Published by Eric Litman on Monday, April 14th, 2008 8:13am
Mark Hopkins of Mashable called me last week for a quick interview about the launch of a new partnership between Aux Interactive and Mashable, but what was originally intended to be a 10 minute scheduled call turned into an engaging dialog about WashingtonVC, Aux (I’m the Chairman of the company), the evolving nature of technology and insights into entrepreneurship in general. It’s entirely my fault - I love to talk about this stuff, and Mark was nice enough to humor me.
Listen to 39 minutes of our hour long conversation here:
Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 4:51am
I started using Twitter at the end of April 2007 and find it to be more useful to me every day. See Dan York’s great post on getting value from Twitter if you haven’t yet figured out how Twitter can work for you.
Always on the lookout for analytics to describe behavior, I ran across a perl script by Damon Cortesi tonight that pulled in my Twitter feed and generated some pretty graphs. The results - my Twitter statistics from April 2007 through today - are below.
Thanks to @dacort on Twitter for the script that generated this output.
Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 2:30am
The awesome Rana, newest member of my team at WashingtonVC, spent Xmas day hanging out at CNN with Zain Verjee and Scott Stead in Larry King’s studio. Here are the results on Seesmic:
Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 2:22am
Jason Calacanis today writes that Mahalo’s challenge is breadth rather than depth. Fair enough, but to me currency, and by extension accuracy, are of even greater importance for their sustainability. In search, accuracy = trust = user retention1.
Google’s trust model is based on a broad acceptance that their crawlers do a good job of finding pages and that their indexers and ranking algorithms are likely to lead you to the most relevant results for a given search. Certainly there are flaws in the model and room for improvement, from which the category (of one?) of human-powered search draws its raison d’être, but it has been successful enough to attract an enormous user base. Yahoo!2., Ask.com, and other algorithmic search engines operate under a similar model.
What’s the trust model for a human-powered search engine (HPSE)? I’d argue that it’s strongly influenced by three factors:
Quality and context of search results.
Not only does the cruft need to be filtered, but results need to be segmented and described on a results page to clearly identify their value.
Authority.
I’m open to comment on this one, but my belief is that for a given HSPE results page to be useful it needs to be a canonical source for the most salient points of a given topic. I don’t want to feel like I need to dig through Google’s results in addition to what an HPSE provides me.
Currency.
People need a transparent view into both when a link was added and when a human last verified that it remains current to trust that content is relevant to them at the time of their search. Note that neither Mahalo nor its older, distant cousin About.com do this today.
There’s a fourth factor I’ll toss out for discussion, and that’s the personal brand of the reviewers themselves. This is much less of an issue today while the model is still proving itself than it will be two or three years from now when people have learned to value the quality of work of the individuals crafting the content. After all, if HPSEs’ primary selling point is that they’re “human-powered”, isn’t it reasonable to think people are eventually going to pay attention to the “humans” powering them?
About.com lost much of its early luster because savvy folks have learned not to trust it. Much of its content is junk, frankly, either because it was hastily written to fill a void or the data represented there are out of date. Mahalo doesn’t really have this problem yet given its newness, but I already find myself questioning the currency of some of the links I find there, just as I do with About.com. Other HPSE’s will have to combat this issue as well.
What influences your trust in search results? Can/do you trust people over algorithms, or vice versa?
1. I’m holding equal that responsiveness and availability are constants in online service delivery. Of course they aren’t, and that’s yet another reason why Google’s the category leader they are. 2. Yahoo! combines a directory with their search results, although the integration these days has been de-emphasized. Interestingly, Mahalo is essentially an evolution of what were the origins of Yahoo!. Think of it as Yellow Pages meets Lonely Planet, but with fewer plumbers’ cracks and less patchouli.
Published by Eric Litman on Monday, October 8th, 2007 9:22pm
Dony Wynn, the percussionist extraordinaire who drove the beat behind Robert Palmer for so many years, has just launched his latest project: Knuckle Yummy. Dony’s been working with band mates Lizzy Lee and Pehr Smith for less than a year, but the collaboration is just as tight as the music is edgy.
Congratulations, buddy. See you at the next SXSW in March!
Published by Eric Litman on Monday, October 8th, 2007 3:02pm
A few months ago I bought a couple of D-Link’s DNS-323 low-end network attached storage devices as part of my ongoing mission to reduce and simplify the hardware in my home. For about $375 ($175 for the DNS-323 and $100 each for two 500GB hard disks) and almost no setup effort†, you can have 1/2 TB of redundant storage in a small, quiet, Gigabit Ethernet-capable server with some pretty nifty features out of the box. And if you’re a tinkerer with some Linux experience, you can draw from the thriving hacking community supporting it. For the money, I love these little things.
But while my Windows machines communicate with them without issue, performance with my Macs has been abysmal. Even on an 802.11n network, OS X’s average transfer rate is somewhere around 80KB/s. Fortunately, I tracked the problem down to a tunable network parameter tied to OS X’s FreeBSD roots: net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack.
Under 10.4.10, the default value for delayed_ack is 3. If you’re seeing similar performance issues either with the DNS-323 or other Samba servers in general, try setting it to a value of 0:
sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0
I recommend doing this while transferring a large file so you can immediately observe any change in performance. To make this setting permanent, add the following to /etc/sysctl.conf (you may need to create the file):
net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0
†. Initial configuration requires Windows. I ran the setup utility from within VMWare Fusion without issue.
Published by Eric Litman on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 4:00pm
Apple’s most recent update to the iPhone’s base software, version 1.1.1, adds the same anti-hacking protections they applied to the iPod Touch. This means that at least for the near term, anyone who upgrades their iPhone to version 1.1.1 will be unable to run any of the third-party software the budding but enthusiastic iPhone developer community has created.
Since my previous post on the missing iPhone SDK, I’ve spent some time exploring the undocumented APIs on the iPhone and have written a few mini applications just for the fun of delving into relatively uncharted territory†. Others have done much more than explore, and have released some prettycoolstuff. Granted, none of the released apps serve any mission critical function, but they’re all important precursors to what has the potential to become a thriving software ecosystem.
But today, Apple made it clear that these efforts are not welcome. Sure, they want to keep people from unlocking their phones to work on other carriers’ networks, as they’re rumored to be getting a 10% cut on the service revenues generated by iPhone customers. Denying all filesystem access, as they’ve done, reduces the attack surface available to groups seeking to remove the carrier lock. But knowing - as Apple certainly does - that in doing so they’re also preventing software developers from continuing to write their iPhone wares, Apple is directly contradicting recent, published comments from senior execs (Phil Schiller, SVP marketing included) proclaiming what I’ll call official ambivalence toward the developer community.
There’s more to the story. A recent Apple job post suggests that they might still be holding onto the Web as a development platform notion for all but Apple’s closest partners.
Updates on attempts from the community to break the latest protections can be found on Engadget, Gizmodo, Nate True’s blog, and the iPhone IRC channels on irc.osx86.hu.
† I say “relatively” uncharted because many of the iPhone’s APIs mirror or closely resemble counterparts on the Mac version of OS X.
Published by Eric Litman on Friday, June 29th, 2007 2:06pm
Eric Moreno has put together the Bruce Waldack Memorial Site for friends and family to reconnect and keep in touch. If you have a web site or blog, he would appreciate a link to boost the site’s Google ranking above some of the riff raff out there.
And separately, Federico Ini posted this clip of an interview he did with Bruce for his TV show in Buenos Aires:
Thanks to everyone for all of the comments, emails and phone calls.
Published by Eric Litman on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 7:25am
Bruce Michael Waldack, my good friend, cohort and colleague for the past 16 years, died this past weekend at his home in Buenos Aires. He was a bright star who burned out well before his time, and I’ll miss him dearly.
Update 7/17/07: I’ve posted photos of the memorial and wake.
UPDATE: If you knew Bruce and would like to share any thoughts or a message feel free to use the comments here. This post has been getting quite a bit of search traffic from Google over the past few days so I am guessing others might want to talk about this.
I’ll update this post with information about a service/memorial once plans have been set.
[tags]bruce waldack,thruport,digitalnation[/tags]
Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 12:29am
At Apple’s annual developer event this week, Steve Jobs announced that there was no native SDK for the iPhone and that developers wanting to add functionality to the device could write web applications with limited hooks into some of the phone’s native functions. Steve has cited concerns for the sanctity and stability of Cingular’s network, but that’s a veil for other, far more salient reasons behind this. Let’s walk through some of the more interesting ones.
The Apple/Cingular deal represents a significant departure from the typical relationships found between device manufactures and mobile operators. To close their deal, both companies had to evaluate and learn new ways of operating in partnership, and the concessions made on both sides were by industry standards considerable. Apple insisted on driving the launch marketing and channel strategies, including restricting pre-sales, defining retail locations and point of presence collateral, and managing the messaging given to the media. In return they ceded to Cingular on matters related to managing customer acquisition and retention costs, protecting Cingular’s existing revenue models and competitively positioning Cingular against its rivals.
One of the more visible examples of Cingular’s wins - from their perspective, anyway - is the lack of an instant messaging application on the iPhone. iChat, one of Apple’s marquee software products and a core component of Leopard’s personal and enterprise communications strategy is noticeably absent. Why? Cingular offers a competing service - SMS/MMS - which when combined with the other carriers in the US represented a $2.5B market in Q1 2007. As the #2 provider in that market, you can count on them fighting to hold onto their share of it as long as they can.
Steve - and by proxy, Cingular - is concerned that third-party application on the phone represent a threat to the network? Well, there’s a shred of credibility to this one, but it’s a stretch. Others have pointed out that Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm and myriad Java-capable mobile devices have been able to load and run custom applications for years so it should be a non-issue on the iPhone, but the counterpoint to this argument is that the predicted early popularity of the iPhone combined with what would undoubtedly be a dramatically simpler process for loading apps onto it were an SDK available could drive unprecedented levels of network traffic. This would degrade the overall end-user experience and lead to a devaluation of the iPhone and Apple brands, higher support costs for both Apple and Cingular and reduced follow-on sales opportunities for both companies.
It this possible? Maybe. But anyone who’s used a mobile phone knows just how spotty the experience can be. Even with the upgrades Cingular is making to their network in support of the iPhones launch, people are going to get frustrated with slow web browsing, dropped network connections and funky network behavior from Apple’s first generation of mobile Apps independent of any massive, third-party application strain. So is it likely? No.
Sure, this is just the first generation release, and from the tone of the initial keynote announcing the iPhone Steve made it clear that the product teams were pushing hard to get it to general release. But there isn’t such a shortage of talent on the market that would have prevented Apple from staffing up a developer tools iPhone team had they wanted to concurrently launch an SDK. Undoubtedly there’s an element of wanting to see how the market responds to the device before making commitments to developers, but Apple’s lineage is tightly enough enmeshed with the software development community that it’s hard to give this argument significant credence. John Gruber had much stronger words on this.
Where does this lead us? Without question there will eventually be a toolkit that gives developers more than hooks into the browser to build iPhone apps. Apple will start dealing with other operators who will have different wants and needs than Cingular, the software stack will launch through revisions, market forces will drive down flash memory costs and increase capacity, and Apple’s key partners will apply considerable pressure to open up new revenue streams for their applications and services.
Apple has been dallying with selling apps for the iPod through iTunes for several months, so there’s a precedent that this is the likely model for loading applications onto the iPhone. If so, Apple could potentially maintain control over which apps make it into the ecosystem, define how they’re sold, and in the process take a cut of the transaction revenue. In that situation, do you think anyone else might ask to share?
Published by Eric Litman on Monday, June 11th, 2007 7:36pm
I’ve been running a plugin that displayed a simple math question (i.e. “what is 2 + four”) as part of my comments form, but apparently it worked on a far more limited set of browsers than I had realized. So consider it gone and comment math-free to your heart’s content. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Update: coComment is gone, too. Simplicity prevails. My blog isn’t nearly popular enough to be able to afford missing comments.
Published by Eric Litman on Monday, June 11th, 2007 7:14pm
This is a very sexy demo of a few really interesting technologies for viewing and understanding large - really large - sets of visual data. Photosynth, the application behind the demo, was developed by Seadragon and purchased by Microsoft about a year ago, and is now available as a demo on the Microsoft Labs site.
They’re combining computer vision with spatial awareness and analysis to stitch together photos from virtually any source - high resolution digital SLR, camera phone, satellite, municipal camera, etc. - and allow a viewer to zoom in or out from any point in the set with which one or more photos are associated. In the demo, they scraped Flickr for photos tagged “Notre Dame” and the results are stunning.
Published by Eric Litman on Monday, June 11th, 2007 5:15pm
I’ve been watching the early progress of Mahalo, the new “human powered” search engine launched by Jason Calacanis last month, more than I normally would a search-related startup in no small part because I’m impressed with and fascinated by the type and intensity of buzz Jason’s been able to create around it with so little cash outlay. As I spend more time considering the basic model of identifying and gathering the most interesting/relevant/current/popular/uniquely useful/etc. sites related to popular searches, I can’t help but think of just how important context is to search, and that while Mahalo’s broad-based approach to adoption may be a good starting point there might ultimately be more value to be found in applying their model to vertical search.
The first category that comes to mind: product search. How many times have you been in a store looking at a product wondering if it’s the right one of its kind to purchase? Or wanted to know more about its features or what other people have said about its reliability? Maybe do a price check? For me this is a regular occurance.
Case in point: last weekend, I made the trek to BuyBuyBaby to try to figure out new ways to contain areas of my house from the wall scaling, lock defying escape artist my 13 month-old son has become. Their selection of gates and movable walls was limited to six or seven choices, but I was there for instant gratification and was looking to make a decision on the spot. The problem was that I hadn’t spent a single minute researching the category and the staff there knew little more than I did. So as I usually do in these situations, I fired up the browser on my Treo 680, googled the model numbers of the gates that stood out from the crowd, and hoped there were enough practical reviews on Amazon to help me make my choice. There weren’t, so I left frustrated without a gate.
There are, of course, product review aggregation sites, and I use them from time to time, but they invariably suffer from either low quality results, a lack of results outside of a particular category or have reviews slanted toward the limited relationships their business development teams have been able to forge. Mahalo could have a unique advantage over these guys and the big search engines by applying human intelligence to the process and focusing on the items people tend to buy the most.
So here aremy suggestions. Enhance Mahalo to offer a place where people can type in the category of item they’re looking to buy (i.e. 58“ plasma TV, baby proofing gear, organic green tea, all-season performance tires) and see a current list of results pointing to Amazon review pages, product bake-offs on CNet, a great blog post describing a similar shopping experience, etc. Make a stripped-down, mobile version of the site that would offer this all this directly through Mahalo.com and auto-detect mobile browsers. Have Mahalo’s editors build and maintain a list of synonyms - including product names, model numbers, and alternate variants of search terms - for each SeRP so users don’t need to enter just the right query to get a match, and where possible, include pre-built links to whatever product search engine provides price checking for the top contenders in each category. Or better still, scrape these results or get a feed and include them directly in the SeRP page.
Once they’ve tackled product search, I’d suggest putting medical search next on the list. Again, it should be highly accessible from mobile devices so people in a doctor’s office trying to understand what’s being said to them can quickly and in real-time look up conditions, symptoms, medications, etc. and ask the questions we all either don’t know to or forget to ask. Leverage the AOL/Ted Leonsis connections to cut reciprocal deals with Steve Case’s Revolution Health and crush Google’s medical search.
There’s another piece to this but I’ll save it for another post.
Greetings. I'm Eric Litman, I'm an Internet entrepreneur and executive, and I run an early-stage fund and incubator called 
Mark Hopkins of Mashable called me last week for a quick interview about the launch of a new partnership between Aux Interactive and Mashable, but what was originally intended to be a 10 minute scheduled call turned into an engaging dialog about WashingtonVC, Aux (I’m the Chairman of the company), the evolving nature of technology and insights into entrepreneurship in general. It’s entirely my fault - I love to talk about this stuff, and Mark was nice enough to humor me.
Jason Calacanis today 
A few months ago I bought a couple of 
Apple’s most recent update to the iPhone’s base software, 
At Apple’s annual developer event this week, Steve Jobs announced that there was no native SDK for the 
I’ve been running a plugin that displayed a simple math question (i.e. “what is 2 + four”) as part of my comments form, but apparently it worked on a far more limited set of browsers than I had realized. So consider it gone and comment math-free to your heart’s content. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I’ve been watching the early progress of 
