Apr
3
What would Google want with Twitter?
Filed Under Social Media, Web | 1 Comment
I think most of the coverage is missing the point on the value of a potential Google-Twitter deal. The base microblog technology is dead simple to recreate. My team created working Twitter clone for use inside the firewall in less than a month. A fully working and better performing microblog could be put on App Engine for peanuts. The idea that Arrington put forth yesterday that Twitter “holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet” misses the point. The real Keys that Twitter holds are the users.
Simply stated, Google learned their lesson with Google Video. They built a product that was just as good as YouTube, yet hardly anyone used it; the simple solution was to buy the users. Just like the YouTube deal, the only things Google needs from Twitter are the user base and the brand name. The biggest difference between the two deals is that I don’t think Google will want to take on the “fail whale” technology that twitter is running on; It wouldn’t surprise me if they already had a fully functional and integrated microblog platform ready to go on Google infrastructure with the same API, just waiting for this deal to be done. The deal would enable Google to instantly get back in the game with Facebook and leave Microsoft in the rear-view mirror.
Jan
23
One Billion Served
Filed Under Web | 3 Comments
I would like to congratulate the Internet on serving over a billion unique visitors in December. While this is a tremendous milestone (and I am sure that the Internet’s parents are very proud) I must point out that this is less than 15% of the total world’s population so there is plenty of room to grow.
For all of us cloud developers, there is some interesting information contained in the comScore research report as well. For starters, China has surpassed the US in internet visitors and Asia Pacific as a region accounts for 41% of all Internet users. I am not sure what you are thinking about, but if I happened to be developing a SaaS solution that was targeting this vast audience, I might think twice about how I can enable said application to provide its service to the 84% of users that live outside the United States.
Jan
21
Day 1
Filed Under Politics | Leave a Comment
Day 1
I heard a lot of pundits speaking yesterday on how historic the inauguration was, how we were collectively witnessing history and other such sentiments. I agree that yesterday was a wonderful milestone for civil rights in this country, but I have a fervent hope that President Obama will not be remembered by our great-grandchildren as the first African-American US President. January 20, 2009 should not simply be the answer to question #10 on a 5th grade social studies quiz.
I hope that future generations will remember this presidency for what it will accomplish, for setting us on a trajectory of peace and prosperity that was unmatched in human history, for engaging and inspiring a new generation of leaders, for fostering a culture of service, for ushering in unparalleled access and transparency of government, for ensuring that every person has affordable access to quality healthcare, for solving our climate and poverty crisis, for building the world’s most effective primary and secondary educational system, and yes for closing the loop on 300 years of racial inequality and strife. The President can obviously not do this alone, the power of the government is (thankfully) limited and scope of our problems is unbounded; however, he can inspire us to achieve all of this and more.
President Obama’s new job will be to identify what needs to be done and motivate the American people to take action. The genius of this presidency is that nothing now seems out of reach. If, given the current state of race relations and politics, Obama was able to pull together and motivate an organization that was able to get an African-American elected president, are these other goals really unachievable? Who can deny the implausibility of what he achieved? Who can say that the other challenges facing us are more entrenched or difficult to navigate than what has already been accomplished? I cannot.
I can no longer bury my head in the sand and say that the problems facing us are too difficult to solve and therefore should be ignored. Barack Obama has proven that anything is possible, let’s help expand his chapter in the history books. Today is Day 1 of the Obama administration and we all have the opportunity and responsibility to ensure that yesterday’s event ends up as a footnote to history.
Jan
19
I am Back
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
I want to apologize for taking such a long hiatus; I took some time off from real life to play World of Warcraft for a while. Over the last couple weeks though, WoW started feeling more like work than play and I haven’t really developed any friendships in the game that would keep me playing. Essentially, I beat the game and don’t have much left to do in it any more.
On the other hand there is so much to do in real life! We have a new president (as of tomorrow) and I am really excited about that. We have a worldwide financial meltdown brewing and there will be much to say on that as well. In addition I think the time is right to start a blog (and possibly a podcast) on Cloud Computing.
When I logged back into wordpress today, I had over 4000 spam comments to moderate. The process to do this involves clicking on a checkbox and then clicking on “Mark as Spam”. WordPress only shows 25 comments at a time, so I had to do this this about 170 times. This would be daunting task for anyone, but one good thing about WoW is that it desensitises you to having to repetitively do the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over (well you get the point) so I cleaned up that spam in no time.
It feels great to be back, stay tuned for more greatness to come and my thoughts on the innaguration tomorrow.
Jun
29
Sixteen a Day
Filed Under Games, Gaming | Leave a Comment
A chance encounter with a UPS service clerk yesterday, led me to an unbelievable and astounding discovery, but before I get ahead of myself let’s start at the beginning:
I received an XBOX 360 Elite from my daughter for Christmas last year (2007); the whole family loves it and we are all somewhat addicted to Rock Band. I had hoped that by opting for the “Elite” version of the XBOX that I would be getting a newer and better tested design, thus avoiding the “red-ring of death” problems that plagued so many people. After five months of light use (about once or twice a week) I noticed that the XBOX would sometimes freeze up, especially when starting up. When this happened the screen would freeze the picture and no fumbling with the controller would help. To unfreeze it, I would have to unplug the system from the power outlet, wait a few minutes, and then plug it back in. This would solve the problem and we would continue on with our game.
Over the course of the last 30 days this problem happened about seven times, and then suddenly last week it froze every time I started the system. The XBOX would randomly stop at some point in the boot sequence, and the screen would just freeze solid. After trying to restart the system about 15 times, I searched on the internet for “XBOX Screen Freezes” and found that Microsoft has a page dedicated to the issue.
I tried everything in the article to solve the issue, before determining that it wasn’t going to be fixed by me; I needed have my XBOX repaired. I called the XBOX support line, and was walked through a series of questions intended to diagnose whether or not I had a real problem. At the end of the process I was told that they would ship a box to me in order to package my XBOX and send back with a postage-paid shipping label.
I received the unmarked, white box within two days and dutifully packaged my system for shipping, including the prepaid UPS shipping label. While running some errands I stopped into the local UPS store to drop it off. As I walked into the store the woman behind the counter looked up and before I had a chance to utter a word she said “XBOX?”
I laughed and said “Yes, do you get a lot of these?”
Her reply astonished me: “We average about sixteen-a-day.”
I do not live in a dense urban area (there are only 45,000 households within 5-miles of this UPS according to 2000 census data) and there are at least 7 other UPS drop off locations within that radius as well. Some quick math: Total US Households = 105 Million and Total US XBOX 360 Sales = 10 Million. That means that about 1 in every 10 households have an XBOX, or in other words, there are about 4,500 XBOX’s within 5 miles of this UPS store.
Even though there are at least 7 other drop off locations near here, let’s assume that this store gets one-half of all the broken XBOX shipments in the area, because it is in a good location. That means that 32 of 4,500 XBOXs are failing and being shipped back daily. For the mathematically challenged, that would mean that about 70,000 XBOXs are failing EVERY DAY! At that rate, Microsoft would need to service every single XBOX over about a six month period.
Even if you assume that my numbers are an order of magnitude (10x) off of reality (due to some unique demographic in Mason, OH), that would still mean that they are servicing at least 25% of the installed base of systems every year, and that does not account for many, many systems that were purchased and used too infrequently to encounter an issue.
How can a blunder of this magnitude escape the eyes of the press and investment community? Why is no one reporting this? I can only surmise that the efficiency of Microsoft in dealing with the issue has mitigated any negatives with regard to the massive number of failures. What did Microsoft do right?
- Efficient, friendly and apologetic tech support.
- Postage paid shipping with packing materials (they even included the box tape).
- Fast repair and shipment back to the customer.
I can’t imagine that dealing with these issues in a fast and efficient manner has been cost effective for Microsoft, but the alternative would have been console suicide. The few people I have heard talk about this are praising them for doing the “right thing”, but I find it hard to give Microsoft points for doing what is necessary to save their business; I can’t imagine what they would have done with this problem if they had a monopoly in the console business as they do in operating systems.
What does all this mean? Did anyone lose their job over this? Do we think that Microsoft will learn from this and emerge a better hardware company at the end? Is this a harbinger of Microsoft’s death and does this mean that Dvorak was right? I would love to know what you think.
Jun
18
This evening, I watched the replay of Tim Russert’s memorial service on MSNBC. There were many laughs during the course of the service, and several times that I was brought to the point of tears. This surprised me because while I certainly was a fan of Russert, I did not know him personally and never even met the man. Never the less, the passion and love that the speakers felt for Russert came across in powerfully in their eloquent eulogies.
Pondering on the power of eloquent speech to invoke emotion made me immediately think about the charge that Hillary Clinton and John McCain have tried to create that Barack Obama is all speech and no substance. This naïve and simplistic characterization of Obama is a microcosm of the fundamental issue at stake in American public policy. The simple fact is that the American people have, over the course of the last four decades, surrendered the reins of our participatory democracy to multi-national corporations who fund propaganda campaigns that we call American politics.
At this turning point in history, we desperately need a visionary leader who can leverage the power of honesty, intelligence and eloquence to evoke the emotion necessary to get the American people out from behind their TVs and into the public square to discourse with each other on what type of role this country will have in shaping our own future and the future of the world.
It is important to remember that the world was at an equally precipitous point 68 years ago today; three days after Paris fell to the Germans, Winston Churchill grasped that moment in history to address the House of Commons, the English people and the world:
“What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.
Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”
Listen to an exerpt from Churchill’s “Finest Hour” Speech (1.4mb)
Churchill’s eloquence at this moment of crisis for the world, changed the course of human events. I hope that our country can rise above the base emotions of hate and fear to elect an equally eloquent leader that can ignite the fundamental fairness, spirit and energy of the American people in a way that would make Tim Russert proud.
Jun
18
Clicks to Cliques
Filed Under Social Media, Trends, Web | 2 Comments
It should be of no surprise that on twitter very close knit groups of people band together who have similar interests (e.g. friends, work colleagues, etc.), because twitter was designed to allow social groups to stay on top of what each other are doing. What intrigues me are the public cliques that form dynamically from people who have similar interests.
In my own effort to gain a twitter following, I have surfed twitter profiles by clicking on profiles of people I know and looking at who my friends are following on twitter. If those people look interesting (e.g. Interesting twitter posts or a good blog) I follow them and then click through to people that they follow and do the same thing. The act of doing this has led me to find several distinct groups of like-minded individuals who form what I call a twitter clique.
There are some obvious cliques like the Tech Podcasters (Laporte , Scoble, Veronica, et al), the Web 2.0 crowd (Rose, Calacanis, Arrington) and pro bloggers like Joy Wang, May Woo and Erica O’Grady. There are a lot of people who simply use Twitter for self promotion and there is a big clique of book authors who take every opportunity to pimp their next signing and tell us about how their current projects are going. However, the most interesting cliques are very unexpected like the 120+ people who follow the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (Roller Derby). I have found that Cliques can swarm around any subject and don’t seem to be limited to one social cast, for example I cannot image more diverse groups than work at home moms (Mommye), adult cam girls (Stacie Adams) and Obamamainians (Barack Obama).
It surprised me at first that most of the self organizing groups have formed around women or issues that are important to women, but then I realized that most men who are early adopters of technology are generally introverted geeks; therefore the early adopter women became the driving force behind clique swarms like raw food evangelists (emilyraw, 1rawgirl), Expat ESL teachers (Mleec), and wannabe actors who are always off on auditions. Eventually, I think that marketers will pay a lot of money to mine conversations of these cliques to better understand and market to specific demographics, but for right now I just am enjoying the conversation.
Your Turn
I am sure that the 500+ people that I am following just barely scratch the surface of the many cliques that intersect on twitter and other social media sites, what are some of the unique clique swarms that you have discovered?
May
22
I have arrived?
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
I was just cleaning up some spam comments left on bovak.com and was getting a little annoyed. Then I realized that I WAS GETTING SPAM COMMENTS. This is a watershed moment for bovak.com; this validates me as a blogger: I am now worthy of the spammers taking time to post virus laden Cialis spam on my site.
Please don’t burst my bubble by pointing out that the spammers are probably using automated scripts and that all this really means is that some web crawler found my site, I already know. Just let me bask briefly in the glory of my new found celebrity.
May
10
Two companies that I will not do business with
Filed Under Gadgets, Travel, consumerism | 1 Comment
Nothing gets under my skin more that poor customer service, and this week I had two experiences so frustrating that I am very likely never to do business with those companies again.
First was with Brookstone. I recently changed roles within my company and there were many cake and card parties as well as some parting gifts etc. The gift fad this year seems to be small digital picture frames. I received three of these after having bought one for myself at Christmas time. Being the gadget hound that I am I knew that people thought these would be the perfect gift for me. I accepted all of them graciously and thanked everyone for being thoughtful, but two months later the gifts were still unopened.
This week I had to run to the mall for something and thought to return these items for store credit, in order to buy a mother’s day gift. When I get to the store the clerk informed me that they “can’t do anything for me”, because I don’t have a receipt. I explained that they were gifts and I didn’t have a receipt. I also pointed out that they were brand new, unopened Brookstone branded products, and that they were actively selling these exact models for Mother’s day.
No dice. Brookstone would not take back unopened, Brookstone branded merchandise for store credit. This makes no sense to me; I was not asking for money back; I was not trying to return something purchased at another store. All they accomplished is to piss me off and send me somewhere else to buy my mother’s day gift. I am also fairly certain that I will never buy gifts for anyone at that store ever again.
I left from the mall to the Airport for a business trip. I was planning on attending The New Yorker Conference on Thursday and then had business meeting in New Jersey on Friday. I decided to stay at the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick, NJ, because I was taking a late flight and the Hyatt is within walking distance of a NJ Transit station. The plan was perfect: I could take the train into the city on Thursday while leaving the car at the Hotel and then return via train Thursday night for my meetings in Jersey on Friday.
There was only one problem. The New Brunswick Hyatt didn’t honor my reservation. When I showed up at 12:30 in the morning, the hotel clerk informed me that “a computer error caused them to overbook the rooms and they didn’t have a room for me.” Instead, they offered me a free hotel room at the Somerset Plaza Hotel which is 15min away. I tried to explain that the reason I was staying at this hotel was the proximity to the train and that my company pays for the room so a free nights stay doesn’t really mean anything to me. She obviously had given this speech several times this evening and was callous to my concerns and inconvenience.
By the time I found the Somerset Plaza Hotel (a horrible old hotel that is run down and poorly staffed) and checked into my room it was 1:30 in the morning. Making casual conversation with the desk clerk, I discovered that this “computer error” happens several times a week and that the Hyatt is always sending disgruntled guests to them in the middle of the night.
Even though I travel more than 100 nights a year, not doing business with Hyatt ever again doesn’t seem to me to be sufficient penalty for them, anyone have suggestions on how I can best inconvenience them to the extent (okay three times the extent) that they inconvenienced me?
Apr
23
Open Letter to the Obama Campaign:
After a disappointing ten point loss in Pennsylvania and a lackluster speech this evening, I believe that Senator Obama needs a new strategy to simplify his message and present it in a way that everyone can understand the difference between his candidacy and Senator Clintons. Two points he needs to make:
- The economy is bad, lost jobs, weak dollar, huge national debt and mortgage crisis that is affecting the financial markets.
- The war is bad, people dying, reducing our ability to get Bin Laden and costing us billions of dollars that could have been used to solve (or would have prevented financial crisis) instead these billions go to large corporations.
Politicians have been manipulating the american people with fear tactics to keep our attention away from these two issues, but the fact remains that we are where we are because of special interests in politics.
Explain in no uncertain terms that the fundamental issue with our government is that in order to get elected and stay elected that you need to raise millions of dollars to run your campaign. The easiest way to get access to this kind of money is to use the lobbyists to find/organize campaign donors. Because of this the politicians that take this special interest money must then act to the benefit of the special interest or risk losing that donation for their next campaign.
The DIFFERENCE between Obama and Clinton is not lapel pins or nuances of the healthcare plan, but where the money to run her campaign came from and how that will affect her judgement to do something right for the american people or something that benefits the campaign donor. Because Obama has a donation base of 20MM people, large corporations will not have any special influence on an Obama presidency, and hopefully the clear mandate that he will be elected on will allow him to enact sweeping campaign finance reform as well.
Finally, make the connection that once we take the large corporate money out of politics, there will be no reason/benefit for legislators on either side of the aisle (with the exception of corruption) to enact laws that benefit corporations over the general people. That freedom will then allow the government to fix healthcare, education, the mortgage crisis and yes even the war.
So simply follow the money. It is unfortunate but people need a common enemy, the enemy in this case should be Large Corporations that take jobs out of the country and who pour money into lobbyists and special interests in order to bias the tax code and other laws/policies. Tell people in detail how the money of politics effects legislation (really tell people how bad it is). The best part about this, is that the same arguments will also work against McCain, so in essence you will be showcasing to Democrats that may have doubts about Obama’s electability a blueprint to beat McCain in the fall.
I know that Obama has been talking about these issues, but he speaks of them at a 50,000 foot level. He needs to connect the dots (follow the money issue to the individuals pocket) and show how big business is the enemy we need to be paying attention to.
Eddie
p.s. One more thing, either get rid of the Teleprompter or practice it more, your starting to come off a little robotic.