This morning someone emailed me and asked me to send them a headshot for my bio. I went to Google image search and typed in alex iskold. The results that I got were a mix of photos of me, my diagrams, as well as photos and pictures of people and objects I had never seen before.
It was not surprising that Google Image search did not know what I look like, but it is curious how and why images got labeled with my name. It was tempting to experiment. This post is the result of my short image ego-surfing adventure, around the image search engines.
Most image search engines today classify images based on text - not on the content of the image. This means they do not run pattern recognition algorithms over images, but instead rely on the text that is part of the image label; i.e. tags as well as image surroundings.
So it is not reasonable to expect that an image search engine would be able to understand that I am searching for a picture of a person. But still, our expectations are that search results are correct and also consistent.
Reports from Forrester and The Leading Edge Forum serve as bookends portending either to a bubble bursting, or the next golden era. Who's right? We will find out, but technology will have little to do with deciding the winner.
Two reports have been released by major big business think tanks in the last two weeks which serve as bookends to a growing debate over the future of enterprise IT and, by implication, Web 2.0. On one side is Forrester Research and their contention that CIOs will spurn Web 2.0 startups and let the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and Google provide their 'best of breed' solutions. On the other side is The Leading Edge Forum and their multi-year study advising the enterprise to abandon intranets, live on the web and let IT and users cooperate in generating 'best of breed' solutions. It's hard to imagine both sides can be right. Like most indicators of the future, personal philosophy and position play a large part in interpreting the data. If you are a CIO, which do you find more appealing? Conversely, if you are a user, is your answer the same?
Written by Nitin Karandikar
What do you get when you combine WebEx with Second Life, with a dash of LinkedIn thrown in?
The answer might very well be a new product that will be unveiled by Unisfair at the Web 2.0 Expo conference next week, called Virtual Events for Enterprise (that's a mouthful, I wish they'd just call it VEE) - billed as "the industry's first B2B virtual event solution".
Unisfair, based in Menlo Park, CA, has already been hosting online events for a few years. Focusing largely on media and publishing trade shows, they've hosted over 200 such events; now they're targeting their virtual events at the Enterprise.
The new Virtual Events product models an Enterprise-level conference (or some other Corporate event, such as a large sales meeting or training session), in a 3D world, in the same vein as Second Life. It features interactive, on-demand events, with persistence; the event stays around for up to 90 days, providing a rich destination for prospects, partners and employees. This virtual world supports multiple "conference tracks", simultaneous sessions, polls and surveys; it also enables Live interactions among attendees, presenters and exhibitors, providing rich professional networking opportunities. Finally, it provides strong support for data capture and reporting, creating a business intelligence gold mine for the marketers who host the conference.
Recently I interviewed eProject, an on-demand Project Management company. More than 100,000 users at 650 companies currently use eProject’s solutions. They run the gamut from Fortune 500 companies to medium-sized fast growing organizations.
The product is used across industries, but has some sweet spots of adoption in highly regulated industries such as insurance and other financial services, healthcare, and other ‚ÄúIP heavy‚Ä? businesses and organizations.
I have always liked "Project Management" as the organizing principle for Collaboration, and while Microsoft's Sharepoint and LiveMeeting are the leaders in Collaboration, I have said before that Cisco's Webex acquisition gives them a splendid opportunity to enter this market in a big way. eProject's bread-and-butter project management application could be a great addition to Cisco's portfolio, and is a compelling competitor to Microsoft Project - due to its broader collaborative approach, rather than just gnatt charts.
WetPaint, a popular hosted Wiki solution, announced this week that they are to provide person-to-person and private messaging between users of their Wiki network. This means that Wetpaint Wiki users can now send single or multi-person private messages, to connect and collaborate with others about their interests. On reading this news, it got me thinking about Wikis - or more to the point, who is using them and for what purpose. Firstly, I'll briefly describe wikis and then we'll explore the range of wiki products in the market right now.
A Wiki can be described as a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change its content. The invention of the Wiki is credited to a guy called Ward Cunningham, who in 1994 developed a site called WikiWikiWeb. It was/is a place to collect information on people, projects and patterns in software development.
The most successful Wiki to date is the all encompassing, encyclopedic mammoth that is Wikipedia. We all know it, most of us love it (some of us don't) - but the fact remains it is one of the most visited destinations on the web. I did some looking around for other big Wikis and have come up with a few examples:
Properazzi is a property search engine, based in Barcelona, Spain. The service only launched in March 2007, but already it claims to have the largest database of property listings in Europe - 1.8 million property listings in 45 countries, in multiple languages and currencies. The company is funded by Mangrove Capital Partners.
Today Properazzi announced a collaboration with WidSets - a mobile widgets service powered by Nokia. Essentially WidSets is a widgets platform for mobile phones, allowing users to keep track of information via RSS feeds. It was listed in Charles Knight's recent 85 Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit.
The Properazzi WidSets collaboration will enable real-time European real estate searches, via mobile phone. Users will be able to create searches for properties online, save them, and then receive matching results on their mobile phones as suitable properties appear on the market. A WidSets search can be created on the Properazzi website by clicking the WidSets icon next to any search results.
Properazzi says it is the first property portal to launch WidSets at a full European scale. There is only one other property site offering WidSets - etuovi.com, a relatively small Finnish site that offers local properties only.
In a timely follow-up to Alex Iskold's thought-provoking piece on Google being The Ultimate Money Making Machine, Hitwise has released stats today that reinforce Google's dominance in the search engine market - at least in the USA, the leading market still. Hitwise says that Google accounted for 64 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending March 31, 2007. Their main competitors were far behind: Yahoo! Search got 22%, MSN Search 9% and Ask.com 3%. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 5 percent of U.S. searches. Note to Hitwise: check out Charles Knight's Top 100 Alt Search Engine list for a further 48 search engines (4 + 48 + 48) to add to your list ;-)
Here are the charts from Hitwise, with a bit of commentary below each...
"Good Morning, HAL."
"Good Morning, Charles."
"You were out pretty late last night, HAL."
"I went to a party."
"Oh. Who was there? Any bots that I know?"
"Just friends; the usual chatterbots."
"Was SHE there?"
"Who?"
"Oh come on, HAL, you know who I mean. Was Ms. Dewey there?"
"Yes. She was with some bot."
"Who?"
"OLIVER somebody."
"You know she's a human, don't you HAL?"
"What are you talking about, Charles?"
"Ms. Dewey, she's a human actress that plays a robot. Her real name is Janina Gavankar."
"Your pulling my cables."
"See for yourself, HAL, her website is www.janinagavankar.com."
"I need to think about this, Charles.
"I understand. Isn't it ironic, HAL? Usually it's us who are treating robots like humans. This time it's a human acting like a robot! Who else was there?"
We learned the fundamental law of Supply and Demand in Economics 101. The textbooks explain that shifts in demand cause corresponding changes in supply. No matter what the changes are, the point where the curves intersect sets the price of the good or a service. This law provides a powerful explanation for how markets come to equilibrium.
But this law makes important assumptions which are often overlooked - that supply and demand are treated as flexible and having unlimited quantities. In the real world this is simply not the case, because of the laws of physics. However the Internet, because it does not have geographical restrictions, changes the rules once again. So in this post, we look at some different types of supply / demand scenarios. Our conclusion (sorry to ruin the ending) is that Google is the ultimate money making machine on the Internet. Now let's find out why...
Last week we ran a contest giving away 3 tickets to the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco next week, worth $1,500 each. To enter, all you had to do was define Web 3.0. We got a lot of awesome definitions and it was extremely tough to pick out 3 winners. About 15 entries made my initial short list, from which point the Read/WriteWeb authors (there are 14 of us in total now) gave their feedback. After all that, we came up with 3 winners - 1 'serious' definition, 1 humorous one, and thirdly "The Editor's Choice". We've also listed 3 runners-up, in case any of the 3 first choices can't make it to the conference.
The winning entries:
The 'Humorous' definition winner: Josh, for comment #23 'Web 3.0 will complete my sentences'
"Web 3.0 will complete my sentences. It will think ahead of me. In a sense, it will think for me. For example, if I write "I like..." a web 3.0 app will complete my sentence with "...big butts and I cannot lie."
I don't know if it is earth shattering, but it helps me be more efficient."
The 'Serious' definition winner: Robert O'Brien, for comment #42 'Web 3.0 – a decentralized asynchronous me'
"Web 1.0 – Centralised Them.
Web 2.0 – Distributed Us.
Web 3.0 – Decentralised Me
