On Thursday at the Supernova conference, Udi Manber Google's VP of
Engineering talked about what
a difficult problem search is. This was followed up by Sheryl Sandberg, Google's Global
VP of Sales and Operations, giving a presentation entitled What's next for
advertising?.
Sheryl started by providing a little history on Google's approach to search advertising. She said that "before Google advertising was focused on the advertiser," but when Google was developing their advertising model they started by "focusing on providing useful information to users." In other words, they "wanted the ads to be just as useful as the search results."
This afternoon at Supernova thirteen companies selected by TechCrunch and Supernova, from 130 applicants, presented at the Connected Innovators Session. The companies presented to a panel of experts including Mike Arrington from TechCrunch, Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital and Julie Hanna Farris - a serial entrepreneur. The panel held all of their feedback until the end of all the presentations.
Udi Manber, Google's
VP of Engineering, gave a brief 15 minute presentation at Supernova today entitled
Search is a Hard Problem. He explained that with an audience like Supernova, he
imagines we understand to some extent how difficult a problem it is, but it's probably a
harder problem then we even appreciate. He laid out three reasons why this is the
case:
I found the third point quite amazing. I would think with the number of queries that Google processes, they would have seen a much higher percentage of the queries before.
I'm at the Supernova conference in San Francisco this week. In
this post I review a panel entitled, 'Virtual Life or Virtual Hype'. The panel was
moderated by Sandra Kearney from IBM and included the following panelists:
The brief description in the program was:
"Do most people really want to immersed in 3D virtual worlds? And what are the real business benefits of these massively multiplayer environments? This session will examine which activities will migrate to virtual environments and when physical forms will continue to dominate."
I'm attending Supernova this year and will
be covering the event for Read/WriteWeb. In addition to attending various panels, I
participated in the conference today by giving a quick presentation as part of the
challenge roundtable at the end of the first day. My topic was titled: The First
Principle of Social Web Apps and Its Implications. A number of individuals asked me
for the slides I referenced, if you're interested I have posted them here as either PowerPoint
Presentation or PDF.
