
Simple - the old spice man can smell good despite baking a gourmet cake in a kitchen he built himself. Why wouldn't a lady want her man to Smell like a Man, Man by using the old spice bodywash?
Unexpected - my guessing machine was broken seeing the unexpected spokesperson, jolting me into attention.
Concrete - direct imagery to indicate that old spice's fragrance lasts - an adventure loving (walking on a floating log), hard working (built a kitchen with his own hands), fun loving (biker) person who still smells good.
Credible - looking at this strong and good looking guy, why wouldn't you believe he is all of the above?
Emotional - the messages are very personalized. Following the airing of the commercial, the ad agency seeded social networks with an invitation for people to ask questions of Isaiah's character. As the questions started flowing in, they made 87 short personalized video responses and posted them back to YouTube, thus appealing to people's egos. What better way to make the brand memorable?
Stories - each story in the video responses are connection plots, making people care.
During the recent world cup soccer finals, I recalled seeing an advertisement for Old Spice that "broke my guessing machine". A well built and good looking black man (Isaiah Mustafa) was the spokesperson, not a white man surfing the tube of giant waves. Among all the advertisements that day, this one stuck in my mind. Days later, I read about this ad campaign becoming one of the most followed and watched videos on YouTube. Borrowing ideas from Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
, here is why I think the message stuck.Simple - the old spice man can smell good despite baking a gourmet cake in a kitchen he built himself. Why wouldn't a lady want her man to Smell like a Man, Man by using the old spice bodywash?
Unexpected - my guessing machine was broken seeing the unexpected spokesperson, jolting me into attention.
Concrete - direct imagery to indicate that old spice's fragrance lasts - an adventure loving (walking on a floating log), hard working (built a kitchen with his own hands), fun loving (biker) person who still smells good.
Credible - looking at this strong and good looking guy, why wouldn't you believe he is all of the above?
Emotional - the messages are very personalized. Following the airing of the commercial, the ad agency seeded social networks with an invitation for people to ask questions of Isaiah's character. As the questions started flowing in, they made 87 short personalized video responses and posted them back to YouTube, thus appealing to people's egos. What better way to make the brand memorable?
Stories - each story in the video responses are connection plots, making people care.
Made to Stick - review
In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip and Dan Heath discuss a template for formulating ideas in such a manner that it is memorable and even spreads spontaneously. The template is SUCCESS - Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Story.
At the heart of the book is this concept of Curse of Knowledge and how to avoid it. Simply stated, the concept is that one's deep understanding of an idea is also the reason why it is not effectively communicated. The analogy provided is a person hearing a tune in their head who taps to the tune so others can guess the song, then wonders why they struggle to guess (you can try this experiment at home).
Simplicity - find the core of an idea. Weed out not only superfluous and tangential elements but also ideas that are not the most important. However, don't dumb down the idea. Make/find the core mission, then find a compact way to communicate it.
On the battlefield, a commander's intent is a crisp statement that conveys a plan's goal and the desired end state of an operation. It does not specify so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events.
Use analogies to communicate instead of defining something in its entirety. "Generative analogies" are those that generate new perceptions, explanations and inventions. The founder of slideshare pitched his company to our Entrepreneurship class at Haas and started off by very succinctly saying that "slideshare is the YouTube of PowerPoint".
Unexpectedness - when we encounter the unexpected, surprise jolts us to attention, generates interest and curiosity. Use an element of surprise to convey insight relevant to the core message. Figure out what is counter-intuitive about the message and communicate it to break audience's guessing machines. To be most effective, surprise must be post-predictable - tying together all the clues to which you've been exposed all along.
"People are tempted to tell you everything, right up front, with perfect accuracy, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more". Gap theory is that people are anxious to fill a gap in their knowledge. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. Instead, open a gap in their knowledge, then close them with details.
Concrete ideas are memorable. Concrete messages can be examined with your senses and creates an imagery that can be visualized.
Credible - conveying an idea using real people, particularly authorities, is the most compelling and credible way. Honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, makes them authorities. Sometimes anti-authorities can be more powerful than authorities. For example, a chain smoker with terminal lung cancer is a more effective anti-authority figure to discuss the harmful effects of smoking, then the surgeon general's statutory warning.
Vivid, concrete details lend credibility to an idea. Statistics should almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. People should remember the relationship more than the number itself. Generate a "human scale" for the statistic that people can relate to and experience.
Emotional - the most basic way to make people care is to draw an association between something they don't yet care about with something they do care about. Incorporate self-interest into the message. Emphasize benefits, not features - "what is in it for me?"
Stories - a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. Right stories make people act.
Fight the temptation to skip directly to the "tips" and leave out the story. You can re-construct a moral from a story but you can't re-construct a story from a moral.
Stories with a challenge plot inspire us to act by describing a protagonist who overcomes formidable challenge to succeed. Connection plots inspire us through relationships with other people. Creativity plots make us want to do something different and experiment with new approaches.
, Chip and Dan Heath discuss a template for formulating ideas in such a manner that it is memorable and even spreads spontaneously. The template is SUCCESS - Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Story.At the heart of the book is this concept of Curse of Knowledge and how to avoid it. Simply stated, the concept is that one's deep understanding of an idea is also the reason why it is not effectively communicated. The analogy provided is a person hearing a tune in their head who taps to the tune so others can guess the song, then wonders why they struggle to guess (you can try this experiment at home).
Simplicity - find the core of an idea. Weed out not only superfluous and tangential elements but also ideas that are not the most important. However, don't dumb down the idea. Make/find the core mission, then find a compact way to communicate it.
On the battlefield, a commander's intent is a crisp statement that conveys a plan's goal and the desired end state of an operation. It does not specify so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events.
Use analogies to communicate instead of defining something in its entirety. "Generative analogies" are those that generate new perceptions, explanations and inventions. The founder of slideshare pitched his company to our Entrepreneurship class at Haas and started off by very succinctly saying that "slideshare is the YouTube of PowerPoint".
Unexpectedness - when we encounter the unexpected, surprise jolts us to attention, generates interest and curiosity. Use an element of surprise to convey insight relevant to the core message. Figure out what is counter-intuitive about the message and communicate it to break audience's guessing machines. To be most effective, surprise must be post-predictable - tying together all the clues to which you've been exposed all along.
"People are tempted to tell you everything, right up front, with perfect accuracy, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more". Gap theory is that people are anxious to fill a gap in their knowledge. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. Instead, open a gap in their knowledge, then close them with details.
Concrete ideas are memorable. Concrete messages can be examined with your senses and creates an imagery that can be visualized.
Credible - conveying an idea using real people, particularly authorities, is the most compelling and credible way. Honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, makes them authorities. Sometimes anti-authorities can be more powerful than authorities. For example, a chain smoker with terminal lung cancer is a more effective anti-authority figure to discuss the harmful effects of smoking, then the surgeon general's statutory warning.
Vivid, concrete details lend credibility to an idea. Statistics should almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. People should remember the relationship more than the number itself. Generate a "human scale" for the statistic that people can relate to and experience.
Emotional - the most basic way to make people care is to draw an association between something they don't yet care about with something they do care about. Incorporate self-interest into the message. Emphasize benefits, not features - "what is in it for me?"
Stories - a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. Right stories make people act.
Fight the temptation to skip directly to the "tips" and leave out the story. You can re-construct a moral from a story but you can't re-construct a story from a moral.
Stories with a challenge plot inspire us to act by describing a protagonist who overcomes formidable challenge to succeed. Connection plots inspire us through relationships with other people. Creativity plots make us want to do something different and experiment with new approaches.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Will Deepwater Horizon become Ixtoc 2
Current estimates of the amount of oil being spewed from BP's Deepwater Horizon rig blowout, the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico near Lousiana's coast, range between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels a day. Assuming the low end of that range of 12,000 barrels a day, at 42 US gallons per barrel of oil, over 24 million gallons of oil have already leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. By comparison, the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska's Prince William Sound spilled 11 million gallons of oil and the 1979 Ixtoc 1 disaster, also in the Gulf of Mexico, spilled 173 million gallons of oil [1]. Oil is supposed to be gushing at an incredible pressure of 23,000 lbs/square inch. Combine that with inhospitable depths of over 5000 ft of water and the Deepwater Horizon disaster becomes quite a challenge to counter.
Both the Ixtoc and Deepwater Horizon disasters involved a failure of the blowout preventer. The Ixtoc 1 site was located in only 160ft of water (divers were dispatched to implement remedies) but Pemex had no contingency plan set up in case of a blowout [4]. Even after 20 years, BP didn't have a contingency plan. These aren't the only two incidents when blowout preventers failed. Within a few months after the Ixtoc blowout, there were two more such failures - an incident on Funiwa-5 off Nigeria's coast and on Ekofisk Bravo in the Norweigian North Sea [3]. While I don't support BP's utter lack of disaster preparedness, that BP received its drilling permits from Obama government's agency makes the administration's PR offensive campaign against BP hypocritical.
The Macondo Prospect, site of the Deepwater Horizon, has estimated reserves of 50 million barrels of oil, compared with 800 million barrels of reserves [2] at the site of the Ixtoc disaster.
Pemex (Petróleos Mexicanos), the culprit in the Ixtoc spill, drilled two relief wells to reduce pressure in the main well so it could be capped off. This is the same strategy being attempted at Deepwater Horizon. Drilling relief wells was estimated to take 3 months [5] (same time as is projected in the current disaster) but it actually took over 5 months to complete.
While you may or may not consider BP's actions adequate to combat the disaster, Shell and other major oil companies seemingly have carte blanche to spill in the oil fields of the Niger delta that supplies 40% of US crude oil imports. This is too high a cost to pay for "economic development".
I hope the Deepwater Horizon disaster does become this generation's Three Mile Island. I'd like to see three actions come out of this incident. US government reducing oil subsidy thus raising fuel prices, regulating auto manufacturers to significantly and quickly improving fuel efficiency and investing in and subsidizing public transportation.
[1] Nancy Rabalais, Executive Director and Professor of Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, on NPR Science Friday, May 7, 2010
[2] Oil & Gas Journal, March 31, 1980, pg. 54
[3] Oil Spills - Summing up the big one, The Economist, June 7, 1980, pg. 81
[4] Mistake by Mexican drilling crew is blamed for world's worst oil spill, The Globe and Mail (Canada), August 1, 1979
[5] Blowout in the Gulf, Newsweek, June 25, 1979, pg. 67
Both the Ixtoc and Deepwater Horizon disasters involved a failure of the blowout preventer. The Ixtoc 1 site was located in only 160ft of water (divers were dispatched to implement remedies) but Pemex had no contingency plan set up in case of a blowout [4]. Even after 20 years, BP didn't have a contingency plan. These aren't the only two incidents when blowout preventers failed. Within a few months after the Ixtoc blowout, there were two more such failures - an incident on Funiwa-5 off Nigeria's coast and on Ekofisk Bravo in the Norweigian North Sea [3]. While I don't support BP's utter lack of disaster preparedness, that BP received its drilling permits from Obama government's agency makes the administration's PR offensive campaign against BP hypocritical.
The Macondo Prospect, site of the Deepwater Horizon, has estimated reserves of 50 million barrels of oil, compared with 800 million barrels of reserves [2] at the site of the Ixtoc disaster.
Pemex (Petróleos Mexicanos), the culprit in the Ixtoc spill, drilled two relief wells to reduce pressure in the main well so it could be capped off. This is the same strategy being attempted at Deepwater Horizon. Drilling relief wells was estimated to take 3 months [5] (same time as is projected in the current disaster) but it actually took over 5 months to complete.
While you may or may not consider BP's actions adequate to combat the disaster, Shell and other major oil companies seemingly have carte blanche to spill in the oil fields of the Niger delta that supplies 40% of US crude oil imports. This is too high a cost to pay for "economic development".
I hope the Deepwater Horizon disaster does become this generation's Three Mile Island. I'd like to see three actions come out of this incident. US government reducing oil subsidy thus raising fuel prices, regulating auto manufacturers to significantly and quickly improving fuel efficiency and investing in and subsidizing public transportation.
[1] Nancy Rabalais, Executive Director and Professor of Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, on NPR Science Friday, May 7, 2010
[2] Oil & Gas Journal, March 31, 1980, pg. 54
[3] Oil Spills - Summing up the big one, The Economist, June 7, 1980, pg. 81
[4] Mistake by Mexican drilling crew is blamed for world's worst oil spill, The Globe and Mail (Canada), August 1, 1979
[5] Blowout in the Gulf, Newsweek, June 25, 1979, pg. 67
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