Social Studies

Google Prediction Goes to the Movies

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With my request to use Google’s black-box Prediction APIs finally approved and a little time available in my schedule, I set out to see how well Google’s racks of CPUs would do against a few training sets I had in mind.

Ultimately, I was hoping to gain more insight into the question: Can software algorithms (with help from the crowd) predict what I’ll like in books, movies, web sites, and food?

To make this a manageable project, I limited the scope of my exercise to the modest problem of predicting  amusing movie titles.

Wait, don’t laugh! I have some definite ideas on this subject, which I was able to compress into simple rules.  For example, a number or date with an exclamation after it, funny!  I’m tickled by these somewhat hypothetical movie titles:“Ten!”, “1941!”, or  this real knee slapper, “22!”

I’m also similarly affected by titles with a man or woman’s name that ends in a vowel followed by an exclamation or question mark. “Ralphie?” Hilarious.  “Albert.”  Not funny.  And titles with “Being”, as in “Being Ralphie”, are funny  in a knowing, ironic way.

So how did Google’s mysterious Prediction oracle do ?Continue reading

The Rack

PC Quarantines May Be a Good Idea But…

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Bruce Schneier points out—you know he would!—some of his issues with Microsoft’s proposal to quarantine infected computers.  He’s not against the idea in principle. For it to work, though, it has to have a good chance of success.

Schneier’s main concern is that hackers will be motivated to get around the software, initiating another security arms race. Bruce does note that Internet access restrictions would work better if ISPs are the central authorities in deciding who can leave their digital houses.

Of course, as he rightly notes, there would be all kinds of forces, not necessarily benign, who would want their say in this matter.Continue reading

@NYC

The View from Hoboken

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I’m liking the Hoboken Tech Meetup experience. As I remarked in my last HTM post, there are advantages with smaller groups and a limited roster of speakers. The pace is less hurried, the demos more leisurely, the speakers can make extended points, and the Q&As have more educational value.

Obviously, I hope that HTM grows and prospers, but I would recommend NYCers take the Path or ferry and try this more intimate tech gathering. And the views of the NYC skyline from the Babbio Center are quite stunning.

Kudos to Aaron Price and his staff.

I’ll confess that I come to these meetups just for the demos, but at last night’s Hoboken Tech Meetup I arrived earlier and stayed later to listen to the speakers.  To my surprise, I was able to understand some of the inner legal and financial aspects of the startup world, which were the subject of two of the talks.

Bigger surprise: I enjoyed  it.Continue reading

Social Studies

Google’s Pretty Good Recommendation Service

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I’m still near the starting point in my travels through recommendation services and their underlying algorithms. It’s always a great help therefore to meet a more experienced knowledge hiker returning from the other direction who can offer a better sense of the terrain ahead.

We received a comment from Sachin Kamdar, founder of recommendation startup Parse.ly, in response to a post last week on Freebase and knowledge networks that gave us just such an insight.

Kamdar’s point is that you can get pretty far—but not all the way, of course—by extracting patterns from datasets. Even a simple pattern matching algorithm can be useful.

Parse.ly, by the way, employs both data mining techniques and language processing in generating its recommendations.

So how far can you go with pattern matching and a little semantic analysis?

To find out we tried Google Sets.Continue reading

Social Studies

Knowledge-based Recommendations

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Over the last few months, recommendation startups have sprouted up—getglue, Hunch, Foodspotting, Parse.ly, Miso, Xydo (in beta), Bubbalon, etc.—to offer suggestions about restaurants, books, web sites, or just about anything in this world.

If you add in Facebook (with its like button, and lots of 3rd-party rating apps ), Amazon, and NetFlix, there’s enough of a universe to merit a service that rates and recommends recommendation services. There’s a startup, no doubt, working this out.

All share the idea that there’s wisdom in the crowd, and to various extents use stats about the mob to algorithmically classify tastes—clustering, nearest neighbor,decision trees—and then generate suggestions. There’s a nice summary of these collaborative filtering techniques in the reference section below.

What about a more conventional, common-sense approach that derives wisdom from actual knowledge of the subject?Continue reading

The Rack

Battling Galaxy Tab Reviews

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David Pogue of The New York Times likes the Samsung Galaxy Tab, with the exception of the high price.

WSJ‘s Walter Mossberg considers the 7″ Tab to be a “serious alternative to the iPad and one that will be preferred by some folks.” But not this folk. In spite of the two cameras and Adobe Flash playing ability of the Tab, Mossberg still prefers that larger, camera-less iPad.

The Denton-esque headline of Matt Buchanan’s review for Gizmodo says it all: “A Pocketable Train Wreck.” Matt’s gripe is that it’s more of a phone than a tablet.

And Wired considers the Tab a pleasure to use and likes the smaller size.

So there you have it.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Brand X and Information Cooties

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With pre-election talk of new telecom laws and in the aftermath of the Comcast decision, I was hoping to not revisit the spooky crypt containing moldy Supreme Court decisions and worm-eaten FCC regulatory rulings for a few months. But I was dragged back into this basement last week, when I received an email about a new study commissioned by “Broadband For America.”

BfA is “dedicated to making broadband available to all Americans” and counts former FCC commissioner Michael Powell as an honorary co-chairman. There’s not much else about the organization on their web site, besides a list of, ahem, grass-roots organizations that make up its membership. You can read more about BfA in the reference section.

Written by University of Pennsylvania law professor, Christopher Yoo, “Reclassifying Broadband as a Title II Telecommunications Service” takes the view that because the FCC’s third-way approach is in contradiction of statutes, rulings, Supreme Court decisions, and plain common sense that it can not possibly pass legal muster..Continue reading

The Rack

iPad's Cost Advantage

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Samsung Galaxy Tab Review

Samsung Galaxy Tab

I had to gulp when I first heard about the pricing for Samsung’s Galaxy Tab.

I’ve since recovered my composure upon learning of the more reasonable carrier offers at around $400 (with a two-year contract) and a WiFi-only version of Tab for $499.

Samsung’s tablet is the best of the Android lot, and even they’re having trouble keeping up with Apple’s iPad.

ZDNet’s Larry Dignan nicely explains why the rest of the pack won’t equal the pricing and functionality of the current version of the Ipad for some time.  Cupertino’s wizards nimbly build the hardware they need to differentiate  and outsource the rest.

And Apple’s IOS tablet software won’t have any serious competition for another Android OS rev or two.  Continue reading

@NYC

And the winner last night was …

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At New York Tech Meetup’s election day event, a bunch of young college-age upstarts stole the show from some of the slightly older incumbents.  I’m referring to student projects and hackathon winners who were up on stage at Skirball demoing their software efforts.

The evening’s theme was set by host Evan Korth, assistant professor of computer science at NYU and one of the co-founders of HackNY. Korth laid out his vision of New York City as an East Coast tech hub with NYU, Columbia, Parsons, and Rutgers acting as an educational seedbed for startup activity in this area—i.e., the Stanford University model.

And based on the demos I saw and the various entrepreneurial opportunities and programs around town, I’m becoming more of a believer.

Continue reading

The Rack

Android Christmas Shopping Season Starts Now

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On Friday, our friends at Yixin Industry International Group (Shenzhen, China) emailed us with news on a new tablet computer. I guess it won’t be a surprise if I report that their MID YX-7100 product is a 7” iPad clone powered by a Rockchip 2808 processor and running Android 2.1.

I was curious. I took a look at the Yixin website, and this consumer-oriented electronics company has good marketing instincts—better than some well known US laptop makers. I’m impressed with their line of liquid USB flash drives, especially the beer models.

I studied the YX-7100 specs a little more closely, and discovered they’re offering the YX-7100 in white and pink, in addition to basic black. Nice touch!Continue reading

Quote of the Day

Simply put, we need to improve and maintain the health of consumer devices connected to the Internet. This will benefit not only users, but also …

Archaic Telecom

OnSIP’s Free Click-to-Call Plugin

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I was about ready to launch into a new assignment for a client when some news concerning OnSIP, the cloud-based PBX service, attracted my wandering attention. The folks at Junction Networks have just introduced an OnSIP browser plugin for Firefox and Chrome that lets you perform a click-to-call. While this new feature is not technically very sexy, it is a big deal for the small businesses that are the likely customers of OnSIP’s virtual PBX.

Once upon a time, SMBs were practically indentured to their hardware vendors, who made them pay (and still do) for every little feature. This free click-to-call function from OnSIP is typically classified by enterprise PBX makers under a marketing-speak category called Unified Communications or Desktop Telephony. Having tried a few of these types of apps, I can attest that they were difficult to configure and even more painful  to use.

I was able to install the OnSIP plugin on my MacBook Pro in under a minute, and then launched an X-Lite softphone to act as my virtual endpoint.

I achieved Unified Communications with little effort and no expense.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom, The Rack

Microsoft’s Solution to Cyber Attacks: PC Health Certificates

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Quarantine officers on our flight

If you haven’t already, please read Seymour Hersh’s insightful and non-alarmist New Yorker article on cyber security in the context of the recent Stuxnet virus and China’s growing hack capabilities.

The Hersh piece contains a very simple solution to safeguard our nation’s IT against government or mere freelance hackers: mandatory encryption of all commercial and civil Internet communications.

While this broad approach is attractive in principle, cost and inconvenience make this less than desirable. And there’s also opposition from the same government intelligence agencies responsible for protecting us against cyber attacks in the first place: they wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop as easily.

Though perhaps not the most credible candidate, Microsoft has offered its own proposal, an idea that has proved useful in managing infectious diseases: PC health certificates.Continue reading

@NYC

Tech Meeting Across the River (Hoboken Tech Meetup)

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Hoboken Tech Meetup is a nice counterpoint to the goings on across the Hudson. Though I enjoy the big-city excitement of the NYC version, the Hoboken Meetup I went to last night at Stevens Institute’s Babbio Center also had its share of fun, Jersey style.

I loved when Michael Streko of Knowem (Belmar), social media trademark protection firm, said he sucked at Powerpoints before he launched into his speedy presentation, which had maybe two slides. I get it: we’re not fluff-meisters, we got products that sell and make money.

On this point, Streko stated that his site was profitable within an hour two hours after launch.

Take that NYC startups!Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC Reminds Fox,CableVision of its Obligations

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On Friday, the FCC sent out a letter to Fox and Cablevision requesting both to state how they  are meeting their statutory obligations ( “to negotiate in good faith”) over their current retransmission dispute.  As Yankee fans are painfully aware, Cablevision and Fox had an agreement that expired on October 15 to carry WNYW, WWOR, and WTXF channels. Cablevision pulled its rebroadcasting of local MY 9 and Fox 5 television, which carries the Yankee games in the New York area, in a disagreement over its payments to Fox.

You can read the full letter after the jump.

It is powerful thing to see the public interest that’s written into the telecom laws being asserted with these two combatants. As a  former coworker of mine would sometimes remind us  during contentious meetings: where’s the customer’s voice in all this?Continue reading

@NYC

Bantam Live: A Look at Small Business CRM

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I just finished writing and posting my five favorite small business apps and then some underutilized neurons kicked in with the following thought:“wasn’t there a contact and project management tool that I had seen a few months back that looked promising?”

I searched through The Technoverse Blog’s Up Starts database to jog my memory and came across Bantam Live. It was slowly coming back to me.

I decided to gave this cloud-based social CRM app a closer look. My snap judgment after trialing it for under an hour:Bantam Live is a capable contact relationship management tool with the usual sales gears.

The social part comes about through Bantam’s ability to display a Twitter stream within the app and then allowing its users to import Twitter ids into the contact database. It’s a nice touch, and it will no doubt get used by sales folks scouring Twitter and Facebook for leads.Continue reading

@NYC

Five of Our Favorite Small Business Apps

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It is hard to keep track of all the startups that are emerging daily from apartments, hackathons, and incubators. And from within the ranks of unemployed workers, many are cranking out business plans and working out sales projections at their neighborhood Starbucks.

We are definitely in a new era of entrepreneurship. One factor that makes starting your own less of a dream and more of a practical reality is that the costs of IT infrastructure have dropped significantly in recent years. It’s just cheaper than ever to buy a phone system, establish a web presence, and build out administrative functions for sales and marketing.

I’ve come up with five web-based apps that bring IT for little or no cost to IT-less companies.Continue reading