Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

While I agree that the democratization of data is important, there are still significant hurdles surrounding privacy and security. For example, if my small business is in competition with someone else in a similar market space, how much do I trust the cloud with this data? How much can I share without a competitor deducing what I am doing?

While the initial "snooping" concept is simple ... The data is secure therefore they can't see it, what about the in the cracks data. Imagine we are collaborating on a Google document internally for a new partnership in my product space. We have a determined competitor who really wants to find out how to beat us to market. What is they can watch the ad's being served up to me and my employees in some way. What if the information gleaned from those ads (targeted at document content maybe) reveals our super-secret market partnership? Sound far fetched? Maybe not.

I think that the true power of this data comes from aggregating it, smashing it up against other data and then analyzing it. The problem is that doing this kind of data analysis often requires something more than a human mind. Scientists are already struggling with this concept as more and more raw scientific data is made available on the web. What we need is an automated way to look for patterns, clusters, interesting hypotheses in these data.

However, on the flip side, the setup of a business that is not tied to physical location any more. Cloud services like google docs, grandcentral, skype, and zimbra allow people to create a company without a physical office. A globally extended supply chain and global reach for shipping means companies can be created, operate, and grow in a completely virtual way. What will countries do to tax such an entity? How will we deal with this?

Dean McRobie

image credit: point_cat35 [Flickr]

A few years ago, a technically minded (geeky? Who said geeky?) friend offered to set me up with a blog on his personal server. Having kept journals in various forms over the years, I thought, Why not? And hey, good work research.

With nothing in particular I wanted to write about, over the next four years it became a compendium of family and work life anecdotes, not very deep thoughts, links and anything else that came to mind. Few people knew about it, but I was vaguely aware that with very specific searches (eg the name of my band) it would show up on Google, so I was careful not to include client names or even where I worked, just to stay under the radar.

Then two days ago I got a frantic email from my friend (with a subject line that I'm amazed got through my spam filter) saying that while updating the blog software, he'd accidentally wiped away all four and a half years of posts -- about 250 or so. Poof! And he had no backup of his server. Suddenly my lighthearted musings of the last while became more valuable -- there were a lot of nice memories recorded in there that (as every parent knows) don't last on their own. What to do?

Google to the rescue! Knowing that my band name showed up in searches, I started there. Sure enough, it came up, but of course the link itself was useless. On the other hand, the "cache" link... worked like a charm. And best of all, each post noted the name of the post before and after, so with a search string that went something like: "site:www.theservername.net elliottblog blog toronto " I found I could methodically work my way through the posts and extract all the content from them into a text file.

Google as file backup! It was laborious (and Google had lost track of a few of them), but hey, posts with names like "Glove in a Cold Climate" are worth saving. Ahem.

There is much written about the worrisome way that Google is crawling and documenting our online activities, but this is the first time I've really considered it as something with personal benefit beyond getting a decent search result. For once, the idea that Google has been following along behind me like an obsessive court reporter, recording and storing my meanderings, is oddly comforting.

Not that I won't be backing up my own posts from now on.

Elliott Smith

...because catching up to Firefox and Opera functionality better describes what is happening here. In either case, Microsoft has definitely stepped up their game with this release which allows a ton of new functionality and features.

All of the new functions are neatly packaged and easy to understand, which is a much different experience from browsing through pages of Firefox addons. The Easy Homepage function (see image above) has been incredibly useful and really changes your browsing experience because you tend to use this tab as a navigation page. The page load times seem faster than any other browser I have used to date, probably thanks to the FasterIE prefetching which uses idle bandwidth time to download and cache links so they are ready for you when you click on them. The mouse gestures are fun but this along with many of the services take time to learn and setup, I guess that is why it is called "Pro".

I have tried Chrome, Avant, Flock and other browsers but have always comeback to Firefox. Had it not been acting up this week I probably would not have even tried IE7 Pro. But now that I have spent some time getting acquainted, Firefox maybe knocked out of contention.

http://www.ie7pro.com/

Russ Hopkinson

UPDATE: Contrary to the implication in my post above, IE7 Pro is not developed by Microsoft, it is an independent group of developers based in India. Although there was mysteriously little information on who they were or how much support Microsoft has provided.

image credit: akakumo [Flickr]

Editor's Note: For the entire month of September, the year of Google's 10 year anniversary, they will be marking the occasion by asking their experts, "What's going to happen in the next ten years?" Since their philosophy is that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, their vision of the future of the web comes very much from the flavor of the Google Kool-Aid.

So Organic felt that this would be a good opportunity for us to respond to Google's vision of the future as they tell it, with our vision of the future.

The Intelligent Cloud by Alfred Spector, VP Engineering, and Franz Och, Research Scientist

When people talk about Cloud Computing, they tend to lose their grounding in reality. Here are some important things to consider:

1. It's going to take a while for people (and businesses) to come around to trusting the cloud:

"It's not an OS (contrary to anything Mike Arrington says), and it will not be the answer to everyone's problems. People have an attachment to ownership - something that won't go away as easily as we think. Mainframe computing would have never worked as the sole option for the layperson computer user, and it won't work for the mainstream internet consumer/user/contributor."
Alex Bisceglie

But this isn't markedly different from the transition that we are undergoing with adoption of RIAs today. As people begin to view remote data as just as stable and secure as local data (Google Docs v Word), I think the likelihood of adoption goes up.

2. The cloud 'owners' need to work very closely with developers and users of their system to ensure that many of the base assumptions that we currently hold about applications stand true in the new world. eg: currently, there is no good way to do data backups inside of Google's App Engine (their cloud computing product). In reality, I should probably trust Google to have better data redundancy and failover backup capability than I would cook up, but at a very base level its very different from how developers work today.

But... it's going to happen, its going to be incredible and it looks (for now at least) that Google is going to lead the charge. Already they are using user activity to train their systems to very good effect. For example, they've been running Google411 as a free information service for quite some time, with the stated goal of teaching machines how to best recognize and parse human speech. The output? http://labs.google.com/gaudi full text indexing of video and audio content.

In a nutshell: its happening now and overall I think its a very good thing. But it needs to be closely monitored to ensure it doesn't become a very bad thing quickly.

James Vreeland

Sekai Camera, which has been written up quite a bit since launching at TechCrunch50 on Tuesday, is basically a realtime data overlay onto video from the iPhone's camera. While I'm not sure walking around looking "through" an iPhone is an optimal execution, the idea of a localized data / social communication heads-up display is pretty fascinating.

It was unclear from the unique presentation and Q & A how "real" the system is. The language barrier and clear enthusiasm of the company's executives has reduced my confidence in my own comprehension to approximately 50%, but it seems the current version is based exclusively on GPS location data. The demo video implies an object recognition component, which seems potentially feasible (if exceptionally difficult) in the very near future. The iPhone does have the ability to stream live video, and recent demonstrations have shown the feasibility of realtime remote rendering and other huge computational tasks.

The panel at TC50 raised other important questions, like "how is data kept current"? Seeing firsthand the wonder that was TonchiDot's presentation, my personal guess is that it may be a while before we get some answers.

Christian Dodd

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo

Mozilla Labs announced today that it has released a new experimental solution called Ubiquity. Ubiquity is a method for non-developers to create mashups out of the pages and content they are already surfing.

This is dramatically different that what is already out there. Solutions like Yahoo Pipes! requires you to set up 'plumbing' before you can get output. Ubiquity let's developers make little snippets of code that users easily access data. Think of it like creating very human readable APIs.

The experiment has been provoking some thoughtful conversation around Organic:

"I've always felt somewhat ambivalent about RSS feeds of marketing/product news. Same goes for branded widgets, because you still have to 'go to' them. They require consciously calling them up or else allowing them to clutter your screen/dock until the moment you may need them.

"But the opportunity to provide branded utility via ubiquity commands, which have the potential to become an integral part of the browsing experience? My head's about to explode with the possibilities, like... select items from throughout the web and save them to a merchant-agnostic shopping list that constantly pings for comparable items and best available prices."
Sam Cannon

James Vreeland

Recently, LivePlace.com (owned by Brad Greenspan one of MySpace co-founders) accidentally provided a brief preview of a 3D virtual world called City Space. It is rendered in OTOY - an technology capable of rendering cinematic quality 3D visuals in a web-browser. From this particular footage - it also appears to be employing a cloud-based rendering engine - rendering images server-side so that almost any computer or device can display the impressive real-time lighting effects without needing a powerful-but-pricey graphics card.

With the actual launch date of City Place still unknown, it may be a bit too early to proclaim it as the next-big-thing in the marriage of virtual worlds with social media. However, Second Life and Google's efforts with 'Lively' will have a great deal of catching up to do in their graphic's departments when LivePlace begins to bustle with real users.

Tomas Roldan

Yesterday, Google launched a beta feature called "walking directions" on Google Maps. While the directions are limited to routes shorter than 6.2 miles (or 10 kilometers), they provide a few useful advantages for walkers over regular driving directions. First, the walking directions ignore the direction of one-way streets. Second, it supposedly takes into account terrain, giving pedestrians a more flat and walkable route when possible.

Google acknowledges that the feature is clearly in beta, even adding this warning: "Use caution when walking in unfamiliar areas." It's obvious from a quick query on walking from the Ferry Building to Organic San Francisco that Google must not know the layout of the sidewalks around the Embarcadero Plaza, or it might have given me a slightly more direct route. Hopefully, they will be adding more information about sidewalks, pedestrian bridges, traffic, and even crime statistics.

Another feature missing that seems like a given is that there are no walking directions on Google Maps various mobile versions. This feature would be far more useful than its online counterpart, so you would assume it is a feature on it's way. Then again, I've always assumed the same thing about Google My Maps, and I have yet to see results.

Marta Strickland

By now most of you probably have heard about Google's latest assault on the social network front: Google Friend Connect. It promises every Webmaster and site designer the addition of social features to his or her website with minimal effort. No server software to install, zero configuration, and no programming required, all one has to do is to embed snippets of code provided by Google on the target webpages. Once the Google Friend Connect becomes part of your site, users of Facebook, Orkut, Google Talk and other compatible social networks can start interacting on your site engaging in various social activities.
 
This is indeed a great boost to small/independent site developers. It is also an exciting time to many social network observers: No one is too surprised that Google, being an uncharacteristic underdog in this realm, attempts to disrupt the marketplace with an open strategy. But considering that MySpace also announced its Data Availability, followed by the Facebook Connect revelation, the data portability movement seems finally gaining steam and heading toward realization. So what would be the implications of meta social networking?
 
The "Long Tail" phenomenon may become even more pronounced
Chris Anderson's The Long Tail article on Wired Magazine illustrated the power of niche communications tailored to personal tastes and interests. Ubiquitous social networking features have the potential to penetrate each and every imaginable niche markets. The "tail" would only get longer and fatter.
 
Social networks may gradually turn into a commodity
The long decline of the PC industry is well-documented. Over the years, the PC market has transformed from one filled with unique products to a low-margin business selling undifferentiated generics. Should the personal data on social networks become fully (or close to) fully interchangeable, it'd be very difficult to prevent the eventual commoditization.
 
Valuations of social network companies may start to deflate
While no one took it seriously when the MySpace's ousted founder Brad Greenspan declared the valuation of his creation to be $20 billion, YouTube was indeed sold for $1.65 billion and Rupert Murdoch also said MySpace might be worth $6 billion. The climax came when Microsoft paid $240 million for only 1.6% share of Facebook, effectively giving it a jaw-dropping $15 billion valuation. If the aforementioned commoditization of social networks starts to take place... watch out.
 
Fang-Yu Lin

Last night Google launched their cloud computing suite to compete with Amazon's S3/EC2/SimpleDB stack of utilities. The SDK is aimed at giving developers a way to leverage the big iron of a company as large as Google on the cheap.

Things of note - some good, some bad, some both:

- Only Python is currently supported (more languages to come)
- You must have a Google account to access any apps with authentication
- You only need a Google account to access any apps with authentication
- Only 10,000 developers invited into the beta
 -The SDK contains a staging server so you can test apps locally without having to push them into the cloud
- Your source goes into the cloud - but not for public viewing
- It appears to connect to, and utilize MapReduce and BigTable
- The toolkit launched without any flashy demos (much like FireEagle from Yahoo!)

Once the system comes out of beta, applications will have a fairly large free usage cap, so in theory, your application should be well on the way to self-funded before you start getting bills from Google.

In short, Google released a set of tools that allow you to build web applications specifically tuned to run in, and benefit from, Google's huge infrastructure. Currently only a single, pretty nuts and bolts, language is supported and there aren't a bunch of cool demos to pass around. I am excited.

James Vreeland

http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/