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.

Goby, Search, Startups, Travel

What’s Goby all about anyway?

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What’s Goby all about anyway? On the surface, Goby is a search engine for things to do in your free time. The travel industry has invested hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in helping you get a hotel room and plane ticket – but hotels and plane rides aren’t why people travel – they travel for experiences. Finding experiences is tough – the information is scattered around the web, locked away in domain-specific databases, and often with poor user experiences and bad information architecture. And we’ve all had the experience of sitting around on a Friday night trying to decide what to do over the weekend – essentially the same problem. Goby crawls the web looking for high quality sources of information about all kinds of experiences, covering both traditional travel content (tours, attractions, lodging) as well as more local-oriented things to do (like music, theater, restaurants, museums, hiking trails, surfing spots and skiing…). We then take those results and contextualize them, by geolocating the results and putting them on a map, cross-referencing photography from around the web, and converting those web pages we found into real-world objects you can make decisions about.

Under the covers, Goby is a structured data, task-centric search engine. Over the years there has been continuous interest in the tech & business communities around “what is the next Google?”. In my view there won’t be a “next Google” in search, if by that one means a market-dominating, universally applicable search engine. The future of search is task-centric information access, that supports both findability and exploration in the context of specific objectives – say, finding a new book to read, deciding what neighborhood to move to, getting your next job or deciding where to eat. The shortcoming of major search engines is that, while they can happily parse your query and give you some web pages to read, they have no idea what you are trying to accomplish – and therefore cannot adapt their experience to support your task. You can see this trend happening with Goby (search engine for your free time), and with other interesting products like Milo (product search will real-time store inventory), and the very interesting Hunch ( a general purpose recommendation/decision engine).

The other major dimension to how people consume information is through social media – tools that integrate search & social media have the opportunity to bring the engagement of social media to the findability of search. Look for more on this from Goby in the future.

Books, Startups, Travel, Search, Music