July 30th, 2009

Aardvark: ask it anything, get an answer in 5 minutes [invites]

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 8:56 am

Categories: Commentary

Tags: Twitter, Question, Aardvark, Jason Calacanis, Instant Messaging, Internet, Online Communications, Andrew Mager

If you want an invite to Aardvark, click here.

San-Francisco startup Mechanical Zoo is trying to build the ultimate interactive knowledge base. And it’s kind of addicting. Once you get started, you will not want to stop.

To use Aardvark, simply ask it a question. You can interact with it in so many ways too: web, IM, email, you name it. You can even ask questions via Twitter.

I just asked it a question:

Less than a minute later, I got an answer from someone in Melbourne, saying “tomorrow”. Not always 100% accurate, but then again, my question wasn’t really the best. Another minute later, I got a ping from Aardvark with a link to a CNET article about earthquakes.

Everyone’s an expert at something, right? Here are my specialties so far:

When you start interacting with Aardvark, it passes the ball right back to you. Moments later I got this:

It went pretty well from there:

I like Aardvark because it’s intuitive, and it doesn’t interfere with your day. Sometimes it will IM you during the day, but you can just ignore it, or type “pass”.

Aardvark scans through my query for keywords and then matches it to their database of people. When you join the site for the first time, the site tries to get to know you, asking what your specialties are.

When you invite a friend, you can even suggest topics that your friend knows about.

You can now search for topics on the site itself:

I think Aardvark has the best implementation of Facebook Connect so far. It doesn’t try to match you up with strangers either. Once it connects with Facebook, it matches you up with friends of friends, or people that are only a few degrees separated from you.

It even suggests friends that you should invite to Aardvark, then sets you up with a message to them:

Last night in San Francisco, Aardvark held a meetup.

Tons of people showed up, you couldn’t even move around.

And they unveiled a new iPhone app. I searched for it this morning, but couldn’t find it. But here is a sneak peek of what it will look like:

I see a lot of promise for Aardvark. I think people will be using social media more and more to ask questions and get answers. Jason Calacanis has the right idea with his new @questions and @answers accounts on Twitter. As we teach the machine, it will become more and more automated, and also a little scary.

Click here for an invite to Aardvark, and please tell me what you think of it in the comments.

July 21st, 2009

Face.com auto-tags photos on Facebook and finds photos of you [invites]

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 11:46 am

Categories: Commentary

Tags: Facebook, Photograph, Andrew Mager

People take pictures of you, post them on the web, and you probably don’t even realize it. It’s kind of a pain to tag photos on Facebook, especially with large albums.

With their simple Facebook app, Face.com does it for you:

And it’s pretty accurate too. I only find a few minor mistakes:

Granted, Matt Mullenweg, Matt Cutts, and Tim Moynihan do kinda look similar.

Face.com also has a photo finder app that scans your friends Facebook albums and looks for photos of you that haven’t been tagged yet. I do wish there was a button that allowed you to auto-accept all tags of you. It didn’t mistake my face once when I tried it:

Since launching, Face has scanned over 1 billion photos and recognized over 400 million faces.

Click here for an invite to Face.com (first 50 will get in).

July 16th, 2009

I love my Prē, but it feels defective

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 9:58 am

Categories: Commentary

Tags: Camera, UI, Andrew Mager

I’ve been using the Palm Prē for about a week now, and it’s the best mobile device I’ve ever used. The UI is great, you can have multiple apps open and switch between them with ease. The camera is 3 megapixels and it snaps faster than any point & shoot camera I’ve ever used. It takes great photos.

Apps are still newborn, but they show promise; downloading, installing, and running them proves to be a simple task. The phone part of the device works fine, even though I don’t use it very much. Global search is sweet; just start typing and it finds contacts, web bookmarks, and even lets you ping Wikipedia or Twitter with your search query. Battery life: not terrible.

But my newfangled phone has a few issues that make it feel cheap and fragile. For instance, the alarm is defective because the phone shuts off randomly when not being used for a few hours. So setting an alarm only works if your phone is plugged in. Wake up (late) in the morning, turn on your phone and realize that the battery isn’t dead, but the phone just wanted to take a nap with you.

It also shuts down sometimes when I close the keyboard. Very annoying, and powering the phone back up takes up to 2 minutes sometimes! Unacceptable.

Another issue is the wiggle. Check out the video at the top of this post to see what’s going on there. I talked with a few other Prē owners and they’ve experienced the same thing. There is a fix, but I shouldn’t have to use a hot glue gun to fix my phone.

I am willing to deal with these defects for a certain amount of time, but one day I think it’s gonna make me want to throw the phone off the Golden Gate Bridge. I hope that Palm is aware of these issues and will fix it with future releases. In the meantime, I hope they take good care of their customers who have defective phones.

Update: When I hit “publish” on this blog post, my Prē shut down with full battery life.

July 15th, 2009

Dipity visualizes your social timeline

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 9:23 pm

Categories: Commentary

Tags: Timeline, Andrew Mager

All I really need to show you is the embedded timeline from Dipity. I connected my Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Last.fm, Yelp, Youtube, and Digg. It’s really cool to see all your social things in one horizontal timeline.

July 14th, 2009

bizSessions 1.0, FTW or WTF funding models for startups

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 7:59 pm

Categories: Commentary

Tags:

Hosted by Wildcog, and the creators of geekSessions, tonight was the first bizSessions.

Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster and now Socializr, was the first to speak.

The Lean Startup

• Low burn rate, the use things that are cheap
• Open source, cloud computing
• Aglie web development
• Charge from day one
• Understands “free”

Why isn’t every startup a “lean” startup?

I learned about a new startup called Fotki from its co-founder Igor Shoifot (Webware 100 winner). They claim to be a “blog-hosting” platform, and offer FTP access to upload pics. Email i@fotki.com to try it.

• Create a low-cost foundation
• Follow the power users and the money
• Let your users play and pay
• Focus on the kind of growth that bring money
• Fight where you can win
• Don’t put all eggs in one basket
• Constantly tweak the vision and product
• Don’t let the big opportunities slip away
• Be ready to scale
• Be close-fisted but open minded.

Kent Goldman from First Capital was next up to speak.

• Validate entrepreneur’s hypothesis
• De-risk or disprove it

You should try to raise small chunks of money in different avenues. You are not raising $3 million because that is the assumption of what a Series A is supposed to be. It should be the metrics of your business that decides how much money you should raise.

Boot strapping, Angel money, VC funding, micro funds, ramen profitability?

And the cost of starting a business is a lot less today. Now you can build it in a weekend.

Ping Li from Accel Partners, who spoke about the health of the VC industry in Silicon Valley, was the last to present at bizSessions Tuesday night.

In the 90s, we had a technology constipation. It took a couple years for the system to work itself through. These past few years, we have had a lot of breakthrough products and real trends that have changed the numbers. Data centers are moving from solos to cloud architectures.

Your funding strategy should not fuel your business strategy.

July 14th, 2009

Notify.me pings you when your feeds are fresh

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 7:20 pm

Categories: Commentary

Tags:

Notify.me is your content in real time. That means you can sign up for different feeds, and choose how that content is delivered to you. It’s not passive feed reading. You are getting direct notifications of any content you choose.

Imagine that you want to be the first person to comment on your favorite blog. Notify.me can send you an SMS text message each time a new post is published.

Notify immediately asks for your cell phone number and tries to hook in your IM services:

It only took me a second to use Jabber to add an alert for MG Siegler and Caroline McCarthy.

Moments later:

You can use a notify.me bookmarklet to easily add services to your account.

They have partnered with Ping.fm so you can link their engine to Ping’s services. I chose to send all of my notify feeds to goto Delicious.

I haven’t played with the site much yet, but I like the sign up process. It’s intuitive and creative. They have plenty of tutorials to get you started.

Give them a try, and follow on Twitter.

July 1st, 2009

Live: Cisco Live Blogger Meetup

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 6:18 pm

Categories: Commentary

Tags: Meetup, Event, Network, Cisco Systems Inc., Blogger, Cisco Live, Networking, Andrew Mager

Warning: This is a live blog. Words may be misspelled. Sentences, incomplete. But the photos will be plenty, so you can’t be mad either way.

Cisco Live is the ultimate networking event; literally, physically, and socially. Engineers from all over the globe have converged in San Francisco this week to study, listen, learn and network with the networking giant’s clientele and community.

This year’s event is the 20th anniversary, and they’ve launched an interactive website for people everywhere to sit in on the event.

I spoke with one of the executives in the cloud division, and he said that Cisco Live is the one event that brings out developers to see the “day star“. They participate in BOF sessions, talks, tutorials, and intensive training courses.

Robert Scoble made it to the event:

Jeremiah Owyang, chatting with a Cisco exec:

The difference between social media and traditional analyst meetings: it takes a much more personal approach. For bloggers, they actually started this out of straight passion. They want to meet people. It’s hard for companies to match it.

Social media is not scalable. -@jowyang “Even Scoble can’t scale. Not everyone can make those one-to-one interactions, especially if you are already huge yourself. How can you connect with every single one of your customers?” asks Owyang.

This is event is cool because some of the best bloggers get a chance to interact with companies. I think the event was well coordinated, but I agree with Owyang in some ways.

“When social media becomes popular, it starts to look like mainstream media, and companies will treat it the same way.”

Here is me with the world’s first cell phone:

6:30 p.m. - I am going to take some more pictures. They are about to announce something, stay tuned.

Bloggers and Cisco folks:

I had a chance to talk to Alex Thuber, the VP of “Go-To Market”. We chatted about the actual Cisco Live event itself. It’s amazing that in a down economy, over 10,000 people made the trek to the bay area to interact.

Dark Jedi bloggers Harry McCracken, Owyang, and Brian Solis:

ZDNet got lucky tonight. Both I and blogger Oliver Marks won a free flip cam:

Scoble and Steve Gillmor:

One of the reasons I moved to SF is to go to events like this. But Cisco Live brings the event to me. I think that’s pretty cool.

Full photo set on Flickr