News round-up for May 13, 2011

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.

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.

US Parents say almost a third of the apps on their phone were downloaded by their children.

There is a surprising paucity of mobile optimized eCommerce websites and apps and merchants are missing out on potential sales. On average, only 2% of revenue is generated from mobile platforms. Even more interestingly, "shoppers told Tealeaf that mobile shopping was more frustrating than sitting in traffic or visiting the D.M.V., which helps explain why, despite all the interest, people are not yet spending much when shopping on their phones."

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.

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.

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.