Greek Complexity

Links of the day - Feb 9, 2012

Triple the fun today:

The Zuckerberg Tax -- a US tax lawyer's suggestions for increasing taxes on the mega-rich. Do tax lawyers get paid on a commission basis?

Turin's Enduring Importance -- a quick history of Alan Turing's seminal contributions to modern computing

You Are Solving The Wrong Problem -- I didn't understand how the title was relevant to the problem he outlines at the start of the post until the end of the post when I had my "A-ha!" moment. Very nice. Clearly showed me how I, like everyone else, really was looking at the wrong problem!

 

You probably already know this but for the dodos out there (not you, of course, dear reader) I'm just being cheeky with the tax lawyer commission jibe above.

Inventory that walks

Here's a TED video that's like a mini Discovery Channel-style documentary. It's futuristic like many TED videos but actually tells us about something that has existed for a while now.

What is the video about? How e-commerce orders are handled in warehouses. Is that a snore I hear? Just watch this.

Google TV version 2

I really hope Google succeeds at this:

Google’s smart TV software platform, Google TV, is poised for its first significant overhaul since it launched in Logitech and Sony hardware a year ago. Via over-the-air updates that should begin streaming to hardware devices on October 30, Google TV users will find new TV-optimized Android Apps, an improved YouTube experience, and new features that provide easy, direct discovery of TV and movie content. When Google TV launched, it was supposed to seamlessly co-mingle “live TV” (read: broadcast, satellite and cable) with streaming video services like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Video On Demand. You could also use your Google TV software to search the web, and even access digital content from your home network or attached storage.

via Wired

Platformize! Now!

Ya gotta love rants like this: Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

Amazon comes in for a lot of stick, Microsoft gets huge kudos and Google is torn apart. It all feels like an alternative universe, only it's not.

Excerpt:

The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate -- ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can't cheat. You can't have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.

Google gets credit for letting the writer leave this online. On their own servers. But not much credit for anything else.

Announcing investment in CustomerXPs

I am happy to announce a Series A investment in CustomerXPs Software Private Limited, a software company based in Bangalore.CustomerXPs is a rare example of a home-grown enterprise software company that aims to compete on the global stage with truly world-leading innovation.

The firm operates in the analytics space to provide human-like intelligence using real-time transaction data (for example, when a bank's customer calls the call centre with a question). A short-hand way of thinking about what the company does is, as one journalist said, CRM Version 2.0. CRM industry insiders would probably see this as Version 3.0, if we define Version 1.0 as contact management and Version 2.0 as analytics on historical customer data. Customer relationship is only one application of the company's technology. The technology is also being used for monitoring of fraud and compliance matters, business intelligence and other transaction-heavy applications.

Besides the team's obvious expertise spanning technical areas (artificial intelligence, data management, statistics, psychology and behavioural science), product management and sales, what struck us is the amount of commitment that the founders had to the long-term vision, with the discipline not to seek easy services revenues by becoming yet another Indian IT solutions company.

I hope to see more such product companies emerging and getting funded in India to allow the broader ecosystem to develop.

More information on the investment here.

The Google Nexus S phone

To anyone who's been thinking of getting me this phone as a present, I'm not standing in your way! Even though it has a touch-screen, usually one my pet peeves. Here's why:

Click here for more.

KeePass

Does anyone use this? Views? Seems very useful but also slightly scary. See http://keepass.info/ for more information.

Not better search; better-than-search

Earlier this year, Nova Spivack called for a better "decision-support engine" (my phrase; he prefers "help engine", which is definitely catchier). He doesn't say much about what form such an engine could take, either as perceived by the user or its entrails. However, you do get an inkling of what he's thinking about.

Quote:

Search engines cause choice overload. That wasn’t the goal, but it is what has happened over time due to the growth of the Web and the explosion of choices that are visible, available, and accessible to us via the Web.

What we need now is not a search engine — it’s something that solves the problem created by search engines. For this reason, the next Google probably won’t be Google or a search engine at all.

Spivack is a (the?) grandson of Peter Drucker, not that that's relevant to this article. I consider him one of the best technology futurists around in a world of pretenders.

Link: Eliminating the Need for Search – Help Engines

Singapore: start-up city?

Entrepreneur Hugo Angelmar shares his views on Singapore as a destination for new start-ups. Some particularly astute views given the relatively short amount of time he has spent here. No platitudes, sycophancy or motherhood statements here. I found this paragraph particularly good:

Singapore has made the news in the US and Europe as providing a large amount of startup capital to young upstarts. This has made available a flurry of grants of $50,000SGD to a number of fresh graduates (or still in school) students with no experience to build and launch a product to market. Empirically, Singapore hasn’t had any global tech startups (ignoring the surprising story of Creative). Social Wok and Home Camera might be considered exceptions (and where started by experienced individuals) given the overwhelming amount of individuals I’ve seen with their “Founders” or “Directors” business cards of companies. This easy access to funding has diluted the labor market for entrepreneurial people among small projects of 1-2 people.

And found this particularly telling:

A friend who did some recruitment while at Motorola a few years ago complained that 80% of the candidates they interviewed couldn’t code a program in C to determine if a number was odd or even.

Entrepreneurs, investors and government need to take note.

Though agreeing with almost everything he says, I do think there have been a few more Singapore-based successes than he realises (though definitely no world-beaters) and there are a few potential future successes waiting in the wings.

Link: Structural Market Deficiency or “How Do I Scale Our Team”

And the Facebook debate continues

I read the title of one of Mike Arrington's recent posts and thought he was being sarcastic. Glory be, he's serious!

Mike relates user complaints about Facebook's interface changes to design by committee. That's wrong. Design by committee is before the fact, user feedback is after. I don't think any user is saying they can do a better job at designing the Facebook interface; they're just saying what they hate about what Facebook themselves have done.

So the broad ideas, vision, back-end architecture and all that is very much Facebook's job. This is NOT what users should be doing, ie users aren't involved in core design. Users don't design either Porsches or iPhones; expert designers do. What users can in turn do (generally speaking) is provide the market reaction. Give feedback on specific hitches and glitches that affect them. What Robert Scoble calls taking "splinters out of the experience".

Someone else comments on the same page:

Ignoring your users much of the time is the path to oblivion for a company. The examples cited about Porsche and the iPhone are examples of survivor bias. There’s probably 100 or 1000 examples for each of those where the idea and/or the company bit the dust.

How true. Case studies are one thing but can we look at the universe please?