Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

Both of my last two companies have been involved in the aggregation of large data sets.

At the company I co-founded, Ten Ton Labs, we collected and normalized music reviews from across the web to support our music search engine, Squishr.

Our original plan, however, was to collect all reviews, of anything and everything, and then build an application that analyzed and tracked various metrics from the data to find out how consumers felt about certain products. We scaled the idea back to focus on music to allow us to continue building the underlying review platform and to have an easier application to implement on top of it to prove it out.

At my current company, Collaborative Drug Discovery we collect huge amounts of data about experiments in the field of chemistry (there are about thirty million known chemical compounds) and allow people to search through the data in various ways, as well as add their own data. Our users can use our toolset to keep their data private, but search across the aggregated dataset.

Both of these companies have a lot in common. When I was at Ten Ton Labs, our music search engine held a huge amount of short-term value for us. It was the cool thing that we could show to investors to get them excited about the company, and it gave us attainable short-term goals to go after. CDD is very similar, we currently put most of our effort into our cheminformatics application that runs on top of our data, because it’s what we sell to people and show to our investors.

Long term though, I don’t think that our music search engine or the CDD cheminformatics app is really where most of our value lies.

It lies in the cloud.

A huge amount of value is created by building tools to make it easy to get data into the cloud, and to make it easy for people to process the data and get it back out in a manner that they’re used to. Once you have those tools, especially if you’re allowing people to build applications and communities on top of your data, you’re creating real value.

You’ve created an app that people will come back to everyday to see what’s new.

And you’ve created an ecosystem around your data that won’t allow it to die. People will build tools to interact with it in ways that you never even thought of, and again, more value will be created because of it.

I think that building a platform for data like this, not just a one-off application, is where the opportunity for huge value creation eventually lies.

Today marks the official beta launch of Triggit, the tech side of which is run by my friend Ryan Tecco (who co-founded Ten Ton Labs with me a few years ago).

So what’s a Triggit? It’s an easy way to insert images, videos, or text links into your blog, without downloading or installing any software.

All you have to do is add one line of code to your blogging software template. You can then use a cool Javascript based tool to insert objects into your blog on the fly. As you can see in the picture below, the Triggit interface just overlays itself on the top of your site to allow you to insert things:

You just select what type of object you want to insert and then drop it into the page wherever you want. For instance, I’ve used Triggit to insert this image, of Ryan dressed like a cow from Halloween a few years ago, into this post by searching for it on Flickr through their interface, and simply dropping it in below:

This is a game-changing sort of tool that will make your life as a blogger much easier. If anyone wants to try it out, I have 300 invite codes to the beta to hand out. Just use the access code ‘kurt’ when you sign up.

Update: More coverage at TechCrunch , GigaOm, and WebWare.

Wow:

MacBook Air is 0.16″ to 0.76″

There must have been some amazing engineering that went into that thing. I’m already drooling over it. I’m assuming that we’ll see more info at http://www.apple.com/macbookair/ soon.

A quick reminder to all of my friends out there as yet another Macbook Pro hard drive bites the dust at our office. I can only imagine that Apple put Time Machine into Leopard specifically because so many of these things crap out.

(Image From Makezine)

I’ve been on vacation down in LA for the last week.

A couple of days ago, my friend James pointed to the horizon and said something along of lines of, “look at all of the smoke from the fires up North.”

Well, I had no idea how bad things were until today, when I was driving back up I-5 and literally 10 minutes didn’t go by where I didn’t see a caravan of 5-10 firetrucks heading South. This was over the course of a 5 hour drive, so I figure that I saw about 200 firetrucks.

We also drove just East of the fires under two lines of helicopters, one that was flying in and dropping water on the blaze, and another that was returning to load up their water tanks again. The suburbs that we could see from the highway all had police cars stationed in front of them to keep people from trying to return to their homes.

It was more than a bit surreal.

Hopefully they get the fires out soon and everyone down there is safely evacuated.

Scary, scary stuff.

A recent disturbing trend that I’ve noticed is that more and more programmers I run into seem to be really bad at math. At the very least, I’m starting to think that a few semesters of calculus in college wouldn’t have hurt anyone.

Example 1:

Mint is a financial website that recently won first place at the Techcrunch 40 conference here in San Francisco. It aggregates your bank accounts and tells you how you can save money. While checking it out his evening I came across this, which, incidentally, is the same thing that it’s been telling me since I signed up:

Come on Mint, this is the core feature of your website. (I’m not counting the account sign in and aggregation piece, as they seem to contract with Yodlee to do that.) How hard is it to properly calculate the above value?

I hate it when a startup spends so long on design that they forget to write solid code. People aren’t going to come back if you can’t even get this right.

Furthermore, check out the account that they want me to switch over:

Where did they even begin to pull these numbers from? They want me to switch an account with no money on it from a lower rate card to a higher rate card in order to save $278 a year.

At this point I’ve stopped thinking about math though, and starting thinking about all of the security holes that are probably in this site if they got something this fundamental wrong.

Unfortunately, there’s no way in their interface to cancel my account. Wonderful:

These just seem like basic, basic things to me. I don’t even know how you say that you’re in beta when things like this don’t work.

I think that I actually had one of the first batch of Twitt(e)r accounts months and months ago, but I’ve never really used it. It looks like Twitterrific might change that, at least for a few days, or until I get bored with it again.

Check me out at http://twitter.com/kurt.

I’m not sure what to make of my experience with United today. I’ve given them a good review on this blog before, but today made me remember why I hate dealing with them.

The story starts last night when I sleepily booked two tickets to Chicago from San Francisco for later this month. This morning when I woke up I realized that I used my girlfriend’s nickname on the ticket instead of her proper legal name. No problem, I thought, I’ll just call up and have them change the first name on the ticket.

That’s when the fun began. After I spent fifteen minutes navigating the robot phone system to get to a (hard to understand, off-shored) person, I was told that I couldn’t change the name on a ticket without a $100 change fee.

A $100 change fee.

To change a first name.

I wasn’t aware that this is what the change fee was for. I can understand charging me if I want to change to a different flight, but why would they try to charge me $100 to change the first name of the person on the flight. The only explanation I could come up with is that they were intentionally trying to irritate me.

So i did the only sensible thing. I hung up and called back under the assumption that the first person was crazy. (But not before checking on gethuman.com before calling back to figure out how to avoid the robot phone system.)

This rep informed of the same thing that the last rep did, but luckily, I had another out. The customer service rep on the phone informed me that since I had purchased the ticket within the last 24 hours, the ticket could be canceled with a full refund and rebooked. That made sense, so I told her to go ahead and do that.

Unfortunately, due to the magical airline ticket pricing system that we all know and love, the price of the exact same flight had increased by $96 since 12 hours before. And there was a $15 fee for booking over the phone.

Wonderful.

So I had two choices, change the name and pay a $100 change fee, or cancel the ticket and pay the $96 + $15 difference.

Obviously, neither of these options appealed to me to change a first name.

So the first tact I took was to try to get them to waive the change fee. This has worked for me before on a number of airlines (Continental, Frontier, etc) and I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal, since this wasn’t really a big change to the ticket.

After being put on hold for 5 minutes, I was informed that that couldn’t be done.

I would love to personally thank the supervisor who made that decision.

Eventually what I ended up doing was to have the original ticket refunded and book in a different time that was only $15 more expensive then the original flight that I booked.

So far this cost me $15 and an hour of my time.

To change a first name.

And I ended up with a less convenient flight.

Absurd.

The final slap in the face came just now, when I checked back on United’s site. It seems that the pricing fairies have set the price of the flight that I wanted back down to the price of the flight that I booked today.

Thanks, United. I’m done flying your friendly skies.

I’ve often wondered how a brand new college graduate can come in to a company and show them how to manage their people better. I always figured that it was just some sort of a really good scam. Good to see that Joel has figured out how works. Now we just have to figure out why people keep falling for it…

Does anyone out there really watch video blogs? I mean outside of the closed circle that is the tech community? This is a serious question. I saw the brewing fight over video blogging over at zefrank and it made me wonder who really watches video blogs.

I’ve watched RocketBoom before and it’s not good. I can’t imagine showing it to my mom, or brother, or friend, or anyone I like really, unless I wanted to annoy them. So who are these 350,000 people a day watching it? I’ve been trying to break it down, and here’s what I’ve got so far:

• 20 people: friends of the creators
• 10,000 people: people that read something about it on a blog, started a video, and then closed the window after 15 seconds
• 339,980 people: ?

That’s the best I can do.

Furthermore, it looks like the creator of RocketBoom says that he gets 15,000 phone distributions of his content each day. That’s already more than my numbers come out to, so I decided to go try to watch RocketBoom on my phone, as maybe it’s better on there.

Needless to say, it reset my Treo when I tried to start the video. I can’t really blame Rocketboom for that though, as everything seems to reset my Treo.

So finally I decided to go watch Rocketboom one more time, just to see if I remembered wrong. Maybe it really is more interesting than I remember and maybe 350,000 people a day would really watch it.

I got through about 15 seconds before I closed the window.