Words from Yannis

This is the second entry in a series of reviews of startups that were present at the Next Web 2008 conference.

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Don’t you really hate it when you write a comment on someone’s blog or post at a forum and then you never remember to check back for replies? Well, I do. And CoComment provides, among other things, the ability to track that, via a browser plug-in that tracks your comments and replies to them pretty much anywhere. It would be unfair to say that this is all CoComment does though. Another interesting feature is the ability to start a discussion on any web page you want and other cocommenters will see that when they visit the page, thus getting a conversation going between the cocomment community on virtually any page on the internet.As cool a feature as that is, I fear that it’s quite easy to blog about something interesting I spot on the internet by including a link to it, or twitter about it if I have a very short comment on it. And I know that my friends follow my blog or my twitter updates, whereas they will not necessarily be CoComment users.

Nevertheless, I’ve seen a lot of startups trying to somehow combine a social aspect with blogging/commenting, and this is one of the most original and interesting ones. Let’s see where it takes them.

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Time to vote for Mayor of London next Thursday and I’ve just got a little booklet in the mail explaining how to vote and listing the 9 candidates for the position.

And what a riveting read it is. After going through the entries from Ken, Boris and Brian (all mostly focusing on crime, housing and transport - in that order), the rest of the entries start to diverge enormously:

• There is the Green Party with an environmentally focused strategy. As important as the issue of the environment is, that can’t be the single axis around which every other problem and policy revolves.
• The Left List party’s points to a better London read like a comedy sketch. They include bringing the troops back from Iraq and ending the war there, as well as taxing the wealthy to close the rich-poor gap. I didn’t realise the Mayor of London had such authority - is the government taking the next 4 years off? 
• The Christian Choice bullet points of priorities are just too limited to be realistic. Promoting marriage, stopping the “mega-mosque” at West Ham and opposing abortions is not really all that one would expect the Mayor to be worrying about.
• The Independence Party say “No to mass immigration, No to the Lisbon Treaty/European Constitution, No to the European Union”. No comment.
• But it gets worse. The British National Party get more specific: “House British People first - it’s only fair”. “Stop immigration”. “British jobs for British workers”. Well, they’ve got my vote. Seriously, do these people realise how many immigrants with a right to vote in the elections for Mayor live in London?
• Ah, but apparently the BNP were way too liberal and inclusive for some. Enter the English Democrats. “Putting England first”. I think I’ll hold out for the “London and the South-East” party, just to narrow things down a bit more.

Credibility of the candidates pretty much plummets half way through the list. Disappointing, albeit entertaining.

And my favourite quote from the entire booklet (taken from the English Democrats page): “[England is a land] that gave the world the English language, Democracy, the Mother of Parliaments and the Magna Carta”. :-) Priceless.

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This is the first entry in a series of reviews of startups that were present at the Next Web 2008 conference.

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andUnite is about searching while socialising. The idea is that you do your internet searches through them (they delegate to the search provider of your choice) and your searches get logged to your profile. You can then share these searches with your friends, or everyone (there’s obviously an appropriate permissions model around that).I can immediately see some benefits to this:

• The social aspect is similar to Twitter, but instead of “What are you doing now” it’s “What are you searching for now”
• The practical aspect is that you can find out about interesting things from your friends searches
• Also, you can find what you’re looking for by observing other people’s search strings. I often have to use many permutations of search strin got discover what I’m after, and seeing that a coleague searched for “weird rails activerecord issue” a few days ago can speed up my searches in more than one ways

A drawback is obviously that I may forget to label a search that I intend to be private as such and people find out things I don’t want them to. Another more subtle drawback is that I’m quite used to my Google toolbar whcih gives me plenty of added goodies (suggesting what I may want to be searching for, highlightinh and searching through my search results etc.) and I’m not feeling quite ready to give it up in favour of the IE search bar with andUnite configured as the search provider.

However, I can see how this could be very useful, especially if they add cool things like results rating (if I could see that the people who searched tha exact same search strings I am, found the third link down the most useful one, rather than the one on the top, I would really like that).

Definitely on to keep an eye on.

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As part of a Python focus group started at work, we had the following exercise - as the first of many - set to us. The problem is the wll known fizz buzz one:

Write a program that processes a list of numbers from 1 to 100. For each number, if the number is a multiple of 3, print “FIZZ”; if the number is a multiple of 5, print “BANG”; otherwise, print the number. You are *NOT* allowed to use any *IF/ELSE* statements in your code. You can use the list-accessing ternary operator hack, but whilst I’ll accept your homework if you do, you’ll miss out on the prize (alcoholic), which goes to the most concise code (not including whitespace).

Kerry and Nigel have already posted their solutions, which I’m afraid are much more concise than mine - I was mostly happy to find a way to do it without any conditional logic (including an or) and too lazy to look further. So here’s mine:

def fizzbang():
 # Numbers from 1 to 100
 numbers = range(1,101)# 3,6,9,...,99
 multiples_of_3 = range(3,101,3)
 # 5,10,15,...,95,100
 multiples_of_5 = range(5,101,5)
 # 15,30,45,60,75,90
 multiples_of_3_and_5 = range(15,101,15)# Replace all muliples of 3 with FIZZ
 for i in multiples_of_3:
  numbers[i-1] = "FIZZ"

# Replace all muliples of 5 with BANG
 for j in multiples_of_5:
  numbers[j-1] = "BANG"

# Replace all muliples of both 3 and 5 with FIZZ BANG
 for k in multiples_of_3_and_5:
  numbers[k-1] = "FIZZ BANG"

for x in numbers:
  print x

Go on, poke some holes in it.

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On 3-4 April I was at the Next Web 2008 conference in Amsterdam. This is a long overdue (owing to my blog being down) but brief write-up of my overall impressions.

The conference was satisfyingly wacky. It’s all about new web startups presenting their stuff and conversations on what’s coming up on the web, upcoming trends, the new Google or Facebook etc. It’s a good place to find out about cool new startups, but also to observe the areas that attract the most innovation.

In the following days I’ll write up my comments on the most interesting of the startups, but here are some of the other highlights:

• Robert Scoble talking about some interesting differences between software experiences of yesterday and today. Signing up on Twitter or Facebook and having no friends makes for a much different experience than having thousand (as he does). In the old days, a software installed on your computer always offered the same experience.
• Chris Saad speaking on Data Portability - very relevant in a room full of new web startups and very interesting.
• Nova Spivack talking about the semantic web - computers actually understanding the web. Probably slightly dumbed down for our benefit, but very informative session.
• Adeo Ressi speaking on how to get funded by VCs. A good guide on how to “get funded for your dream”.
• A brilliant episode by Tegenlicht called ‘The Truth According to Wikipedia‘. It explored the nature and status of Wikipedia as the source of all truth on the internet in contrast with the fact that it’s maintained by a community of users rather than experts as a printed encyclopedia is. I won’t side with one side or the other here, but it was a very thought provoking video.

Overall I would say that it was a very worthwhile two days, held in a lovely city. I’m glad I was there.

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Finally! Apparently I was caught between a server going down at the same time when I was due to pay my subscription for another year of hosting (this is with Tophost, essentially the same company I got this domain from; don’t click that link unless you’re prepared to come face to face with website that’s all greek to you). The server was brought back up, but did not know that I’d paid my dues and dutifully deactivated my account. It took a week or two to get my account reactivated.

As an aside, the emails exchanged with their sales support had the ticket information at the bottom, right where I could spot the following:

Priority: Low

Low! A week and a bit of downtime, due to a combination of server and billing issues, low! I think not!

On the other hand, a hosted managed Linux Plesk environment (no ssh access though) for €50 per year, I can hardly complain, can I?

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The 1and1.co.uk hosting package I’m using just failed massively, and it’s the second time week. Out of 4 servers (2 dedicated, 2 virtuals) 3 were inaccessible this morning, and the response the technical support gave (after fiddling around trying to ssh in themselves I presume) was “here’s the number to the server team, call them in 2 to 3 hours for an update”.

2-3 hours! In server time, that’s about a year. It is seriously bad form for a hosting company.

On to buy a box from another hosting company, I opened two browsers and typed in the address for slicehost and vpsland (I’ve happily used the former so far and the latter was suggested by a colleague). It took 30 seconds to choose a slicehost package and by then the vpsland website hadn’t come back. It subsequently took 2 minutes to complete the very short order form in slicehost, and vpsland website had come up by then, but too late. And in 4 minutes, I was ready to log in to my server. Brilliant, well done slicehost.

Hosting is a highly commoditised industry, and reliability and good service makes all the difference…

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There’s a lot of debate around people’s data on the internet: who holds it, who owns it, who controls it, how you should be able to access it, how other “parties” should access it, and so on and so forth.
As I was uploading photos on Flickr for the first time the other day (yes, I’m the equivalent of a Neanderthal in the IT geek world, as I didn’t own a digital camera till the year 2008) it occurred to me that there’s more to it than that. Apart from the concerns mentioned above, I feel like I’m missing something. I own those pictures I took, but I don’t have a physical object that represents them (the external hard drive doesn’t count).
This extends far beyond pictures. Take mp3 vs. LP/CD/Tape. Or e-books vs. err, regular books. There’s something satisfying about having a physical object. Something you can look at, hold, feel, be proud of and have it shining down at you from your shelf. Something that gives you the feeling of ownership. And although a lot of things are moving into the digital world and future generations will have less and less to do with physical objects and deal even more in digital entities, I don’t think that feeling of owning a real object will go away. I think it’s something engrained into our genes over thousands of years, and people will keep seeking to satisfy it, one way or another.

2 Comments »

While sailing in a sea of flight cancellations and alterations last week, I needed to monitor two different flights, and followed an ad for a website that promised to do exactly that. I registered for a free service that would send me notifications for both these flights and had an impressive collection of airports and airlines it covers (www.flightstats.com). I got a bit disappointed that I could only get the email notifications for free and SMS had to be paid for, but was not surprised. After all, SMS costs money, email is free.
And then I thought twice. I have a PDA and receive my emails instantaneously. The SMS notification would give me no more prompt feedback than the email (apart from the slightly more attention-demanding ringtone). It would actually be limiting the notification in terms of length of the message, whereas email can be a bit more verbose.
So how long till SMS dies? The more people have devices that do email (easily), the less meaning SMS will have. Apart from the possibility of Instant-Messaging style applications on mobile devices that would serve the same purpose, just plain old email will serve the purpose of instant, short-message communication just fine. Perception of the instant nature of SMS in contrast with the usual delays in reading and replying to emails will change as email will be just as instantaneous, and SMS will have little or no reason to exist.
The end is nigh (well, a good two or three decades away perhaps, but definitely in our lifetime) for the SMS…

3 Comments »

I was reading an article on The Times on Monday about University professors being worried that today’s young students arriving at University are lacking the deductive reasoning to distinguish between genuine, verifiable and trustworthy as opposed to random imaginary bits of information. The article associates this with the internet and websites like Google and Wikipedia. It argues that today’s young minds, being used to have all the information they could possibly want at the click of a button, and all their questions answered instantly, are lacking the curiosity and reasoning ability to question the information and distinguish between truth and nonsense.

I don’t have enough contact with the generation in question to have an opinion on the truth of these claims, but I can certainly see the danger at hand. The previous generation went through (or arguably is still in) the phase of the TV gullibility: If it’s on TV it must be true. It’s definitely a possibility that young people who grow up using the internet and learn to trust sites like Wikipedia de facto, don’t learn to be suspicious of random websites and take what they read as the undeniable truth.

On one hand, people’s gullibility regarding the internet is obvious in the amount of internet scams victims (a colleague informed me the other day that 3% of spam email actually get a reply – staggering!). On the other hand, everyone trusts well-known websites to be accurate. I had a disagreement a few months ago which was eventually settled by looking up the “truth” on Wikipedia.

This is of course in no way the fault of websites like Google and Wikipedia. Google strives to give you the websites that are more relevant to your query. It’s up to you to decide if you can trust them or not. But it’s dangerous to assume that the first result in your Google search must be a very popular website and therefore creditworthy. Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia, maintained by it’s users, which is great. It’s still up to the individual to decide if it’s the right source of information. If I want to find out information on a popular TV show, I’m happy to trust what Wikipedia says about it, and if I’m looking up what the definition of a livelock is, that will be a good place to start too. But if I’m trusting Wikipedia to give me the accurate and up-to-date information on what the procedure is to get an immigrant Visa to a country, then I’m looking in the wrong place for reliable information, and that’s my own fault.

At the end of the day it all comes down to people’s judgement of what’s genuine and what isn’t. But it’s very important, especially in our age of information overload, not to simply absorb any piece of information that comes our way without thinking about it. Being on the internet (or the TV for that matter) doesn’t mean it’s true.

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