Great literature on iPhone? You bet!

All iPhone fan boys love trolling for new and interesting apps. So do I - and I am now reading “Great Expectations” on my phone. Dickens may have just rolled over in his grave - please accept my compliments on the tome, Chuckie D. Solid, solid work.

Over the last few months, iPhone has really trained me to read on a small screen. As long as I can zoom in and really bury my face in the device, no problem. I mean, I’d be crashing into street lights and mailboxes while walking around *anyways* - I may as well read and learn something interesting while risking personal injry and looking like a jackass.

This is why I was so excited when I came across the “Books” category in App Store. While its selection is NOWHERE near what you’d find if you purchased a Kindle, it contains a small but powerful set of books that are generally accepted to be great literature. My guess is, the copyright on those titles has run out so you don’t have to deal with pesky-ass publishers if you are the guy developing the app.

Reading Great Expectations has been a lot of fun so far. And I always have it with me, in my pocket. Yay! The part that sucks is that the developer should have made it easy to look up terms in a dictionary. It is just too damn painful to find an obscure word, kill the app, go to browser and look up dictionary.com. Boo!!

But overall, well worth the 2 duckets.

On iPhone 2.0, Shazam and the future of music

Shazam!

Like every other Valley Apple fan boy, I’ve been spending lots of time downloading, discussing and evangelizing iPhone apps.

My favorite app right now, bar none, is Shazam. I cannot believe that the list of fawning servile fans of this app is so small, but let me be the first in line. Not only is the app usable and ridiculously useful, IMHO it points to something the music industry should have been working on for a long time.

What is Shazam? its an app that you install on your cellphone and run whenever you come across a track that you can’t recognize (which happens ALL the time to most of us at the gym, the car radio, and if you are a major Kenny G fan, in elevators). Once the app “listens” to a few seconds of the song, it sends the audio fingerprint up to the server and figures out the actual song and sends it down to the device. You can then proceed to purchase the track (at least on the iPhone you can) or watch a YouTube video.

This is great, but it is rendered more powerful by the iTunes model of music. Several commentators smarter than me have commented on how the album - a collection of songs sold as a whole - is still a valid form of music retail.

Based upon my personal behavior over the last 2 years, I call bullshit.

Purchasing music now is like purchasing a stick of gum while standing in line at Safeway. Or the National Enquirer if you want to be trashy about it. In other words, music purchases are starting to be impulse buys. You hear a great track, you WANT TO BUY IT RIGHT THERE. Given the low price point of 99 cents, you don’t think twice about making a purchase RIGHT NOW.

This impulse has been around since iTunes started to take off but its been dormant. I hear a great track on Entourage, I have to do the heavy lifting of remembering the stupid lyric, Googling the lyric (game over right there), finding the track on iTunes and then paying 99 cents for the privilege. Uhh, no thanks.

On the other hand, Shazam greases that impulse better than anything out there on the market right now. Plus, it retails for FREE via the appStore.

What’s not to love??

A Few Thoughts on Cuil: The Least Disappointing Search Launch in a While

After not much fanfare but plenty of anticipation, Cuil has launched.

As expected, the general blogosphere coverage of Cuil has been sub par (except for Danny Sullivan’s EXCELLENT review; in depth and trenchant as usual), mostly because the service simply wasn’t available until 9pm. Also, most mainstream blogs that test search products miss the obvious things to check for (spam, porn, relevance, link analysis, etc.). Today, the stories to be found on TechMeme are either focused on index size (mine is bigger) or on the backgrounds of the founders (who gives a rat’s ass?).

I decided to kick the tires on Cuil and the short review is: the least disappointing search engine launch in quite a while.

Quintura? Not so much. Hakia? Mmm, no. Ask? Yeah, nice UI but didn’t have the stomach to push it. Mahalo? Nice, but don’t even get me started, I should be ashamed of myself for putting it on the list. PowerSet? Interesting, but they have a LONG LONG way to go, hopefully the road is easier with M$ dollars.

Here are a few things at Cuil which are very nice:

• It works reasonably for tail terms. I tried “12 year old with diabetes”, “who built the eiffel tower”, “swimmer’s itch” and a host of others. Sometimes the results are less than stellar but there were very few chokeathons. Try any of the search players above on a really obscure term and you’ll define the word chokeathon for yourself.
• The magazine layout (or the grid layout, to be more precise) makes scanning easy. I like the presence of anchor images everywhere even though the images themselves are sometimes BS.
• The refinements and exploration jump off points offered are usually very nice. If I do say so myself, Kosmix does better on the “Related in the Kosmos” block, definitely so in Health.
• Love the autocomplete’s execution on the search box. Ask has already offered this so it ain’t a first, but its very well done and quite accurate for my tests.
• It supports site: which a lot of new search engines don’t support. Good on you, Cuil.

Now, here are all the things that are currently blowing chunks:

• Its not fully stable. I saw an empty page for “Barack Obama” as well as for “salmonella”. A refresh fixed it each time.
• Spam is an unsolved problem: http://www.cuil.com/search?q=viagra&sl=long. You cant claim to be good until you remove the domain parker in result #4 for Viagra, which is a VERY popular search.
• A colleague (who shall remain unnamed) sent me a query called “getting rid of bats”, which produces a virus on the first result. That is just NOT COOL (pun intended).
• Sometimes, the images are bullshit.
• Google Universal Search RULES for things that are newsworthy or imageworthy. Try “salmonella” on Google and find news results because of the latest food scare. None to be found on Cuil. Presumably, “universal” search is something they could work on because this is necessary but not sufficient for success. Similarly, their local offering is bound to blow.

All in all, a big congratulations to Cuil for pulling over what many others have failed spectularly to do. Now, please get back to work and roll me a better offering.

As for those of you that think Kosmix is still working on what is generally known as search, check out this post: http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/06/searching-for-a-needle-or-exploring-the-haystack.html

Dear Hollywood: Please prep Tom Cruise. He needs to dance around a tree, Bollywood style

I just love this. The New York Times reveals that cash heavy Bollywood entertainment companies are trying to throw cash around Hollywood and are promising to cut through Hollywood “bureaucracy”.

I am now fully assured that I will - in my lifetime - see an A list Hollywood movie star prance around a tree, Bollywood style. Bonus points if they line up a 100 extras behind him/her performing the same dance move in unison.

See here for the gory details.

Dear IKEA: Did you realize you are now selling to dumb Americans?

This is a rant.

I have a violent love hate relationship with IKEA. I love big box retail convenience as much as the next guy (and screw you if you think I’ve sold my soul) but absolutely HATE Ikea’s ridiculous arrogance.

What the hell is with IKEA’s stubborn insistence on naming all their products in Swedish????

Are you frigging kidding me? You’re selling me a piece of shit 5 dollar ottoman that’s gonna disintegrate in six months and cause me a goddamn back injury while I’ve got my feet up on it.

The least you can do is name the stupid thing in English so I don’t have to squint at the letters and look like a jackass trying to pronounce it.

Plus, let’s face it. It’s not as if you are some classy company that gets to charge more money by naming crap in “European” so us stupid US dwellers get easily conned. Your demographic is kids fresh out of college and young families who’d rather be shopping at Z Gallerie instead of your dumpy-ass store. Get with the program.

And here’s the last problem: your language isn’t as pretty as you think. French this ain’t. There, I’m glad I said it.

Exhibit A: Walking through your interminable maze of Swedish crap, I came across and picked up a grill pan. Of course, even such a mundane object had to be classied up with a Swedish moniker. Only problem is, here is how this word is spelled:

SKANKA

I’m 26 and should know better, but I couldn’t stop giggling.

Funny Signs from my India Trip: Part Deux

For an intro to the series, see here.

While in India, my folks and I decided to take a family trip to Kerala, an absolutely gorgeous southern state in India. Kerala is full of wonderful cultural shocks and different from the rest of the country: highly educated, a heavy Christian population, lots of folks who don’t speak Hindi, greener than the rest of the country, the list goes on.

Here is a photo that I snapped at the Cochin airport as soon as we landed:

This is not a sign that you will see at any American domestic airport. Questions: what exactly are they facilitating? If I walked in, would I see a helpful fella who would facilitate me by picking up my bags for free? Are they renting out elephants in there? What could it POSSIBLY be?

I guess I could have just asked, but this is more entertaining. To me, anyways.

On founder blogs and startup valuations: Kosmix, Ning, and others

In the short amount of time since Anand (co-founder of Kosmix, the company that funds my rather expensive Star Wars costume habit) has edited a personal blog, I’ve become interested in the following question:

How much does a well-respected blog translate into tangible benefits for a startup? Can a blog’s impact be measured in terms of valuation dollars?

Anand started his blog a couple of months ago and has used it for the following reasons:

• Trends and ideas related to the business of search. Kosmix is a player in the search ecosystem and these posts tell the world that we’re not a bunch of monkeys with a lot of VC dollars. It tells potential recruits, investors, advertisers and bystanders that we (or at least some of us) know what we’re talking about. It tells Stanford PhDs that we hire them for a good reason and that they’d feel at home with us.
• Posts plugging the technology that portfolio companies are building. A great way to give a fledgling startup completely transparent, totally biased but technically strong point of view.
• Details on conversations with tech heavy hitters like Peter Norvig. These depend upon the 1-2 punch of access that most of us don’t have and a degree of technical competence that most journalists don’t possess. Very unique, compelling content targeted at a niche audience of rabid tech heads.

You get the point. His blog is an excellent mouthpiece for him as an individual and for Kosmix as a company. I now routinely run into people in Silicon Valley who don’t know Kosmix but have heard of Anand’s blog. That is absolutely shocking.

Take another example: Marc Andreessen’s horribly brilliant blog that came out of nowhere with an absolute bang two years ago. Marc has publicly claimed (on his blog, where else!?) that he’d rather blog in his undies - stay with me here - than deal with reporters to plug his message.

But these 2 guys are established Silicon Valley commodities. What of those who aren’t well known and/or don’t have a few million safely tucked away under a mattress? That’s what leads me to be most impressed with Andrew Chen’s Futuristic Play, a highly thoughtful blog on web monetization models, virality and other things that I don’t quite understand. It so happens that Andrew is doing a startup with a good friend from Stanford, so I’ve been following the blog for quite some time and watching it grow from nothing to over 3000 subscribers (yikes!). If I were a VC, I’d put some money into the guy.

So the million dollar questions: how do you quantify this impact? If the value of PR is notoriously hard to measure in hard dollars, is this harder? And why hasn’t every founder/CEO in Silicon Valley gotten off their sorry asses and started a blog? Lastly, should I focus more on having a life than asking these questions?

Best Twitter Quote of the Day

I know. I’m NOT supposed to be talking about Twitter. But this one is slightly subversive (as opposed to the normal blogger bitching about uptime, downtime, business model, blah blah blah).

I found this great quote about Twitter on a - of all the places - Wired blog.

“Twitter takes the Pringles analogy to its logical conclusion. It’s something like a collection of personal blogs, only each entry is limited to 140 characters, so you end up with a vertical stack of bite-size, artificially flavored communication snacks. They’re oddly compelling while remaining staunchly unsatisfying, and it always feels like maybe the next one will quell the roiling ennui inside.

Like an elderly widow keeping the TV on for “company,” I keep a Twitter window open whenever I’m online, and accept that as sort of, kind of communication. Over the course of my day I learn that Wil Wheaton enjoys the new B-52s album, Jonathan Coulton is taking a minivan cab and Kottke himself is having a “really crappy morning.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Hey T-Mobile! You suck, take your whining elsewhere

I just love this. T-Mobile is suing Starbucks because the coffee hawker has come to its senses and stopped charging a ridiculous 30 monthly dollars for its WiFi access.

http://gigaom.com/2008/06/07/t-mobile-vs-starbucks-free-wifi/

Can you believe this?

GigaOM also makes an interesting observation that iPhone users who hog bandwidth for a paltry 20 bucks a month need to use more WiFi, less 3G. I can’t find fault with that - God knows I use my iPhone way more than I ever did for my Nokia E62, and I paid 45 bucks a month for that connectivity. Now: 20 bucks flat.

Welcome to the real world, Starbucks! Free WiFi! What’s next? Cheap coffee?

The yuppie in me LOVES Starbucks. But that other guy - who left home at 15 to be self reliant ever since and has held down a job since seventeen - HATES it.

One of the worst features of Starbucks is the paid WiFi. What were they smoking? 30 dollars a month for WiFi, especially after I just lost an arm and a leg paying for cinnamon crapola latte? Get the f outta here!

I welcome their entry into the real world with “free” WiFi. Well done, guys.

Here is the full story.