2007 7
Pinging vs Crawling and an open source search engine
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
I am sure that there´s tons of stuff written on the web about the pros and cons of pinging (notifications a la technorati) vs crawling (programs that scout the web for links a la google) or listening vs spying. Tonight we had dinner with Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia in Madrid and we spoke about some of these. In general pinging beats crawling in everything but thoroughness. Crawling finds all there is to find on the net, pinging finds what wants to be found. Jimmy described to me a problem that I was not aware of and that is that ajax pages are hard to crawl. I commented on a problem that he was not aware of and that is that Google is the biggest or one of the biggest consumers of electricity in the world and that is among other things because crawling is incredibly energy inefficient compared to pinging. In any case what was extremely interesting is the concept of an open source search engine. I really hope that Jimmy and his open sourcers make this one work. One of the worst jobs at Google is probably policing results to make sure they are not hacked as the monetary incentive to hack google results is huge. Wouldn´t it be great to have a community police force rather than some paid employees? This problem is more manageable than the problem of people who tried to hack Wikipedia. If the Wikipedia community dealt successfully with article hacking, search optimization hacking should also be policed more effectively by a community than by a few paid individuals. Wisdom of the crowds at work in search. Intriguing. In the meantime I mentioned to Jimmy the little search engine that we put together at Fon called Unfolding News. This engine combines crawled sources with pinged sources that are all fresh.
2007 6
Loic´s Seesmic: happy to be part of it
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Investments with No Comments
Seesmic is my friend Loic Le Meur‘s new start up. It’s similar to Twitter, but uses video instead of short text messages. I recently invested in Seesmic.
Loic and his team are working hard in San Francisco to build this new exciting social video platform. When launched, Seesmic will allow users to post videos on the site using their webcams or files and will automatically publish them on other popular sites (Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and others soon). Many people are already doing this in Beta.
The service is built with openness in mind: it’s not trying to replicate other social networks or video sites, it builds on top of the best ones. The purpose is aggregating, sharing and tracking conversations about the best professional and user-generated video content on the Web.
Soon users will be able to post videos straight from Skype (our partners at FON) and interact with their Seesmic friends with a Joost widget (another company I invested in).
Loic is documenting every day of his new startup with a series of videos published on seesmic.com.
2007 5
Investment in Tumblr
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Investments with No Comments
I have invested in Tumblr, the company co-founded by David Karp, who I recently had a chance to meet. Tumblr is a clever mix between Twitter, blogs and social networks like Facebook.
If we think of a blog as a diary, then a tumblr is similar to a collection of notes about interesting things found on the net or whatever else you might want to share with your friends (links, photos, videos, audio, text messages).
Not everybody has the time or interest to create and maintain a blog, yet with Tumblr anyone can create a simple and beautifully designed personal page to aggregate his digital identity and share content with their friends.
Tumblr can automatically import content from most of the Web 2.0 sharing services you use and show it as a continuous stream on your tumblr. When I shoot a photo with my unlocked iPhone, the iFlickr application automatically uploads it to Flickr and Tumblr shows it on my page, alongside my twitter and blog posts.
Tumblr has just released its 3.0 version with lots of new features and a stunning graphic design which also looks great on the iPhone.
2007 2
Can USA be a super power with a mini currency?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
The dollar is on a free fall. It used to take 85c of a dollar to buy a euro. Now Americans have to cough up 1.45 dollars to buy one euro. For Europeans USA now is a bargain. For Americans coming to Europe is becoming horrendously expensive, especially London, America´s favorite foreign city with the pound at an all time high as well. At this point I think it´s fair to ask how can USA be a global super power when its citizens can´t afford leaving their home? While many in USA think that devaluation is good because it helps exporters my view is that if you can make a decent living with a very strong currency you are in a much better position than if you need a weak one because your companies are more competitive, more automated, more productive, and you can afford buying other companies around the world. To seek protection behind a weak currency is not the strategy of a super power, if anything it is the strategy of a wannabe power like China.
Having said this USA is USA, the number one economy in the world. When George W Bush announced that he was going to invade Iraq I thought that this go alone foreign policy was going to bring tremendous economic hardship to America and sold my dollars, moving my savings into Euros. Now however, as a Clinton victory seems to be on the horizon I think that the collapse of the dollar maybe coming to an end. For the US to have a decent currency again the country needs to go back to the balanced budgets of the Clinton era. Should that happen the dollar should recover to close to parity with the euro again. Military adventurism and absurd overreaction to minor international threats have made of America the world´s largest debtor by far. Spending half of the world´s military expenditures and go around the world begging (or printing papers and hoping that others will take them) is a foolish strategy that has to come to an end. The good news for the depressed dollar is that the Bush era is coming to an end.