For those that don’t know, collaborative filtering is a method of making suggestions for other products, based on your previous shopping habits. It is used by sites/web-apps, like Netflix, Pandora Radio, and Amazon, and, I think, Ulik, and mostly based on user-generated content.

Just working it out logically, you could say several things about user-generated content:

1. there’s a lot of it, but attention is limited to a few leading sites
2. not all users are equal, there are demographic, emotional, intelligence, and other factors that affect how users vote.
3. users are cheap, which also sometimes means that you get what you paid for.

I’m personally not a fan of user-generated content, at least on a massive scale, because of some of the things in that list.

Alternative is the expert-based method, which means that expert-critics analyse a product and give it a rating. It is not often used in a collaborative setting, meaning that it makes suggestions for other products, i.e. Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic would be sites collect expert input, but don’t, afaik, suggest other matching movies.

The most famous example of an expert-based collaborative filtering system is Pandora Radio, which is built on top of the Music Genome Project, a collection of 50-or-so music-experts that analyse music and assign attributes to it. Those attributes can then be used to match songs. Users’ input isn’t ignored, they can vote on songs, which affects their future track-lists.

A few characteristics of expert-based systems are:

1. They entail significant wage-costs for employees that have invested in their expertise. Counter this against the possible income of a service like Pandora—advertising & referral-fees—and there could be a discrepancy.
2. They cannot rate as much content, as quickly, as a more user-generated system could.
3. They, on the other hand, maintain a consistent quality, that is unmatched by the varying quality that comes out of user-input.

I’m personally much more of a fan of an expert-based system, but sceptical of its economic merit, looking just at point 1.

Most systems seem to be orientated at users mainly, which, if you have a dataset like Netflix’s, is a smart way to go about things. There are some limitations that that entails, as the Netflix prize has revealed, namely that it cannot account for “strange” films like “Napoleon Dynamite,” and that it doesn’t take into account any user-based information, such as demographics or mood.

What do you think, audience? Knowing that users are cheap but a-plenty (but also overwhelmed with competing attention-buckets), and experts are few and expensive, is the solution to still go the user-generated route and try to make that work? In my opinion, expert-based systems require different business models than are popular online these days. You cannot get away with charging nothing, expecting users to magically click your advert, and hope to pay those university-educated experts. That, or, the margins for your products have to be so high (e.g. insurance & travel), to make such a system work (not that I think collaborative filtering and insurance really make that much sense—”give me the insurance radio-station please!“… eh no.)

Enjoy the weekend!
Vincent

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A lot more multi-part blog posts on Tech IT Easy; finally some continuity again, which is nice for both you and me! So, today was the ceremony for stage 1 of the New Venture business-plan competition, the submission of the idea, of which a prize of €500 was to be won by 10 contestants. As I expected, for several reasons, I wasn’t among those 10, though the race isn’t over yet! The next submission is February 26th 2009, the feasibility-study, for which I may compete with my own idea or change it (to another, if needed). The feasibility of an idea entails technological and business aspects, and there’s still a lot to be worked out on both ends. I’m letting you know for completely selfish ends—it would be nice to see a familiar face, if only on the other side of the court. Of course, one team-member must be residing in the Netherlands!

So how was today? I wasn’t really top-fit as it feels like I’m doing a 101 things and am a little overwhelmed, i.e. stressed out. So I didn’t come with high expectations, mostly to check out the competition and perhaps meet some people. The event was presented by Roland Koopman, a Dutch TV-presentor, and the awards were handed out by Pim Batist, founder of SellaBand.

Two “insider”-stories were presented, one was SellaBand and other was Taniq, a rubber-company, for lack of a better word—the company makes it so that rubber hoses and similar are more stable, while using less materials and no metal. You should check out the film their site, it’s very well-made. Most important insight from Taniq: the importance of coaches/mentors, which appear to be abundant if you take part in the competition, for bouncing off ideas & solving problems. But also on the hiring process—when the three young founders decided to look for some “grey haired” commercial talent, they found out, the hard way, that big-company sales-talent is not the same as small-company talent. In the end, if you can’t sell your own products as an entrepreneur, you’re probably in trouble!

The best example of this was perhaps Pim Betist; what a magnetic personality! SellaBand is a crowdfunding mechanism for bands, who, instead of walking to a record-company (for whatever reason), can place themselves on the site, after which fans can vote—with their wallets!—for the band they like. And with that a music-cd, etc. can be produced… He came up with the idea in 2001, residing in New York. Then, for reasons unexplained, he decided to take on a 3-year job at Shell, until he finally quit that job, sold his car, moved into some (illegally) free housing and focussed all his energy on working out the idea. He recruited a guy from Sony BMG as co-founder, by posing as a student wanting to write a thesis and holding several meetings with the company under that subterfuge—a side-note: recruiting people from Sony should never be hard, these guys, from my experience, are all chronically made unhappy by the politics in that company. I’m a little more into music over rubber, as you can tell, but that’s maybe also because the presentation was excellent. Not that Taniq didn’t have a nice movie either, definitely to be watched on their site!

So what about the winners? If there was a definite theme to the evening, apart from innovation, it was that pretty much all of the prize-winnars had a sustainable idea. It wasn’t necessary green, but more efficient, more ethical, more social, etc. What I remembered was:

• a one-handed fire-extinguisher for handicapped people
• a crowd-funded electrical cart for people in third world countries
• a way to make fuel consumption more efficient in cars
• a sensor that measures how people sleep

On the off-chance that you are planning to take part in round 2 (send me a mail, if interested), that should give you a hint of where to direct some energy at! Looking at the credit crisis now, it should perhaps not be a surprise that attention is being drawn towards both efficiency, but also more sustainable ways of doing things—that is, incidentally, one the conditions that will probably be imposed on the car-companies, if they receive financial aid: to become more green.

That’s it from me on this subject! It’s not too far a leap for me to write a feasibility study, but I’ll only know for certain if I’ll take part a few months from now. So, let’s hope for a part 3, 4, and beyond!

Have a nice weekend!
Vincent

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The point of this mini-series is to vocalise some of my thoughts about the creative writing process, which is something I only think about when I write every day, but not when I only write sporadically. I wrote this post last week Thursday, which illustrate its point perfectly. Another key to prolific writing is scheduling & bundling related tasks. Why?

• For one, blogging isn’t a job, and if it is, it usually isn’t a good job. You blog when you find the time.
• Second, bundling similar tasks is easier than interrupting other ones. When I write, I’m “in the zone,” so why not write multiple posts instead of one.
• Three, ideas come and go when they please. I sometimes wake up at 3 a.m. with an idea and just need to write it down. I don’t go, “oh I’ll just write it tomorrow,” because by that time my creative influx has usually gone.
• Four, researching complex posts can be time-intensive and sometimes happens weeks in advance.

Incidentally, a good book to read (part 1) about the idea of getting into the zone, is Neil Fiore’s “The Now Habit.”

On the note of research, I drew the below graphic about a year ago, trying to visualise how I research and write for a blog (in this case, Food ‘n’ Retail). I personally think it only works when you take research very, very seriously (which you should, but which also takes time). And yes, it’s also the way I visualise innovation in firms, very much inspired by portfolio management, which I wrote about before.

Three horizons, obviously, the first being where its all still one big mess which you run into (or which is where you purposefully direct your energy at). Second, comes the processing phase where you’re trying to organise all that raw data into something useful. Third, comes the moment when the world sees your stuff and responds to it. That essentially feeds back into the organisation to produce future goods that are better. In a blogging context, that is the main reason why I value comments so much, though I’m also conflicted about them—a topic for a future post perhaps.

I think I’ve gone a little beyond the intended scope of this post. But it also illustrates that any project, be it prolific writing, or the prolific creation of any kind of art of product, requires some serious planning behind it, i.e. the timing and combining of activities for a consistent outcome.

Vincent

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Choosy is Mac software, currently in beta, and works as follows: when you click a link… it let’s you choose what browser to open it with.

I’m certainly not a typical user, but browsers hijack my time in a number of ways. For one, I tend to have a lot of tabs open in them. If the browser is running, that means that I don’t want to close it; if it is closed and a tab-saving feature is enabled, I’m hesitant to open it. Not closing a browser with many tabs, means that your browser gets heavier and heavier. Having many saved tabs, means that opening a browser will be slower and slower. Another, less prevalent thing, is extensions. I no longer use Firefox on a day-to-day basis, but when I did, the more extensions I had installed (and they can be so addictive), the slower that browser would get.

The consequence of the many-tabs problem is that I tend to use different browsers at different times. On the Mac, my no. 1 browser is Safari, because it’s the fastest to start. Camino is no. 2, because it’s faster (to start) than Firefox. Firefox is no. 3, and was, until recently, browser non grata (Firefox 3 has been a massive improvement). And I now use them interchangeably, according to which has the least tabs in it.

Quicksilver is a big aid in browser-management for me; having each browser attached to a keyboard-trigger, means that I can quickly launch one of them as needed. But it didn’t solve one problem for me, which is the default-setting in OS X. You can only set one browser as your default, which means that when you click a link in any other app, it will open my default, Safari (even if that is currently browser non grata).

And that is the problem that Choosy solves for me and perhaps for you too. And even cooler perhaps, you can set it up to open the link in the browser you are currently running. It’s still in beta (there are actually some bugs), and will eventually be be pay-ware, but test it out and you can get a discount.

This isn’t the end-all-problems solution for me, but it’s definitely a good step forward.
Vincent

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Looked at two new (for me) search-engines this week, Cuil (pronounced cool) and Keyboardr. Keyboardr is a geek-project and, like Mac’s Quicksilver, is all about navigating via a keyboard. Cuil, which I had heard of before, I was made re-aware of by a recent Stanford entrepreneurial thought leaders podcast, in which its creation and the theory behind it was discussed. I liked the idea of approaching search as a visual placement problem, as that is how humans (in my opinion) often judge information. Still, I didn’t think that Cuil was particularly innovative, from a GUI perspective. Even so, all interesting projects, as is Mahalo—human powered search.

What remains clear is Google will continue to be the thought-leader in this field, not because it is a better search, but because it is so integrated with the web.

What I’m thinking about is how search can be improved to become useful for human beings, rather than search-engine optimised websites, and the key to that seems to me to be presenting information in the right way for the right person.

Take Java tutorials, which I was looking for last week and where my priority was to find a. the right tutorial for my beginner-level and b. be taught by a good teacher. Two elements that matter here are level and quality, of which the first is easy to search for—just insert ‘beginner’—but the latter is currently being solved by Google as follows: the more it is linked too, the better it must be, which also makes sense. But it does ignore an element, discussed in the Stanford podcast, which is that unknown teachers can both be bad, but also exceptionally good.

Education online is different from education offline. The latter, if good, will be very popular, but interested people will run into a physical constraint—only so many students fit in that building. Online education, if good, will also be very popular but not have the same physical constraints, though possibly imposed price-based ones. But since we are talking good old open source Java, let us assume that price is not a factor. If everyone picks the most linked tutorial, which is also of good quality, it means that everyone potentially ends up with the same knowledge. The commoditisation of code.

But how do you produce exceptional Java-coders? These are arguably all people that walked the extra mile, either through inner potential and/or through environmental factors, such as an exceptional teacher. There’s another factor, which is that diversity can also breed innovation, by exposing people to a wide variety of ideas and perspectives, again made possibly by people working with a wide variety of tutors. Still talking Java here, but it could be applied to anything.

Search, in other words, promotes mediocrity, by leading people to pick the most common denominator, the top-result, rather than across the wideband of possible results, made possibly by the widely hyped up “long-tailed” nature of the internet.

And that is one problem that search is currently facing. How this is solved, is possibly a GUI solution, by presenting results in the right way and right variety. It could also be a human solution, such the one used by Mahalo. It could be a user-generated solution, using social-based variables through sites like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, now LinkedIN, and something that Google is also implementing (badly, I hear). It could be a technological solution, something Cuil is also working on… etc. etc.

One thing is certain, that Keyboardr, no matter how geeky and cool, won’t exactly solve this problem

Vincent

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Discipline is the mother of all innovation…!

I’ve decided to dedicate one hour per day to learning Java. If I remember correctly, Jeremy did something similar, but I’m not sure it was for this language. Reasons for doing this are:

• A good intro-language for code-dummies like me!
• Built to be cross-platform: not only PC-wise, but on mobiles as well (I plan to write about the latter in a future post).
• Plenty of resources around (more in this in a sec)!
• The intellectual challenge!
• Necessity: remember my last mantra?

After looking around for resources, of which there is no shortage, I’ve decided on a three-pronged approach:

• A lecture-series, by Swinburne University of Technology, entitled “Object Orientated Programming” (free on iTunes U)
• A book, called “Head First Java, 2nd Edition,” which got good reviews on Amazon, and is co-authored by Kathy Sierra. The lecture above recommends, “Core Java, Volume 1,” which I have to see whether that would make sense to get, in order to follow what they are saying.
• Exercise-tutorials, to learn the basics, of which there is no shortage online. I am currently a third of the way with the tutorials on Javaomatic, and will see what happens afterwards.

Since I don’t like working solo on things, I think a logical next step is to take part in projects where I can practice my l33t haXing skillZ as well as contribute on the business developmental side.

My questions to the audience are:

1. Where do you stand on Java as a language and as a standard? Personally, I have yet to come across a Java-app that I actually use day-to-day.
2. What is the one Java app that I should check out to inspire me!?
3. How easy is it to build on top of Java and learn/use other languages? What web-languages are most related to Java (yes, I am aware that Java could be a considered a web-language also)?

Enjoy the weekend!
Vincent

P.S. don’t forget to answer our poll !!!

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When in business, assume that:

• Originality is zero and copycats are a-plenty
• Ideas are worth nothing unless they can be and are acted upon
• The early bird catches the worm
• Passive research is good, active testing is better
• With customers, everything else falls into place, so sell-sell-sell !

What does this tell you about starting a business? That you, as an entrepreneur, should be in a place where two things happen quickly: technology being developed and the market being developed. If the market is there, but missing the tech: develop the tech! If the tech is there, but missing the market: develop the market!

With those deceptively simple words, I’ll leave you, but before I do, a brief note about my mantra-series: With them, I am essentially developing an entrepreneurial philosophy, which I am encouraging you to share and criticise. To repeat, mantra 1 was: get paid for what you do, rather than making that a secondary issue. Mantra 2 is: have the skills and resources to act quickly when you need to act. This particular recession, for instance, which has barely got started and will truly hit us in 2009, pushes this point home particularly strongly.

Enjoy the weekend!

Vincent

P.S. don’t forget to answer our poll !!!

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Checking out the HP Touchmark PC demo on YouTube. Watch it and then let’s discuss it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scs7DZhQ72E&hl=en&fs=1]

The question on everybody’s lips is, why didn’t Apple do this? Your first hint: look at the way the guy is standing. Few people use their PCs in that position.

I tried emulating the feeling a little, by making stupid gestures in front of my laptop. I’m pretty fit, but it did get annoying after a while. Having a touch-screen at 90 degrees, half a meter in front of you, is inelegant.

The reason the keyboard + mouse combo work so well is because it’s actually within perfect and comfortable reach by the human body. You sit, your arms bend, and you use. Like the picture below, which is the ideal typing position, as taken from Yale’s Ergonomics website. Vs. the Touchscreen, where you would sit, extend your arms and use.

The perfect touch-screen would actually be similar to an architect’s table, like on the picture below. Note that Jeff Han, godly inventor of all things multi-touch-screens, also has a similar set-up.

Why doesn’t Apple do something like this? My guess is three-fold.

1. The market is still pretty small (designers, etc.?).
2. It’s not really that amazing an innovation—as an average user, can you really do that much more with a touch-screen, vs. a keyboard + mouse?
3. And where are the manufacturing economies of scope? I made this point before, when I noted how many overlaps there on the component level for different Apple-products: a big e.g. the 13″ screen, which is now used by 3 product-lines. If Apple did this for one product-line, it would probably want to translate it to the other ones as well… but how would that work?

What do you think? Will we be seeing an Apple touch-PC (note: I say PC, not iPhone XL, which is more probable), and, if so, in what format? Also state if you’re thinking as a consumer or as a prosumer!

Vincent

P.S. don’t forget to answer our poll !!!

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Dear readers,

These last few weeks, months, you will have noticed that content on Tech IT Easy has mainly been provided by me, Vincent, with sporadic, but much appreciated interjections by other bloggers. Why this is the case differs for every person on this blog and I will not go into those reasons.

When this blog was started by Jeremy Fain, it came out of his vision, one which he expanded into building a group-blog, which, for a long time now, has managed to stay alive. Now that I’m the main blogger here, however, I find myself somewhat conflicted with following that vision, which I’ve always seen being focussed on the tech and business space (with some other content interjected).

My background is a-similar to Jeremy, because I don’t have the tech-education and other experiences that he has enjoyed. Rather I am an international citizen, with a passion for innovation and business, as well as plenty of other stuff, and I am able put a few words together about these topics. That said, my work and interests also take me out of the tech-space much of the time, which makes writing about tech more of a hypothetical exercise than anything else.

So I ask those of you that read this blog what you would prefer from my part. Would you prefer that I continue as I have, writing about anything that comes to mind, with the occasional tech-component? Or would you prefer less updates from me on Tech IT Easy (in which case, I will re-open my personal blog) and the occasional blogpost about tech and/or business?

Please answer the following poll to give me an insight, thanks!

[polldaddy poll=1120707]

Vincent

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One of the first thesis topics that was proposed to me, as part of my strategic management master, was to research why companies are located where they are. Turned out that this is some super-secret thing and there hardly is any data on it. Our assumption was that this must hence be strategically significant.

I abandoned the project, after making this super-complex mindmap about it. I decided, I just wasn’t interested enough in the topic and that the reason was probably a very boring thing, like taxes.

(click on pic to see full pdf in Scribd)

Yesterday, I had a pretty cool meeting with a software-company that has been running successfully for about 10 years. Only it was in the middle of nowhere, close to some Dutch village that you will never have heard of. After the meeting, I asked why on earth they had located there (no thesis-related motive at all)!? Turns out that when you start a company and start hiring locally, your loyal employees won’t be so loyal anymore if you decide to move to e.g. Amsterdam (about 2 hours away).

Sometimes the simplest answer can be hidden under a lot of complexity…

Vincent

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From Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, a lecture by Mohr Davidow Ventures partner, Erik Straser, on innovation in Clean Tech:

…As you’re thinking about what you’re going do, the no. 1 thing I would advise you is how to find a long wave. Some immutable trend that is gonna permeate most of the 10 years of your career, the next 15-30 years! If you sat down and thought “what are the big long waves during my lifetime?”, jumping on them as a professional will probably be one of the smartest things you ever did. Because if you did nothing, but jump in the computer-business in the late 70s, early 80s, maybe even up to the Microsoft IPO, you had a phenomenal run, 20-something years where you had a very high chance of achieving a higher position, more material income, and just being in a better place, then if you’d chose, for example, Detroit.

So you got to think what wave you’re on and how you get on the wave that makes sense for you both from an interest perspective, a geography perspective, what you want to do with your life. […] Its easiest to see [these waves] right here on campus (note: talking about Stanford School of Engineering). […] Research universities are the start of the waves.

The no. 1 thing you can do is figure out what wave are you riding, and make sure you’re not on a wave that’s going down.

He identifies three streams, according to what’s going on at Stanford: IT, which is a mature wave, biotech, and clean tech. It puts a lot of things in perspective for me, regarding all the companies, projects, and my own business ideas that I come across on a daily basis.

Focus on things that are going up, not going down! And focus on your fit with them!

Thanks to vodpod, you should be able to watch that whole scene here (if not: here).

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.747763&w=425&h=350&fv=]

Vincent

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Visitors to Tech IT Easy may have noticed a slight increase in posting-rhythm last week—I averaged at about 2 articles a day. They say that the simplest reason is often the most straightforward one—I was on a brief relaxing holiday—but that wasn’t actually the core-reason why I wrote more.

Last week, I managed to read two books, one of which I blogged about and another of which, a draft is awaiting some QC before being posted. I remember this effect when I was a youngster, reading always made me feel like writing something. Countless were the fantasy-stories I started, but never finished, back when I was reading Tolkien et al.

Luckily blogposts are shorter… during my one year stint on foodandretail.blogspot.com, where I blogged daily, I was on a constant regime of reading related articles and books at night and blogging about them soon after.

There you have it: reading more makes you a more prolific writer. I also say this now that a study revealed that reading less and watching more TV makes you unhappy—or is it that unhappy people watch more TV, I can never figure out the chicken or the egg…

So what are you waiting for, go pick up a book and make some time to read it!

Vincent

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Just briefly! Just spoke to a long-lost friend of mine who called me out of the blue and tried to explain it to him. I feel very strongly about Facebook, not because I think it’s a great service—it’s no surrogate for real friendship, that’s for sure—but because it works well for people like me who have moved around a lot internationally over the years.

Everyone I collect in Facebook—and I sometimes do feel like a coin-collector—is someone that I have shared an experience with. Whether it’s my family, kindergarden-friends in Germany (none yet, I’m afraid), highschool-friends in the Netherlands, uni-friends in the UK, bloggers on Tech IT Easy, etc. etc. I want to keep a life-line connected to all of them.

Why? Well, I have a master-plan, which is that when I die, you will get sent an invite to my funeral !!! As a matter of fact that would make a great facebook-app, I think!

Now it really is the weekend! Enjoy it, folks!

Vincent

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If that phrasing sounds a little weird, let me explain. Over these last three days, I’ve been watching Dharmesh Shah’s really great presentation on what he knows about startups, in which he talks, amongst other topics, about the attention economy vs. the wallet economy. If you haven’t already, you should really check it out!

The attention economy is based on eyeballs, on non-paying visitors to your site or users of your app that, through some magical reasoning, will translate into clicks on advertising, eventually leading to income to you the entrepreneur. I call that magical because no one I know of actually clicks on adverts.

The wallet economy is based on eyeballs with little hands reaching out of it that hold cash with which they pay you. I serve product A, it costs $20, you pay, I just gained $20 (minus cost of goods sold). The feedback is instantaneous and you don’t have to wait for X000 customers to land on your site and 0.000X% of them clicking on adverts.

This is pretty much the way the world has always worked, with the exception of newspapers and, arguably, the internet is one big newspaper (seriously lacking in editors).

It’s very easy to go the attention route, because it’s very easy to build soft-/webware in the first place. When you start a business in the real world, you make real investments, usually with the help of external funding like banks, that want to see a real return on their money. When you start a “digital” startup, you need a PC, you need to know some code, you need to spend $20 on a domain and $10-50 per month on hosting. The pressure isn’t there to really push for every dollar of income, because you aren’t feeling the banks et al. pushing down on your back. As a matter of fact, you can just set up a service, and go pursue another career, waiting for it to magically attract enough eyeballs to make you millions.

It’s nice, in theory, but it’s not what entrepreneurship is about. Entrepreneurship is like the film “There will be blood.” Life is tough, you have to fight for every drop of oil, people hate you and you will probably end up killing (=divorcing) a member of your family in the process.

And that kind of work deserves the instant gratification that cash for your product provides.

The end. Have a nice weekend, y’all!

Vincent

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It’s a fair question and one which is keeping us stunned for a moment. As I already mentioned, I have recently been engaged in a business development project, in which I, along with two others, have been developing a business case for a project in the wine-industry. The advantage is that a business plan is more or less* ready (*: I’ll write a future post on how I think such projects can be improved), and that there will be a certain base-salary. The disadvantage is that, unlike most salaried positions, I know, it will be extremely hard work and you will, apart from some physical labour, be responsible for building a market (which can be fun, but requires a certain determination). And… a big and, you have to be living in the Netherlands.

Following is the text of the advert, which we have placed on a wine-university-site:

So far we haven’t received an enthusiastic response, which leads me to believe that we have to use different platforms for our search. I put it here, even though I know that most of you aren’t in the target-audience—i.e. living in the Netherlands—and the work is also fairly low-tech: it’s a p2p—people to people—business.

But one of you maybe has some experience in this. Where would you suggest that we look for entrepreneurial folk? I’ll take the person that offers the best response out for a drink, next time they’re in Amsterdam or I”m in Paris!

Vincent

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