All posts by Mark

I’m the founder of The Hawaii Project, a new book discovery engine. Previously I was responsible for Product Strategy and Product Management at Telenav, after they acquired goby. Prior to that I was the ceo of Goby, since acquired by Telenav. Before that I did time at Endeca, PTC, Netezza, Evans & Sutherland in a variety of R&D, professional services and business development roles. When I’m not obsessing over work, I’m a proud husband and father of two great kids, love to play tennis, am a compulsive reader and book collector, and am really into way too many different kinds of music. (What’s with the Viking you might ask? While the vikings were known to split a skull or two, I mean more the verb than the noun, as in “to go adventuring” in the sense of the Old Norse fara í víking. I’ve always been interested in the vikings and started using viking2917 as a handle to avoid spammers way back when, and have just kept using it….)
Goby, Search

Search Insider Summit & presentation

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Presented last week at the Search Insider Summit – great event with a lot of learnings. Everyone seems to be talking about the increased richness and personalization of search, and how it intersects with personal passions and the new social media environment, and what that means for traditional search marketing. Some roundtable notes can be found here: http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/raw/?p=2159.
My presentation focused on “context” as the organizing principle for search innovation. The future of search is about context. The era of one-size-fits-all search engines – a “search box and ten blue links” – is over. Gone are the days that a keyword search returns the same 10 results for every person, whenever and wherever they run the same query. Tomorrow’s search will be personalized, tailored for location, tailored for context, even for the weather! My presentation:

Abstract: The future of search is about context. The era of one-size-fits-all search engines – a “search box and ten blue links” – is over. The future will be contextualized and task-centric, focused on enabling discovery and not just keyword matching. Gone are the days that a keyword search returns the same 10 results for every person, whenever and wherever they run the same query. Tomorrow’s search will be personalized, tailored for location, tailored for context, even for the weather!

Context is environmental, task-centric, social, user-centric, and data & domain aware. Tomorrow’s search engines will know what time it is, where you are, what the weather is like, what your interests are – if you let them. They’ll know as much as you’ll let them about your social network and what they’re interested in, and let you leverage your network to help make decisions. They’ll use this entire context to do a better job of answering your query. Tomorrow’s search engines will have a much richer awareness of data than just a list of keywords – in addition to leveraging context, they will create context. They’ll condense volumes of information down to consumable “chunks” you can use to shape your discovery process. Based on your task and context, they’ll understand how to combine raw results with other information (photos & media, maps, summary views) to help you make sense of the ocean of information that’s out there.

This is starting to happen already. Drawing on examples from Google, Bing, Search Insider Summit alums Milo and Goby, and other new startups like Hunch and Siri, we’ll paint a picture for how tomorrow’s consumers will access information. We’ll explore what that might mean for brands and search marketing professionals looking for new and better ways to address the right audiences at the right time through the right channels.

Startups

Startup I wish someone would build: TheNextOne.com

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How many times have you gone to lunch or drinks with somebody, tried to figure out who paid last time, and promised “ok the next one’s on me”? Happens to me all the time. I wish someone would build this app – “thenextone.com” – I go to lunch, hit a mobile site or send a text message, record who I went to lunch with, and who paid. Then, next time, voila! You know who’s turn it is. Presumably could even be integrated into foursquare or gowalla so that as you are checking in, it’s recorded. Done.

Bonus points for cross-referencing to my social network so the “I owe” is tagged onto the social identities for the people I owe or am owed by. Karma points for buying more than you are bought for…..

Music, Travel

Angélique Kidjo at the Somerville Theater

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Angélique Kidjo at the Somerville Theater

So I’m riding the train in to work on Friday and my daughter texts me and says she’s got an extra ticket to Angélique Kidjo at Somerville Theater that night and did I want to go? Let’s see, long work week, tired, my car’s 25 miles away at the train station….but some things you don’t turn down – your daughter invites you to a concert, you go!

Angélique Kidjo is a Grammy award-winning Benin-born African pop diva, and her music covers everything from traditional African music to smokey jazz that would feel right at home in a Paris nightclub to Brazilian-sounding funk. The show reminded me why I love African pop music, and why it’s so important to see it live. The energy in the show is absolutely not captured on her studio recordings, great as they are. Plus – you can’t see her dance on the cd! For two solid hours Angélique danced through every song, and I don’t think she repeated a dance move the entire night – she has more moves than a human should be allowed to have! The other reason to see African music live is that they all dance – and the audience participates in a way that western musicians usually don’t encourage. Angélique roamed both aisles up and down both ways during one song, weaving her way through the crowd. Towards the end, she invited the audience up on stage to dance while she sang – “first come first serve, it’s kind of crowded up here!”. By the end of the song, she had 40 people on stage, everything from six year olds to sixty year olds, professors and students and football players up on the stage dancing.

She started off the show with a traditional song she grew up singing, accompanied by a rhythmic clapping. I was completely unable to clap along with the rhythm – it was totally foreign to someone who grew up on Bach and Led Zeppelin – completely irregular, and yet she repeated the rhythm over and over again, so it had an internal logic for her. One of the other things I love about African music is that it is completely accessible, and yet the melodies always move in unexpected directions. One of the things I love about travel to foreign countries is that it challenges your assumptions, and African music has that same effect – you have to *listen* because it doesn’t do what you expect.

Music, Search

Is Apple building a search engine? Should they?

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There are persistent rumors that Apple’s building a search engine. Apple does have many obvious motivations for wanting to have a search engine of some form. There’s the clash with Google over mobile dominance (iPhone vs Android), as well as the continuing need to make their devices (the iPad, iPhone, iPod, and Macs) continue to be “what the cool kids have”. What’s going to sell more gadgets? Content. (and apps, of course).

More broadly, Apple’s brand identity is undergoing a shift. Apple’s core audience has always been the cool, smart, hip people – the creative industry, the doers, the builders. But they are broadening their appeal to not just creators, but consumers. CV Harquail has a great take on this trend.

Are they building something? From the outside looking in, nobody knows. But if they are building something, I doubt it’s general purpose search. Building a search engine is getting easier and cheaper than it used to be, but it’s still a very significant investment of human and computing capital. If they were going that route, they’d just buy Yahoo. Or they could buy Cuil and get pure search at a much lower cost. But the reality is nobody wants another Google – a general purpose horizontal search engine – that’s why Cuil floundered – it doesn’t solve a problem people think they have. Google solves the problem it solves, well enough.

What does all that mean for what Apple should do in search? As I and others have written elsewhere, the future of search is about task and context. Search is the purest expression of consumer intent on the web – as Chris Dixon pointed out, that’s why Facebook has 1/30th the revenue of Google, with more web traffic.

Where does Apple care about consumer intent? Aside from when they are making device decisions, it’s when consumers buy media – music, movies, books, and other content. iTunes is a $2B per year business. So my guess is Apple’s new search engine might not even feel like a search engine. It will be a rich media site for searching & exploring the world of media. It will contain a lot of branded content (think New York Times, Netflix, Entertainment Tonight, Rolling Stone), and given Apple’s penchant for closed architectures, may even have a paid inclusion/pay-to-play model. Imagine a media search engine, helping you explore the world of media & entertainment, but incorporating significant amounts of social media content, centered around music, movies, art, books and other creative content. Of course with quick and easy ways to buy or stream things from iTunes 8). Something more like The Hype Machine than Google – and of course it would leverage the purchase of Lala. It will support exploration and social search as much as pure keyword search.Given Apple’s dominance in the creative world, and it’s brand power, it would have no trouble attracting advertisers to that kind of experience. iAd, anyone?

Is Apple building a search engine? Who knows.

Should they? Hell yes.

And knowing Apple’s design philosophy, it will be clean and elegant, with lots of rich media. It might feel kind of like a certain fishy search engine we know.