Archive for May, 2007

My Recommendation To Google – Let Users Ban Sites From Personal Search Results

May 18

Posted by Davis in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Marketing, Netflix, Search, Spam, Technology, TiVo, TV | Comments off

Mr. T Working at GoogleOver the last few years, Google has become essential to how I surf the web. Whether it’s their minimalistic advertising or their superior search results, Google has become a daily staple in my internet diet.

Last year, I signed up for Google’s personalized search program and after a year using the program, I’ve got to give it mixed results. This program has been a little bit controversial, because it allows Google to tie your search results to a unique profile.

Overall though, I don’t tend to worry too much about Google abusing this power and having access to filtered personalized search results, along with trend analysis on my queries, more than makes up for the small piece of my privacy that I have to give up.

In looking through my search stats, it wasn’t surprising to see TiVo and Netflix as my top two most requested results, but I was shocked to realize that I’ve searched Google over 22,000 times, in just the last year alone. The bulk of these searches were made during prime time television hours, which I found to be a little bit surprising. I’m not sure what it can tell me about my internet usage, but with 15,000 of my search queries coming during prime time hours, it highlights how much of an impact TiVo and the internet have had, on my television watching.

While Google’s personalization technology has largely improved my search experience, there is still quite a bit of room for improvement.

What I like about Google’s recommendations, is that it learns which sites I have a bias towards and will rerank my search results, according to my own personality. The downside to Google’s personalization program is that there is no way to tell Google, when they get a search woefully wrong.

The more powerful that Google has become, the more that people have tried to game the system. Whether it’s blackhat SEO tricks or coordinated Google bomb campaigns, it’s important to remember that Google’s results aren’t always unbiased. They can give a higher weighting to sites that you have already been to, but there is no way to tell them when a site is really search spam.

There are a lot of times that I am searching and an About.com article will pop up near the top. Now I know some people like the site, but I think About.com has to be one of the most worthless places on the net to find information. It is an ad factory that is highly dependent on Google for their profits. Google should give me a nuclear button that I can hit, that would permanetely ban About.com listings from any of my future search results. If enough users started banning a site, they could adjust their alogrithm to take into account the liklihood, that the result was really search spam.

Google’s About.com results are so bad, that someone actually took the time to write a Greasemonkey script, that will strip out the About.com results from Google, at the browser level. While this does offer me a way to remove About.com from my internet life, it’s really not a mass market solution and it doesn’t solve the countless other lame search results, that pollute what you’re really looking for.

I’m glad that Google is out there innovating and I see a lot of positive benefits to using their recommendation engine, but Google needs to do a better job of harnessing the power of their readers, to help make our search results even more relevant. Giving users the ability to blacklist a site from Google would be extreme, but with the SEO firms able to automate massive amounts of fake content, it is going to take the help of the masses, if Google wants to take control back.

Stock Symbols For The Web 3.0 Bubble

May 17

Posted by Davis in Technology, Web 2.0 | Comments off

Let’s face it, everyone knows that this whole internet thing is really just a fad. Sure there is lots of buzz and plenty of money chasing crazy ideas down, but mark my words, in a year or two, all this mumbo jumbo web 2.0 stuff will unravel and people will back to reading print newspapers again.

Just look at how zany the names have gotten, Vimeo, Scooop, Zooomr? It’s clear, that the Silicon Valley fat cats are doing way too many deals over happy hour. Pretty soon though, the internet will go the way of the hula hoop and the free dinners are going to get harder to come by. Since it’s only a matter of time before the public figures all of this out, my advice to my fellow bloggers is to quit waiting for the Google buy out and instead go the IPO route.

In 2000, all it took was a sock puppet and a .com in your name and you could get access to plenty of cash. (Sadly, Kozmo was too good to last :( ) Today, investors are more discriminating though. You must use complicated words like social memes, video data systems and user generated content to confuse them into believing that negative cash flow can be sustainable. If you really need the extra push, you can encourage your own customers to get in on the IPO ;) it was quite helpful to Vonage when they were unloading their shares.

Going from the private world of web 2.0, to the public markets doesn’t guarantee you success, but that doesn’t mean that you still can’t get an edge. Believe it or not, if your ticker symbol is easy to pronounce, it has a better chance of success in the markets, than one that’s a mouthful.

In 2000, there was a massive land grab and poachers bought up every domain they could think of. Some of them made money and some of them lost, but as more and more companies continue to go public, I am predicting that poaching stock ticker symbols will become the next hot market. If Webmasters are smart they would contact Go Daddy on the pronto to see if they can reserve their symbol.

Most of the good ticker symbols have already been snatched up of course, but with a little creativity and digging, I was able to find a few symbols, that would be perfect for some of the sites that I follow. The following is my list of available ticker symbols for when the web 3.0 bubble finally hits. If you are lucky enough to get out at the top, my advice is to play global warming and invest in ice cubes, they will be in short supply one day. This is an evolving list so, if you want to suggest a site, please feel free to leave a comment and I will try and find an available symbol.

BETA – Given it’s tech focus and with so many R&D companies out there, I can’t believe that someone hasn’t already registered BETA with the Nasdaq. Since it’s available, I think BetaNews should snatch it up and use it as an opportunity to launch their own early stage incubation fund. BetaNews offers great analysis on business trends day in and day out. With as many start ups that they have covered, they would have a good idea for which ones would make it and which ones would flop.

FEAR – It’s not hard to figure out why a company might not want to use FEAR for their identity on Wall St., but it would the perfect symbol for the Consumerist, if they wanted to go public. I can’t think of another publication on the net that strikes more fear into the PR industry. Forget pay per post, if the Consumerist would change their business model to pay to not post, they could fetch an attractive multiple as a Time Warner spin off.

DIGG - I wanted to find symbols that weren’t taken, but the symbol DIGG was too perfect to come up with a substitute. Besides, I think that there is still a way for Digg to get their ticker back from this early symbol poacher :evil: Right now, the company that has the symbol is named Digital Gas Inc. They trade on the pink sheets for .03 cents a share. Last fall, they partnered with a company called Techno Rubber, so they are clearly buzz saavy. They would understand the benefit of letting Digg takeover. Digg might have to give up 5% of the company to get the deal done, but if Digital Gas does not play ball, Kevin could ask each Digger to buy 100 shares and could seize control in a hostile Digg mob takeover.

GRDD – Time Warner isn’t the only one that could spin off lucrative web divisions. News Corp would realize handsome profits by spinning off MySpace to the public markets. They could even get paid again, by turning around and suing them for content violations once they were a separate company.. Whether it’s blocking outside developers from working within the community or bombarding you with spammy ads, GRDD would be an appropriate ticker symbol for what MySpace has turned into.

MEME – I don’t know what Gabe Riviera puts in the secret sauce, but influencers can’t get enough of Techmeme. It is where you go when you want to check the pulse of the blogosphere. It’s ability to separate signal from noise, makes the site a destination that you return to many times during the day. With Techmeme’s influence over early adopters, they have traffic that ad agencies will pay a premium for. Without any significant fixed costs, Gabe’s gross margins have got to look great. With a premium product and the public market’s crazy P/E valuations, MEME could easily turn $1 million in net income, into $35 million of market cap. I would be surprised if private equity was not already knocking, but at least Gabe knows that MEME is available, if he needs a back up plan.

GSUP – Everybody pretends to hate gossip, but deep down we love it. This is why Valleywag has been so successful. Sure Gawker itself could go public, but with as much inside information as these guys get, people wouldn’t think twice about giving them a billion dollars to run their own hedge fund. Sure there would be ethical considerations and issues with the SEC, but as long as they stick to the credit swap markets, it would be harder for the regulatory agencies to nail them.

TCVC – TechCrunch already has financial backing, but why make shareholders trade stock in Silicon Valley back alleys, when Michael Arrington could IPO his own venture capital firm and let shareholders trade their equity on the open markets. Arrington has already invested in several start ups and they could be rolled up into the IPO. He better hurry on this one though, Jason Calacanis has already poached MichaelArrington.com and I would not put it past him to go after TechCrunch VC’s symbol as well.

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

May 17

Posted by Davis in Site Of The Week | 5 Comments

Glass Half Empty

Most of the sites that win the Davis Freeberg site of the week award tend to be focused on the positive things in life. Whether it’s a site that gives you quick access to information, some kind of a game or a neat community that has developed, it is the ones that contribute something positive, that tend to do the best in the voting. This week was a little bit of an exception though. Instead of a feel good winner, we had a dark horse canidate take the weekly award.

This week’s winner was the complaint generator. The site allows you to enter in anyone’s name and it will randomly “customize” a complaint against that person or business. The site was originally created by Scott Pakin as a gag, but I’m sure that there are plenty of frustrated customer service reps, who didn’t get the joke. When I entered in my own information on the site, here is the letter that it sent me.

Okay, let’s do it. Let’s exercise all of our basic rights to the maximum. One of the first facts we should face is that Mr. Davis Freeberg wants us to believe that we can solve all of our problems by giving him lots of money. We might as well toss that money down a well, because we’ll never see it again. What we will see, however, is that at this point in the letter, I had planned to tell you that the pragmatist position is that stereotyping and victim-blaming is not more respectable when it is performed by a member of the group being demeaned. However, one of my colleagues pointed out that he has made a big mistake. Hence, I discarded the discourse I had previously prepared and substituted the following discussion, in which I argue that Mr. Freeberg wants us to emulate the White Queen from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, who strives to believe “as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. Then again, even the White Queen would have trouble believing that honesty and responsibility have no cash value and are therefore worthless. I prefer to believe things that my experience tells me are true, such as that Mr. Freeberg does not tolerate any view that differs from his own. Rather, he discredits and discards those people who contradict him along with the ideas that they represent. Mr. Freeberg knows how to lie. It’s too bad he doesn’t yet understand the ramifications of lying. Imagine a world in which he could create new (and reinforce existing) prejudices and misconceptions whenever he felt like it. I would like to go on, but I do have to keep this letter short. So I’ll wrap it up by saying that Mr. Davis Freeberg finds it easier to discuss other people’s problems than his own.

What’s funny about the letter is that if I really received this as an email or a comment, I would think that it was real and that I had actually upset someone. The letter goes off on a few tangents, but it is ambiguous enough, that it would make me wonder who I had offended. While the site is really a joke, I could see how people could take this seriously, if they received it from someone that they didn’t know. I can also see how the social networks could use this site as a new weapon against businesses that they are upset at.

A few years ago, I never would have thought that an online mob was possible, but it’s starting to become increasingly common for mobs to form at places like Digg and use their numbers to go after businesses that they are upset with. These mobs extract their own brand of justice by crank calling companies and posting slams against them in online forums. If one of these mobs got ahold of the automatic complaint generator, things could really get dicey. There are many businesses that are legally required to respond to complaints and if someone started snail mail spamming complaints, they could come up with some really crazy letters, that would be hard to respond to. I’m not advocating that someone should do this, but I still bet that we do see someone use the complaint generator in this way.

Overall, I found the complaint generator to be very entertaining, even if I could not understand half of what it randomly writes. Congratulations to Scott Pakin on winning this week’s site of the week contest. The nominations for next week’s site of the week are listed below. You can vote in the side bar. If you know of any sites that should be considered for nomination, please feel free to email them to me at Davis at DavisFreeberg.com and I will add them to the pool of weekly canidates.

Veegle

Every Stock Photo

Domain Hacks

Sinkin’ Soon

May 12

Posted by Davis in VOD | 2 Comments

All Hands On Deck

May 10

Posted by Davis in Photos | Comments off

All Hands On DeckAll Hands On Deck Hosted on Zooomr

TiVo Awarded Patent For Password That Is So Hard To Guess It Will Outlive Your Hard Drive

May 10

Posted by Davis in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Technology, TiVo, TV, VOD | 38 Comments

You'll Take My TiVo From My Cold Dead HandsTiVo’s dust up with Dish may get all of the ink love, but in reality, it represents a very small part of their patent portfolio. Between their trademark filings, their patent applications and their aggressive open market acquisitions, TiVo has managed to build a very impressive intellectual property portfolio around their technology. They haven’t always had the cash to defend this moat, but with damages from TiVo’s potential patent award against Dish, now up to $130 million 8) it could free up a lot of cash to go after other infringers, if Dish loses their appeal.

Some of TiVo’s patents have obvious applications and some of them are really held more for defensive purposes, but it’s the bizarre ones that I find most interesting and on Tuesday, TiVo was issued a patent for a method of locking down hard drives, that involves creating a password, that is so hard to guess, it would take longer than the expected life of your hard drive for someone to crack. According to the patent document, the method is described as the following.

“An authentication system for securing information within a disk drive to be read and written to only by a specific host computer such that it is difficult or impossible to access the drive by any system other than a designated host is disclosed. While the invention is similar in intent to a password scheme, it significantly more secure. The invention thus provides a secure environment for important information stored within a disk drive. The information can only be accessed by a host if the host can respond to random challenges asked by the disk drive. The host’s responses are generated using a cryptography chip processing a specific algorithm. This technique allows the disk drive and the host to communicate using a coded security system where attempts to break the code and choose the correct password take longer to learn than the useful life of the disk drive itself.”

At first the whole thing seems pretty silly to me, but when I think about it, I see two ways that TiVo could take this technology.

The Glass Half Empty – It’s pretty clear that the studios don’t like consumers having control over their our content. When TiVo first introduced TiVo to Go, there were rumblings that Hollywood would sue them over it. Since than, this rhetoric has turned out to be nothing but empty threats. Nonetheless, TiVo was forced to make compromises. When it comes to HDTV, the studios have drawn a line in the sand and consider it sacred. They will not allow consumers to take HDTV content to go (even though we have fair use rights to what we’ve paid for :( ) Is it that TiVo is in a shakedown with the studios and has implemented these protections to make sure you can’t just unplug your external drive and give it to your friends or is this the secret sauce behind the DRM that prevents you from taking Amazon movies and watching it on an iPod? When it comes to these issues, TiVo has been forced to walk a fine line between pleasing their customers and keeping the studios off their backs and while there are certaininly a wide variety of ways that you could use this technology, it could also be abused in the wrong hands.

The Glass Half Full – From the very start, security has been a big focus for TiVo. They want their customers to be safe. From the get go, they knew that they had to build a network where people didn’t have to worry about pop up viruses. You hear a lot about different hacks on TiVo, but you never hear about anyone actually being able to hack into TiVo’s internal systems, so that they can take control of other people’s DMRs. A secure connection between a consumer and TiVo is not just essential for their customer’s privacy, but it’s a requirement for allowing TiVo to utilize transaction related advertising. There will always be mischief makers who want to wreck havoc on a system, but if you can lockdown the content, it will go a long way towards preventing people from doing damage.

I think that this is a very creative patent, but in all honesty, I don’t know enough about the Technology behind this patent, to have any idea of what this could really be used for. The real answer probably lies in a grey area that exists outside either explanation. Given TiVo’s history of standing up for consumer rights, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Security on a DMR is just as important as security on a computer and my non-technical guesstimate is, that this patent represents technology that was implemented a long time ago. It’s kind of a quirky idea, but I’ve come to expect nothing less from the people who reinvented television.

Watch Out For Killer Roombas!

May 10

Posted by Davis in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Marketing, Robots, Technology, TiVo | 3 Comments

Skeptics tried to call me a conspiracy nut, when I exposed how far TiVo is willing to go, in order to accomplish their master plan of controlling a robot army, but the skeptics were wrong and I now have video evidence of this plot in action! The YouTube clip embedded above was emailed to me by an unnamed source, who has been working deep undercover at one of the iRobot factories. It is perhaps, the most terrifying four minutes of video that has ever been uploded to YouTube, but it offers undisputable proof that TiVo has been quietely plotting their robot invasion.

The movie is actually a sequel to an earlier segment, but this Roomba strikes back clip is far more entertaining. In the first clip, Roomba fell in love with an obsolete vacuum and learned an important lesson about love, loss and the price of having to serve demanding human masters. In this clip, it is the humans who learn what happens when you abuse our robot overlords.

Recently, I was actually given a Scooba and I have been excited about trying it out, but after seeing this video, I’m thinking that it may be safer for me to stick with iRobot’s pool cleaner and just use it for my bathtub instead. On the other hand though, if I could figure out the backdoor hack that tells Roomba how to fetch me a beer, the risk of being attacked in my sleep may be worth the benefits . . .

Davis Freeberg’s Site Of The Week

May 10

Posted by Davis in Site Of The Week, Technology, Web 2.0 | Comments off

FreeSoundFreeSound Hosted on Zooomr

It’s a good thing I’m not a paid blogger because I do terrible with deadlines. Once again, this week’s site of the week is a little bit late in coming out. Rather then try and bombard you with all the sites I need to get caught up on, I think I’m just going to make the site of the week less structured and will sneak in the few I’m missing at irregular intervals throughout the year.

This week’s belated winner was The Free Sound Project. Free sound is a great site, where it’s users can upload sound effects and then allow others to use the effects under various creative commons licenses.

Lately, I’ve been getting more and more involved in video and one of the things that is a huge pain in the neck is having to track down sound effects that you want to use in various clips. There are a number of paid services where you can pay royalties to use their content, but most of the services look pretty spammy and I’ve got a suspicion that these sites are very trustworthy and are using a little blackhat SEO magic to get to the top of Google’s search results.

When it comes creating videos, I’m anything but a pro, so the prospect of paying someone, just so that 10 of my friends can watch a vacation video, isn’t really all that appealing. At the same time though, it can be really frustrating to want a certain sound, but not be able to locate one for free. That is where the Free Sound project steps in. With most of the clips that are uploaded to the site, all you need to do is give attribution to the individual who originally recorded it and you can mix, mash and burn to your heart’s content.

What’s really nice about the site is that because they have such a diverse community, you’ll find all kinds of neat effects that would be harder to find on the more focused paid services. It’s also very easy for users to contribute sounds to the site. Unlike stock video footage or even photographs of newsworthy events, you don’t have to be in the right place at the right time to get an effect that someone might be interested. You don’t even need expensive equipment, you just need a sound recorder and a healthy interest to classify and upload various noises that you come across during your day.

Of all the features that our included on the site, I had the most fund playing with their random sound button. Given how many sound clips that they have, you never know what to expect and it’s a good way to find new sounds for videos, that you wouldn’t have thought of using otherwise.

Congratulations to the Free Sound Project for winning this weekend’s week’s week and half’s site of the week. The nominations for next week’s site of the week are listed below. You can vote in the sidebar. If you’d like to nominate a site for consideration, send me an email at Davis (at) DavisFreeberg.com and I will add it to the list of nominees.

Stockpickr

Weird America

Complaint Generator

Pyromaniac Builds Rube Goldberg Contraption

May 5

Posted by Davis in VOD | Comments off

My Robot Can Beat The Snot Out Of Your Robot

May 3

Posted by Davis in Robots, Technology | 1 Comment

Kondo Robot

There are some pretty weird things that show up on the internet and just when I think that technology can’t get any more bizarre, I find out that scientists have created a synthetic form of snot that will help robots distinguish between one smell or another.

We already have a number of devices that are used to analyze scents, but apparently researchers have found that by using a synthetic form of mucus, robots can better distinguish between one scent and another.

Most of the applications using this technology are more for business purposes, than for consumers, but if you consider the potential for this technology, there are more than a few practical uses for a smellbot.

We already have carbon monoxide filters that warn us when there are gas leaks in a home, but what if we could customize these mini robot canaries to detect scents of other hazardous materials? It probably wouldn’t be popular in most living rooms, but if you could build sensors that could also detect things like sulfur or nerve gas, it could help save lives at factories, mines or even public areas like subways and airports.

We could also see homeland security take in interest in the technology to make more advanced bomb snifing robots. If you’ve ever gotten a chance to see police K9 units in action, it’s really impressive. Those dogs are smart and if you are a criminal on the run, they can be scary as hell. The problem of course is that the dogs are expensive to train and they can take a lot of work keeping them well cared for.

The most promising application that we could see though, is in the healthcare industry. As they are refining this technology, scientists are trying to come up with a way to electronically smell funky body odors, in order to spot eye infections, skin diseases and urinary issues.

Researchers think it will be two years before we see synthetic snot start to appear on the market, but if this technology is as effective as they say it is, the uses for the technology will only be limited by our imagination.