Should You Speak The Name?

From a Wired article which heck you might as well start on page 8.

Debra Chrapaty, the Microsoft exec in charge of the company's data centers, says that Microsoft's infrastructure is so efficient it can compete in cost even with a company she refers to by the letter G. (She refuses to speak its name out loud because "every time you say that word, it reinforces their brand," she says.)

Really? I guess that's the logic behind names like Google Page Creator and Google Image Labeler. Flip side is the Mapquest vs Google Maps effect, although it seems Google Maps is catching up.

Hannity Fires Colmes

Well allegedly it's voluntary. I've always wondered how Colmes saw himself, so I like this quote -

"We have a Democratic House, Senate and president," Colmes said in an interview. "My work is done."

An Hour Well Spent

IncrediBots is another game in the flash-physics-machine-building genre. Like Fantastic Contraption except you can bind motors to keys so you can control your machine while it's running. I promise you, if you play this you will get smarter. Here's me on the monkey bars trying to remember which of my 10 action keys do what.

TradeSports shut down!

Nooooo! The world has just gotten a little bit stupider.

TradeSports was the best prediction market for sports. You could also think of it as peer-to-peer betting, finding someone who would take the opposite bet so you don't have to pay the house 10% overhead. I never placed a bet, but loved the site. You could watch in real time during sporting events as the market updated. You could read the market prices in effect as "Currently the Bengals have a 30% chance of winning." Nice to have open while watching sports - if you ever didn't understand what had happened, you could check how it impacted the odds. Other cool stuff too - you could get implied odds after the fact for success rates of things like going for it on 4th down.

Sadly, gambling is illegal. TradeSports was run out of Ireland but since their users were mostly American I guess that caught up to them.

What gets me is that the stupidest forms of gambling, like lottery tickets and slot machines, are growing. (90% of the profit in Vegas casinos is from slot machines.) But these prediction markets, which actually help their users become more intelligent, are hated on by The Man.

For now, BetFair is still operating, and Intrade still has the non-sports markets of the old TradeSports. Check it out.

Nokia versus iPhones

All right, this doesn't explicitly mention iPhones but I still instinctively consider any cool new application for non-iPhones launched by a cell phone maker to be an iPhone-competitive maneuver.

From Venture Beat:

Among the topics of interest is “augmented reality,” in which an image seen through a camera-phone display can be augmented with things that aren’t there. For instance, you could point your camera at a street in San Francisco and the screen could present you with the view of the same location before the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. A number of companies, including Hewlett Packard and Intel, are looking at creating services or games that can make the real world more entertaining.

Similarly, Nokia’s Point and Find project will let you point your camera phone at a building, and it will fetch you information about it.

My guess is by the time this makes it from demo to real-world it'll have happened somewhere else first. I can't stop thinking Nokia != cool software. The real challenge may be a user interface that makes it intuitive enough to use this software even in the face of slow picture analysis times and inconsistent GPS data. I'm not sure it's possible.

Baby Mammoths For Sale

Regenerating lost species isn't really a "staple of science fiction". Just Jurassic Park, as far as I can remember. I guess there were three movies.

Anyways, good news for the pet industry, Jurassic Park technology is going to be real. According to the NYT you can get your own woolly mammoth for just $10 million. Pet mammoth, fly into space... so hard to decide how to spend that extra 10 mil you have lying around "just for fun".

The real genetic pet breakthrough will be permanent puppies & kittens. Worth billions. And almost as useful to society as another Viagra clone.

Balance

Let me even out my previous anti-Ted-ness by pointing to this really cool video. It's about automatically training real wild crows to make money.



I wouldn't be surprised if animals turn out to be much smarter than we think. One of those things that could cause people in 200 years to be shocked at the immorality prevalent in 2008.

Against Architects

I am bitter against architects ever since Building 43 opened. Celebrated by the architectural Metropolis magazine for innovative features such as walls made of unopenable doors. Annoying to me because it lacks sufficient conference rooms, and a quiet space to make a phone call. Ironically the building wastes space with pointless things like informal bookshelves. Bookshelves??!? We keep documents on the internet, thank you very much.

I was just watching a TED talk on the Seattle Central Library and got the creeping sensation that the architect didn't actually like libraries. Read the Wikipedia entry or just this excerpt:

The architects conceived the new Central Library building as a celebration of books, deciding after some research that despite the arrival of the 21st century and the "digital age," people still respond to books printed on paper. The architects also worked to make the library inviting to the public, rather than stuffy, which they discovered was the popular perception of libraries as a whole.

Although the library is an unusual shape from the outside, the architects' philosophy was to let the building's required functions dictate what it should look like, rather than imposing a structure making the functions conform to that.

For example, a major section of the building is the "Books Spiral," (designed to display the library's nonfiction collection without breaking up the Dewey Decimal System classification onto different floors or sections). The collection spirals up through four stories on a continuous series of shelves. This allows patrons to peruse the entire collection without using stairs or traveling to a different part of the building.

Good research guys! Because that's the point of the Dewey Decimal system, making it easy to linearly scan through every single book without all the bother of keeping a particular type of book in a particular place.

I find it hard to believe the function of a library dictates the form of a giant glass crystal. I find it easier to believe the main goal of an architect is some really cool looking powerpoint slides. They get their money before the actual users notice it takes O(n) time to find a book.

Xoogler of the Month

Congratulations to 1997-8 Sycamore High School Chess Team 5th Board Avichal Garg for getting his picture in the New York Times. Oh those innocent days when we had nothing more serious to worry about than the Vienna Gambit.

Seriously though his startup PrepMe.com is like Kaplan but on the web. I don't think I have any friends in the demographic to use this (or for their kids to use this) so I can't really be that helpful. Rumor has it they have a deal with the state of Maine so this sort of thing is likely to be around for a while. I got in an argument this weekend in Boston whether it was a good thing that via investment you can raise SAT scores... I find it hard not to be biased towards systems that reward people like me.