I am really excited to be joining the board of a cool new non-profit startup, Styleta. Styleta (www.styleta.org) is a student-run nonprofit that sells designer clothing donations online for charities that focus on women’s initiatives. Great clothes for a great cause. Please check it out!
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Documentary and new music from Rush
Randomly noticed that there was a Rush Rockumentary on TV last night, Beyond the Lighted Stage. Turns out it was just released a few weeks ago, and even won the audience choice award at Tribeca. It is pretty amazing – there is even 30 year old video footage of a high school age Alex Lifeson arguing at the dinner table (& smoking) about whether he would finish high school or become a musician!
Digging a little deeper, I realized that about a month ago, they released a two-song bundle & booklet – how did I miss that? (The singles are Caravan and Brough Up to Believe, get them here: Caravan [+Digital Booklet]
Microsoft takes a shot at what Apple should be doing.
Microsoft is apparently listening to my blog – they’ve gone and launched the search engine I said Apple should build a few months ago – a media and entertainment search engine! (Or is this their version of me saying “I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea?” 8).
Bing Entertainment (http://www.bing.com/entertainment) covers Music, Movies, TV, Games, and Video Games. It has a very attractive, browsable interface with a lot of rich media – for example, the music page shows photos, links to audio clips of the artist, as well as upcoming live performances. In spirit, I love what they are trying to do. They’ve even stolen a page from the wonderful (but defunct) service Lala which Apple acquired. You can play over 5 million songs in their entirety once for free. So if you ever wondered if you’d like Miles Davis’ Flamenco Sketches, now you can find out, for free, without engaging in any piracy: http://www.bing.com/music/songs/search?q=miles+davis&go=&form=DTPMUS.
Or at least, in principle you can. If you click on the play links, you get a “coming soon” message. Seriously, Microsoft? What was the hurry to launch, that you called this out in your press release (http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2010/06/23/a-new-entertainment-experience-for-bing.aspx) as one of the main features, and it doesn’t work? In practice, I find the implementation of Bing Entertainment to be disappointing (in contrast, Bing Travel is done very well). So far as I can tell there is no integration whatsoever between the search bar and the browse panels that are right next to each other. For example, a search for “Lady Gaga” produces the same search results as if I’d gone to Bing proper. It’s positioned as a media search product, but in reality it appears to be an entertainment portal with hard-coded content (and not very deep content), with a disconnected search box right next to it. The catalog appears to be very shallow. A search for the “Archer” TV show was disappointing – effectively the same search as on Bing “proper”. (BTW Archer is an absolutely hysterical parody of James Bond meets Beavis & Butthead meets “The office” – check it out if you haven’t seen it). In the entertainment space, there is a very limited catalog of entities that need to be recognized – how many TV shows are there, after all? Those should be recognized as special searches and treated accordingly. My search for “Archer” should have taken me to an Archer landing page. While it is positioned as a media search product, the search angle is virtually non-existent. The positioning of the product is spot-on, but the execution is lacking. Apple has a huge opportunity here – if Apple makes this product, the user experience is going to sing (perhaps even literally!).
Goby gets covered by Scoble!
Had a great (and very informative!) visit with Robert Scoble, his coverage is here. He said some great things about us (“more important than foursquare”!), but one of the most rewarding things was that his wife loves Goby as well. It’s one thing to impress someone technical with what you’ve achieved – it’s even more rewarding when people who aren’t in it for the technology see the usefulness of something in their daily life.
Here’s the interview:
Apple, Search, Task & Context
I’ve posted on a number of occasions about task-centric search and how it’s the future of information access. I’ve also speculated on what kind of search engine Apple should (and might be) building. Some recent comments from Steve Jobs have strengthened one of my theories and thrown cold water on the other.
First, the cold water. According to Jobs, Apple isn’t building a search engine. Some other folks suggest he’s not being entirely forthcoming, but I suspect he’s telling the truth in a literal sense. In the figurative sense though, Apple has a different vision for how people consume information – it may not be “search”, but it is information finding:
On the desktop search is where it’s at; that’s where the money is. But on a mobile device search hasn’t happened. Search is not where it’s at, people are not searching on a mobile device like they do on the desktop. (more here)
Put one way, “there’s an app for that”(TM). In terms I’ve used before, context is the organizing principle for information access, and what is a mobile app if not “context” embodied? Context can be summarized with a mnemonic: TILT. Task, Identity, Location and Time. If I know your TILT, I know your context. An iPhone app has a pretty good implicit idea about all of those things. Who you are, what you’re doing, and where & when you are. That’s why mobile apps like Yelp or Goby can so effectively answer information needs with just a few taps. John Batelle has expressed some similar ideas here. This is why people use apps on the iPhone rather than search, as Jobs suggests. That’s why Goby manifests very differently on the iPhone than in does on the web, even though the underlying information model is the same.
The broader point: in the future, information finding will be supported by task-centric, contextual search applications, not general purpose “search box + 10 blue links” search engines. They’ll manifest differently on the web than in mobile environments, but share the underlying premise.