Self-Aggrandizement: Techmology Archives

Take Dictation
Filed December 14, 2009 11:45 AM.

The problem with choosing the size and shape of an electronic device - what's commonly called 'form factor' - is that it's inevitably an act of compromise. Make something big enough for a keyboard and sizeable screen, for example, and it's too big to pocket. Make it little enough to cart around, and there's simply not enough space to squeeze in a keyboard and resonably-sized display.

Some devices - iPhones or tablets - try and work their way around the problem by faking one element for another: the screen doubles as the keyboard and the mouse. Others - like the new Droid, with its slide-out keyboard - approach the problem like origami, looking to tuck elements behind each other when not in use.

And, invariably, those approaches suck. Another approach - voice recognition - sucks, too. But it sucks in different and complementary enough ways that, when paired with the indigenous suckiness of a device's design, it often hugely improves the overall experience.

That's certainly the case with Dragon Dictation, a new app for the iPhone. The idea is simple: you speak into the iPhone, and, within a second or two, the phone uploads the data, transcribes it to text, then displays it on your phone. You can use the iPhone's software keyboard to tweak any mistakes, though, to my surprise, the accuracy of the translation, even in noisy settings, is surprisingly good. Then, with the touch of a button, you can transfer the transcribed text to an email, text message, or to the clipboard for pasting somewhere else.

For the first time, I can now enter an entire email's worth of content in less than ten minutes of laborious thumbing.

Which isn't to say that voice transcription will be replacing my laptop keyboard any time soon. While the human ear scrubs out the 'ers', 'uhms', and non-grammatical structures that populate at least my own speech, Dragon isn't nearly so kind. And, similarly, while conversational speech tends to move only forward, typing is usually full of long pauses, and even regressions, moving backwards to edit prior fragments.

The writing I can do with text-to-speech, then, is well less than perfect. But, as compared to what I can accomplish with the iPhone's keyboard, it's an improvement nearly impossible to overstate. And, at the moment at least, the price is right: download it for the introductory $0 price, and give it a whirl yourself.

[Nota bene: You may see a lot of negative reviews on the iTunes site, mainly from people unhappy that the app uploads the names of your contacts to the Dragon servers. I suspect this is a tempest in a teapot, as Dragon uploads only the names, not any further info like emails or telephone numbers. If you have a Facebook account, you've already given up way more information to a company that's repeatedly proved itself to be way less competent in respecting privacy concerns. In the end, it turns out most people are willing to give up a little privacy for a lot of functionality - Dragon can spell the names of your friends and colleagues right if it has a list to help educate guesses - and for most people that's a reasonable trade.]

Unripe Berry
Filed July 9, 2009 9:52 AM.

[Another of my VC newsletters from 1999, this one waxing on about a piece of technology I'd just picked up at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: a RIM 850, the very first Blackberry.

Using it around New York, the response from my friends at investment banks, hedge funds, and law firms was unanimous: clearly, nobody outside of the world of high tech would ever, ever carry something like that.]

Yesterday, I received about two hundred email messages. To most normal people, that seems like an ungodly number. But from many people involved in internet businesses, the response is "yeah, that's about right," or "only two hundred?" Of those two hundred, three were spam and about twenty were newsletters and other updates. But at least half required some sort of timely response.

Regardless of the number, email has become central to my way of business. And most people that I talk with say the same thing. Many executives of internet firms even prefer sending email over talking on the phone. The difficulty, however, is that phones are available to executives on the go; email, by and large, isn't.

I recently, however, discovered a solution: the RIM 850. About the size of a standard 2-way pager, the RIM sports a slightly larger than usual screen and a tiny Qwerty keyboard. But packed into the small black gadget is a lot of functionality. The RIM is a PDA, sends and receives email, and browses the web.

While the PDA is fairly simple, it does everything I need. And despite the keyboard's small size, typing emails by thumb is surprisingly fast and comfortable. Unlike the Palm VII, coverage is nationwide, and because the 850 runs on a pager network, building penetration is quite good. The 850 is also better than the Palm VII for three other reasons. First, the 850 can check your existing POP account, instead of requiring a special yourname@palm.net address. Second, the 850 checks mail continually, and, like a pager, notifies you instantly, by tone or vibration, when you receive new mail. Third, the 850 is priced on a flat fee, equal to the Palm VII's second cheapest plan. My two hundred messages would more than burn through an entire month's worth of the Palm's top plan in less than a day.

The little web browser is also surprisingly good. The GoWeb browser strips everything but text from pages and then compresses them for faster transmission. You can check headlines, stock prices and sports scores, get driving directions, and even search the yellow pages from the palm of your hand.

The best part, however, is that, by your instant responses, you appear to be a workaholic. You seem to always be waiting by your computer, when, in fact, you could be anywhere at all. Which is why I was glad to see that the RIM network has full coverage throughout Hawaii.

The New New Thing
Filed July 7, 2009 11:42 AM.

[My old Sharkbyte partner, David Fischer, recently emailed to say that one of his current tech companies is launching a newsletter, and to ask if I'd saved any of the similar newsletters I wrote back in my tech VC days for inspiration.

Indeed I had. As my 'bleeding edge' thinking from 1999 now seems painfully quaint, I thought I'd reprint a few of the editions here over the next few days. First up: the inside scoop on a brand new search engine, Google.]

When users open their browsers, they're largely doing it to gather news and information. In fact, according to recent research by e-Stats, 87.8% of users engage in information gathering, while around 80% are involved in the loosely related activities of research or surfing. The next categories, like online gaming, chat, and shopping are considerably less popular - 30% or less of web users engage in them.

The common thread in the top three activities - information gathering, research and surfing - is a need for search. Users start out with a vague idea of what they're looking for, and usually (about 85% of the time) they head straight to a search engine to find what they want. Most of those searchers head to Yahoo, others to Excite or Lycos, while particularly web savvy searchers sometimes head to Metacrawler, which aggregates the results of the top search engines. All of these searches, however, have the same shortcoming - they only search based upon the "relevance" of the page - in essence, the number of times your search terms appears on the page.

Enter Google. Google, along with relevance, uses quality in rating pages. A Google search, then, doesn't just give you some pages that contain your search terms - it gives you the best pages that contain your search terms. Of course, the web is much too large to rate every page for quality, so Google uses a fairly clever strategy - start with a collection of quality web sites, and define a quality site as one linked to by other quality sites. It might sound circular, but the results are surprising. They're so good, in fact, that Google has an "I'm feeling lucky" button which takes you directly to the first search result. The algorithm works so well that the first result actually has the information you need the vast majority of the time.

No, we don't own a stake in Google. But we do watch the web very closely - that's our job. After seeing how many of our friends still use older search engines, we decided to pass on what we've learned. It just might save you a bit of time and sanity.

Well Thought Out
Filed August 25, 2008 2:29 PM.

I enjoy immensely the large number of TV commercials explaining that television is going all-digital at the end of the year, which refer anyone with an analog-only TV and no converter box to various web sites for more information.

Because, really, the vast majority of people with antique bunny-eared black-and-white TVs also have computers with fast broadband connections right nearby.

Pop Quiz
Filed August 9, 2008 5:18 PM.

"IF U LOVE ME AS I LOVE U THEN I & U WILL MAKE 1 OF 2"

This quotes is:

A text message.
A Prince lyric.
A verse by Vermont's Ebenezer White, written in 1782, as a marriage proposal to Lucy Packard, his future bride.

Yes, number three it is.

Which seems to me a reasonable counterpoint to all of this 'IM and text shorthand is killing the English language' alarmism.

Turns out, we're not nearly as original or influential as we'd like to think.

Of a Feather
Filed June 25, 2008 9:37 PM.

A month or so back, I was having drinks with one of the founders of Napster, discussing the future of the movie business.

In the parallel world of music, things look fairly gloomy - CD sales are down, digital revenues don't make up the gap, and piracy runs as rampant as ever. Yet thus far in the movie world, the problems have been far less severe.

Most analysts, like my Napster friend, credit the difference to technology - from bandwidth issues (stealing a movie takes way longer than a song or album) through to how media is actually consumed (computers and iPods have quickly become where most people choose to consume music anyway, whereas the average viewer would still prefer to see a film on their television, and doesn't have an easy way to get the digital download across those last twenty feet).

I, on the other hand, contended that movies' relative success stems from a deeper cause: people think movies are worth the money, and think albums are hugely overpriced.

Yesterday, I ran across a recent study that backs my claim. Consumers, asked about perceived value for their money, placed movies in the next to highest position - second only to chicken. Albums, on the other hand, essentially fell off the bottom of the list.

In the world of music, some percentage of people already pay for downloads (hence iTunes' success), and others never will. The dividing line, I suspect, is whether each believes a $9.99 price is too high for an album.

In the world of film, then, where a vastly higher percentage fall on the 'worth the money' side of that line, I'm increasingly convinced digital download revenue models can make sense.

Sure, the same technology problems that hold back film piracy equally hold back legitimate sales. And figuring out what those digital download revenue models actually look like is probably three or so years of ugly trial and error away. But there's light at the end of the tunnel.

At which point, all we'll need to do is to find a way to download chicken.

Schooled
Filed March 9, 2008 1:10 PM.

While Will Hunting may think an Ivy League degree is "$150,000 wasted on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library," it turns out, he's wrong. By now, in fact, you don't even need the buck fifty. Because as of a few months back, Yale has put a handful of its best-loved courses online.

I've been taking advantage myself for the past week or two, downloading sessions of RLST 145 - Introduction to the Old Testament - to my iPhone, and listening on my way to work. But there are several others that look good, too, and two classes that I can highly recommend from past experience: PHIL 176 - Death, with Professor Shelly Kagan - which I much enjoyed my sophomore year, and PSYC 110 - Introduction to Psychology - a great survey course now taught by Paul Bloom, my favorite professor of any at Yale.

Does Not Compute
Filed January 29, 2008 2:10 PM.

Extended warranties are a crock of shit.

Sure, short-term warranties make sense, protecting you from manufacturing defects that appear only after a few weeks of use.

But any product used longer before needing an initial repair is invariably just hitting the first of many stops along the slow and painful road to total malfunction and breakdown.

I say this based not just on past experience, but on current. Because, in the last six months, my MacBook Pro had had its logic board, video RAM, left fan, right fan, hard drive, and display replaced. Essentially, the only thing I have left of the original computer is the chassis and keyboard. And, still, the damn thing crashes every ten minutes.

By now, the time wasted waiting for each of those restarts has added up to hours of lost work worth many times over the cost of a new computer. But with AppleCare extended warranty in hand, I've been loath to give up completely.

As my computer has frozen twice while drafting even this short posting, however, I think I'm finally biting the bullet and upgrading. Or, rather, cross-grading, as I'll be replacing the MacBook Pro with an essentially identical (albeit 0.2GHZ faster) MacBook Pro. Some of us never learn.

Shipped Back
Filed July 10, 2007 6:09 PM.

"The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same."
- Plutarch

Yesterday afternoon, I picked up my laptop from Tekserve, after it had spent a week at Apple Service Headquarters.

Or rather, I picked up a laptop. Because, while the shell was still original, the logic board, video RAM, left and right fan, hard drive and screen had all been replaced.

Still, mine or not, for the first time in months, at least the damn thing works.

Bigsighted
Filed May 16, 2007 5:03 PM.

People frequently ask me why I'd be willing to put so much about myself online. But the truth is, there's doubtless a lot about you online as well. The difference: in my case, the stuff that goes up - or, at least, the stuff you'll easily find - is under my control.

Let's face it: a preemptory Googling precedes nearly any business or personal meet-up these days. And if the first page for your name is littered with drunken frat pictures and embarrassing high school musical credits - or, worse, no confirmation of your existence at all - you're up the proverbial shit's creek, without so much as a digital paddle.

What you need, then, is some way to put yourself forward in the best possible light, and a way to get that putting forward indexed atop the search result heap.

What you need, in short, is the newly crafted bigsight. A "directory of people doing good work", bigsight creates user profiles that index remarkably high (mine is number four for "joshua newman", despite a slew of competing Joshua's), yet leaves the content under users' direct control.

And while you might not, in all fairness, be doing much good work at all, you're luckily still basking in my second-hand goodness glow. So, while the site is still by invitation only, for the next week or two, using "self-aggrandizement" as a passcode will get you through the gate.

Head to bigsight, and start building ASAP, lest your shitty digital presence continue to weigh down upon your offline life.

Lost in Translation
Filed May 5, 2007 2:28 PM.

For the past year or so, we've been using Vonage for our business phones, and we couldn't be more pleased with how well it's worked thus far. Aside from cheap, reliable service, Vonage has provided a slew of bells and whistles we've much appreciated - first and foremost, emailing us voice mail messages as .WAV files.

And while that's worked quite well, sadly, my trusty Blackberry Pearl is unable to open those audio files. So I was quite excited when, a few weeks back, Vonage added a new voice mail feature: emails now include not just the .WAV, but also a transcription of the message in the body of the email.

Ninety percent of the time, the transcription is spot on. But as the service is clearly the result of offshore outsourcing, every so often, messages come back in a language halfway between English and the writer's native tongue.

Observe this email from yesterday, to my colleague Chris, and from Jeremiah at PostWorks, the post-production facility we're using to finish the trailer for Naming Number Two. The actual message basically says that the tape is 24p, and they want to make sure that works for the editor. The transcription reads.

Hey Chris this is my gosh we're supposed to work calling you regarding this this down converse That's questions natural that sort tape this is true 24 P. So in order to do it down whereas in we would have to run it at 2398 I'm wondering if this is going to work for you or but but what do you make of all this we were expecting a true 24 PE for the dog person. if you get a chance give me a call [phone number] again it's my gas burner from post works and and so she emailed as well as if we catch either take it by

Very naaaice.

Web Week: Online Eats
Filed February 5, 2007 4:46 PM.

[Okay, so it's going to be less like 'Web Week' and more like like 'Web Two or Three Weeks'. Whatever. I have more sites to share, and I'm not stopping just because my lack of blogging time has made the series title increasingly inaccurate.]

If you live in New York City, you doubtless already use Menu Pages. The idea is simple: restaurant menus, online. The execution, however, is astounding: the site has a menu for every single New York restaurant I've tried, and that includes all of the high-end, not a chance they would hand out paper copies or publish their menus online themselves sort of places. I'm not sure how they do it, I'm not sure how they make money, and I don't really care.

Of late, they've expanded to a handful of other cities, and it seems they're hoping to target even more. And while, from what I hear from my far-flung contacts, the site hasn't sunk in roots quite so deep in those additional locations, I suspect it's only a matter of time.

Slightly newer, though equally on the rise, and targeting a more national audience (albeit a handful of cities at a time) from the get-go is SeamlessWeb, a web-based food delivery service. Like MenuPages, however, it's not the idea but the execution that makes this site stand out. Unlike the countless others I've seen in the space in years past, this one actually, consistently works.

Their listing of restaurants is growing fast (and already surprisingly complete here in New York), their site is easy to use, and their process (which, for example, generates an email only after the restaurant has confirmed the order themselves) is well designed to ensure reliability.

Best of all, the site solves the two biggest pains of delivery: they accept credit cards (rather than just wads of cash) at all of the restaurants, and they understand exactly what you want to order (even with customization of individual items) without your yelling into the phone to make yourself heard over restaurant din.

Toss in OpenTable for web-based reservations (especially at tough-to-book restaurants, as Maitre d's often lie about booking to make hot spots seem even hotter), and you've got the restaurant site trifecta. Foodies of the web, place your bets.

Web Week: Geni.com
Filed January 31, 2007 4:47 PM.

MySpace is so 2005. And Friendster? Does anyone even remember when that was cool?

Ah, yes, social networking sites. How quickly they catch on, and how equally quickly they fade away. Inherent to them is what I think of as the Pokemon Problem: at first, people set out to 'collect' all of their friends. They use the site frequently, connect and counter-connect. And then, after a little while, the 'collecting' slows down. They're connected to all of their real-world friends, and probably to a slew of random people they could care less about as well. At which point, they have far less reason to come to the site. Sure, they could message friends through it; but they already have their real friends' email addresses, so why bother? And photo sharing? Doesn't Flickr already do that far, far better?

So the site begins to atrophy. User pages become unchecked hulls, perhaps logged into every few weeks just to see if anything interesting has happened. Ad revenue falls, user sign-ups dry out, and visions of billion dollar acquisitions no longer dance like sugar plums in the founders' heads.

But, of course, there's a point at the peak where a savvy exec team could handily cash out of such a site. For which reason, new social networking sites still pop up all the time.

At the moment, the gorilla 'new kid' is Facebook, already hugely popular with the college crowd. But, like any of its forebears, once chasing a market that doesn't have time to log in eight or nine times a day just to profile-stalk the hot girl in chem class - and Facebook, indeed, is now trying hard to expand to the 'grown up' world - the site will run into the same problems of short shelf life.

Even in the case of Facebook, their best efforts of pushing into that 'grown up' market will likely be feeble indeed. Sure, my peers and I will perhaps join up. But my parents? My grandmother? The vast majority of the online market? Not a chance.

So, if the model of a social networking site is to grow fast and sell at the peak, and if the market of young whipper-snappers is already tapped, couldn't a site make a huge amount of money by being the first to successfully target the 34-65+ demographic? I suspect one could. The question, then, is what kind of social networking site my mother and my grandmother might join.

Behold: Geni.com, a social networking site disguised as a snappy, AJAXy, web-based family tree application. You can start filling out what you know about your relatives yourself, then (and here comes the clever viral part!) enter the email addresses for any of those family members to invite them to help continue fleshing out the tree.

As the success of the Mormon Church's Family History Centers as proselytizing tool suggests, people of all ages are fascinated by their past, and eager to map out their biological place in the world. Plus, Geni's investors and exec team are extremely seasoned, savvy, and press connected, so a slew of coverage - the first step in getting this otherwise virally self-spreading effort rolling - is likely just around the corner.

Get on and sign up fast. You don't want to be the slow cousin at this upcoming digital family reunion.

Web Week: Intro
Filed January 29, 2007 5:33 PM.

Despite the Luddite claims of my last post, I am, incontrovertibly, a bleeding-edge technologist. I download software in beta, buy gadgets unlikely to ever cross over to mainstream adoption, and generally waste all kinds of time and energy thinking about and playing with things only total nerds would think are cool.

The upside of that is, tech-wise, I'm usually ahead of the curve. In fact, before I started blogging, for about a year I wrote a newsletter trying to highlight new technology on the rise. And, overall, I did pretty well, pointing out, for example, a new-fangled search engine called "Google" I figured might even give the reigning champ Yahoo a run for its money.

So, hoping to re-channel some of those futurist smarts, this week I'll similarly be showcasing a few new sites I think are, similarly, bound for big things. As many of you readers are rather tech-savvy yourselves, I imagine some of those will be ones you've already seen. But, perhaps, others will be new to you. So, tune in and check out the new New New Thing, just so you, too, can experience the joy of gloating that you knew such-and-such.com way, way back when.

Take Dictation Filed December 14, 2009 11:45 AM.

Unripe Berry Filed July 9, 2009 9:52 AM.

The New New Thing Filed July 7, 2009 11:42 AM.

Well Thought Out Filed August 25, 2008 2:29 PM.

Pop Quiz Filed August 9, 2008 5:18 PM.

Of a Feather Filed June 25, 2008 9:37 PM.

Schooled Filed March 9, 2008 1:10 PM.

Does Not Compute Filed January 29, 2008 2:10 PM.

Shipped Back Filed July 10, 2007 6:09 PM.

Bigsighted Filed May 16, 2007 5:03 PM.

Lost in Translation Filed May 5, 2007 2:28 PM.

Web Week: Online Eats Filed February 5, 2007 4:46 PM.

Web Week: Geni.com Filed January 31, 2007 4:47 PM.

Web Week: Intro Filed January 29, 2007 5:33 PM.