Month: February 2003

you can only make an IP play if you really have some IP

Due Diligence

Latent Semantics was invented at Bellcore in late 1980s, by an All-Star information science team including Tom Landauer, George Furnas, and Sue Dumais. (IP alert: It’s patented.) There’s a more recent description from Tom Landauer’s university group here (PDF) and another overview under Creative Commons license here.

So all that mumbling and griping about being a Prime Mover in this space were an utter waste of time. I remember reading that if you tell a VC that you’re the only one working on a solution to problem X, that tells them problem X isn’t a compelling problem: you can watch their eyes glaze over as they mentally move on to the next presentation. I thought that was bad, but far worse is to be unaware that your big idea was patented 10 years earlier.

It’s a very deflating feeling. I had no idea this had been done already. Perhaps a more tech-savvy legal team would have known how to find the facts. I don’t know.

Pthbthbthbth.

the attention economy, defined

From: Tyranny of the Moment by Thomas Hylland Eriksen

In information society, the scarcest resource for people on the supply side of the economy is neither iron ore nor sacks of grain, but the attention of others. Everyone who works in the information field ? from weather forecasters to professors ? compete over the same seconds, minutes and hours of other people?s lives. Unlike what happens to physical objects, the amount of information does not diminish when one gives it away or sells it.

Stolen from here.

This has come up before.

every show is a live album, every fan a sales rep

Guardian Unlimited | Online | Ministers of sound

Last week, Clear Channel, the American radio and concert promotion giant, was reported to be preparing plans to offer live recordings of concerts on CD, at the venue, five minutes after the curtain falls. According to a report in the Boston Globe, by recording directly off the sound mixing desk, and using a bank of cheap CD burners, they will be able to sell concert goers perfect recordings.

The scheme is reportedly to be piloted in small venues in spring with, most likely, the first MP3s appearing on file-sharing networks around 30 minutes later.

And there lies the rub. For bands whose main audience is the live one, allowing fans live recordings of the previous night’s show could be a winner. For the more possessive record labels, it’s a potential nightmare. When stadia could shift 20,000 CDs in an evening and provide free advertising for the rest of the tour, it is so potentially lucrative, it might just be the one that forces labels to reconsider their policy towards file sharing.

This is an interesting development. Will all acts go along with it? Why not? After all, you just paid for the show, why not take it home? But then the filesharing aspect rears its head: will the record companies be willing to accept that music recordings for which they paid zero production cost and zero promotion cost will be available as viral marketing tools that at least some listeners will have paid for the privilege of distributing?

If this doesn’t wake them up, what will?
Continue reading “every show is a live album, every fan a sales rep”

WiFi supplants 3G phones before they arrive

Guardian Unlimited | Online | Tune into the wireless

“Wireless LAN is a threat,” he says. “It is a high-performance, low-cost radio technology that has very low unit costs and comparatively low operating costs. It’s really cheap stuff.

“From the cellular operators’ point of view, there is nothing more nauseating: they spent countless billions to buy into the 3G mobile data future, and suddenly out of nowhere comes this upstart data networking technology that seems to be shaping up as direct competitor. And I think it will be in this crucial business user segment. It’s going to hit them where it hurts.”

The same article mentions a SFO based company that has a single wireless access point serving all of downtown San Francisco: we’ve already seen a few homebrew solutions like the Pringle can antenna extending the range of wireless base stations. Now we have Intel and AMD building 802.11 capability into motherboards. Why would I want to hook up my phone to my computer to surf the net or grab my mail when the computer is already networked?

Safari Update 2-12-03

The Safari Update 2-12-03 improves the compatibility with popular web sites based on Safari user feedback, further improves the performance of loading web pages and Flash content, adds support for XML, increases standards conformance and delivers improved application stability. The update also enables access to web sites that offer self-signed security certificates.

It — 1.0 beta v60 — still doesn’t let me post to MovableType.

More like this

Ben Hammersley.com: Latent Semantic Indexing in the Guardian

Search sucks. No matter how clever your search engine’s system is, no matter how many clever page-ranking formulae you apply, or how many super-speedy processors you throw at it, the current way to search the internet doesn’t work very well.

Searching by a keyword misses out a boatload of stuff, for one simple reason: many of the documents you might find useful do not contain the keyword. Consider this: you want to find documents on Iraqi politics. You’re a leader writer, perhaps, and one sherry too far gone. You turn to Google, and what do you search for? “Iraqi politics”? “Saddam Hussein?” “Abd al-Rahman Arif”? Well, yes, all of these – and each one will be useful, but not the entire picture. You want the search to return not just the keyword hits, but documents on the same topic that don’t necessarily mention the keyword.

Here is the conference blurb on a presentation about LSI.

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is an information retrieval technique known to substantially improve recall in full-text search engines. LSI works by applying a dimensionality reduction technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) to a vector space data model, reducing noise and bringing out latent relationships within the data. While most of the research on LSI has been done in the domain of text searches, where LSI search engines can actually retrieve relevant documents that do not match any keyword in a query, the linear algebra implementation of the technique makes it applicable to a wide range of problems in bioinformatics, including gene and protein sequencing, gene regulatory networks, and medical imaging. Many of these potential applications remain completely unexplored.

This idea, though we never called it LSI, was the core of the startup I moved out to Seattle three years ago for.

sensible words about the impending war

“Godwin is getting old”

Geography, as they say, is Destiny. and here in Europe we have a lot of geography. There isn’t a town that doesn’t show, in some way, the effects of war. From the bomb-cratered walls that every British MP walks past on the way to Westminster, to the vast swathes of Berlin so obviously built post 1945, there isn’t a single day when people living in the European capitals aren’t reminded of war. It’s not the heroics suggested by the Washington monument, but the crushed, burnt bodies and screaming destruction of massive bombing. If you want to know why the French, the Germans, and the Russians don’t want to fight just yet, walk down their streets.

Can’t add a thing, other than to insist you read the whole posting (I’ve excerpted a lot of it but didn’t want to steal all Ben’s thunder).

My father can remember the war, watching dogfights over the West of England, seeing the POWs working in the fields, playing with evacuated schoolkids, and watching the air armada on D-Day.

One’s enthusiasm for a fight depends on how badly you might get hurt in it: sometimes this all reminds me of the 80s when the superpowers seemed prepared to fight WWIII in Europe and no one who lived there seemed all that excited at the prospect (Greenham Common, anyone?).

weblogging as social networking

Power laws and priorities [dive into mark]

[ . . . . ] does that mean that blogging is pointless? Well yes, if what you’re after is fame and fortune. Those 3 hits a day are almost certainly not going to balloon into 3000 or 3 million. And even if you combine all the 3-hit sites together, they won’t ever move markets like The New York Times. On the other hand, those 3 hits are the most important thing in the world, because they’re real people.

Since I was pondering traffic numbers earlier, this resonated. I’ve never gotten a thin dime as a result of my Amazon alms bowl, though I have gotten about $10 in associate fees, but I do this because people read it, no matter if it’s friends I know or ones I haven’t met. I learn from them/you and sometimes people take something away from here.

That seems to be worth doing, even for only 25,000 hits a month.