7 of 8 Semesters Complete.. What’s Next?

So, with the exception of my honors presentation/semi-completed thesis/deliverable, two finals, and another presentation… I’m 88% complete with being an undergraduate. The other day I remembered some random event and was telling a friend.. “Do you remember last year when…”. After I finished the story, she looked at me and said, “Yeah… but Adi, that was in freshman year.” I was confused; I was so sure that it happened last year.

Even though I’ve gone through almost four years of college, it still seems like C-Tops was just last week. And that scares me. I don’t want the last few experiences of college to past by like a fleeting daydream. My worst fear is sitting in an office somewhere a few years from now, looking back on these past four years and missing it all — all of it. The parties, the dance battles, the allnighters with Pokey Stix, the classes, Kamikazi, the teachers, the friends, the acquaintances, that damn pit preacher, that meditative experience of walking through the quad in a sea of people, jumping across puddles of rain in the pit, being a freshman and eating at Lenoir with random people. But I know it’ll happen. I know i’ll miss it all.

Regardless, I’m trying my best not to think of it this last semester. I was originally going to graduate in December and I know now that would have been a horrible idea. I need a semester to take it all in, to relive everything that I’ve missed and live everything that I haven’t done. I need a freaking conclusion to this four-year novel. As far as work is concerned, most of it is stuff that I’ve always wanted to do independently but never had the time or the resources.

1. Work on my honors project, thesis, and presentation… and probably take a grad. info theory class to help it.
2. Consolidate all of the web design work, web development work, and graphic design work I’ve done in the past years into one place.
3. Work on designing and developing one of my ideas and push it out to the public for free (but get money through advertising!) I want to see what people like and what they don’t like. I have these conceptions of what users like right now, but I think that’s kind of pretentious without actually knowing what target audiences are interested in.
4. Build/hack the HTPC…
5. Start work on the carputer (…car + computer). I can’t actually do anything to my car until June when the warranty expires, but there’s always LOTS of time to spend $1,000 :] I should probably also figure out how I would cut out the dashboard and stuff before I actually do it…
6. Start developing applications in .NET. Ha, this is kind of obvious…

So lots of fun, but mostly lots of relaxing before summer, travel, moving to Seattle, and starting work with Microsoft on August 13th!

 

Like.com: Image Rec + AI. WOW.

Just played with the just-launched Like.com, a site whose design reeks of Web 2.0 but whose functionality is seriously unparalleled. This new webapp is from the creators of Riya.com and has stuff that would have Vannevar Bush rolling in his grave. For example: you can search for watches (or browse by watches) select which ones you like, and the backend feeds the user-friendly interface with tons of watches that look like it. What’s more, you can select which of the following attributes you like: the color, the shape, or the pattern on the watch, and the frontend immediately updates to show you watches based on your preference. THEN you can select a part of the watch you like, and find watches with that part! It’s eerily accurate. You can also change what color you’d prefer. Finally, you can look at pictures of celebrities and search based on the products that they’re wearing — you can drag a box around their shoes, or their watch, or whatever, and find products exactly like it!

Whew.

Keep a close eye on this one. Froogle-like functionality + Like.com + cool domain name = a killer app.

 

Interviewing with YCombinator

I went to Boston this past weekend to pitch an idea with Phil to YCombinator, a venture firm started by Paul Graham — the guy who sold his online store to Yahoo in ‘98 for 48,000,000 dollars. The entire weekend was an incredible escape from school and work (unfortunately as I write this now I’m right back in the heart of it). We applied with a completely different idea than what we pitched. In fact, we had a few ideas so we didn’t really know what we were going to pitch until the day before. Regardless, we put our faith behind an idea that did have a lot of technical problems. While we could have touted the amazing user experience and the sheer amount of pain points that the product could have addressed, in the end we were pushing our beautiful pie-in-the-sky design that would have solved all of these technical problems. I think Robert Morris noticed that the most. Phil and I both agreed that we probably would have done a lot better if we had a demo or if we had come better prepared to tackle the technical issues… or if we had went with the idea that Paul had suggested we do!

The night before the interview we had dinner with about 10 of the teams that were interviewing. Seriously, I met some of the most diversely smart people in the bottom of that Italian restaurant. The guys who probably impressed me the most were the three-member Weebly team. They have an amazing beta of their product with an impressive userbase and a great team organization. A few days ago they were mentioned in TechCrunch and received another 2000 users.

While I was pretty disappointed in not getting YCombinator, it was still awesome getting the opportunity to meet Paul, Robert, Trevor, and Jessica. And hey, everything happens for a reason. I was always upset at the possibility of leaving my friends and abandoning my senior year to work in Mountain View on the startup — although I definitely would have done it if we were given funding from YCombinator. A few hours after Phil called me and told me the outcome I ordered Chinese for the people I was staying with. After good food and a good conversation, I opened my fortune cookie and broke a smile as it read:

“Your true wealth lies with your friends”.

 

OS X Leopard. Amazing.

I could go on and on about Apple’s design and innovation, but seriously, the videos and pictures of Spaces, Time Machine, and others speak for themselves. I love their marketing too: “Redmond also has a cat. A copycat”.. haha. I admit, good design and marketing, but come on, Apple has borrowed more than a few things from third-party companies ;] Another cool thing from OS X that isn’t mentioned as much is their amazing new advances in speech feedback. In an earlier post I talked about the iPod getting speech feedback.. well, here’s what the synthesized voice sounds like:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/accessibility.html

They’ve really got the tone and inflection down pretty well. The only reason that it sounds computerized is probably because they wanted to speed it up. I’m betting this is the same stuff that’ll go into the next version of their iPod. They even simulated the “breaths” at commas and periods… that’s attention to detail.

 

Microsoft’s iPod Killer

So I’m sure everyone’s heard about it through CNN or whatever. It’s definitely not a rumor and Microsoft has done an exceptional job at hiding this thing from a ton of people, including.. Microsoft itself. There’s no mention of it at all at MS and there are no internal sites for it (as far as I know). I can’t find anything about it. Engadget though, has done a pretty good job of getting inside information, but the question remains as to whether it was leaked or voluntary for the purposes of viral marketing. If the latter is the case, well, I’m just contributing to that

Some of the cool things heard so far:

1. The Zune will have WiFi, and through this you can download songs without a laptop and you can also share songs instantly with friends wirelessly.

2. There are multiple devices, one of which will be an Xbox branded portable gaming system with Live Anywhere integration.

3. In order to convert you from iTunes Music Store to Zune’s own media service, they’re going to offer to convert you for free (i.e. you can download any song you downloaded from iTMS for free, which is a crazy deal)

4. Pyxis is the codename for their Nano competitor. It will have video too. Not sure how that’s gonna work…

5. Zune’s media service will be driven by the community through recommendations and such. Much like digg.com.

6. The Zune is headed by Robbie Bach and J Allard, who heads all the design and engineering of the XBox. J Allard is pretty interesting. He is best known for sending a memo to Microsoft in the mid-90s about the rise of the Internet, which reshaped their entire direction of the company. He also legally changed his name from “James” to “J”. Seriously.

There are three things I’m concerned about:

1. DRM. Digital Rights Management. This is basically what iTunes does to force you to get an iPod when you use iTunes Music Store — all songs bought from iTMS play only on an iPod and the original computer plus or minus a few that you register. So Zune will have this in order to have full vertical end-to-end integration services (Zune player, Zune media organizer, Zune online store). What many people think is that DRM protects artists and such but in reality it doesn’t add any value for either artists or consumers. It’s just a way of enclosing various technologies together and preventing others from utilizing a part of the whole.

2. Having multiple devices that are aimed at the same market segment is not a good idea. In the end, you’re going to be creating unnecessary loss. The iPod family was successful because it was able to provide *just* enough innovation in each successive release to warrant the buying of it. What’s the difference between the iPod mini and the Ipod nano? Not much from a high-level point of view, but the timings of both releases were the keys to their successes. MS has to do a good job of hiding their successive Zune devices from the public; hiding the future guarantees a healthy consumer surplus in the present.

3. Wifi Sharing. There are two ways MS could do this. I’m sure they won’t allow you to just give a song to someone else directly. Considering their efforts to enforce DRM, this is impossible. A possibility is that they would allow you to swap songs. So you could trade a song for someone else’s. The other possibility is that instead of even sharing songs, you could send a notice to someone else’s Zune to ‘bookmark’ a song on their account on the Zune online store. This is useful for rare songs, but the popularity of this remains shaky.

 

AOL’s Internal Memos! Awesome!

Here’s the good part, straight from the wonderful ladder rung of middle management:

“As you can see, withholding our highest level of service from even one member is all it takes to damage the trust and credibility you have worked so hard to earn. With all of the safeguards we have in place:

• recording and monitoring of member interactions
• our Keep it Real policy, which details our standards of professionalism and ethical behavior
• and Third Party Verification, an industry-first initiative to guarantee quality in every single retention call Any attempt to circumvent our member promise is a violation of our practices, and we maintain a zero tolerance policy for non-compliance.”

Yes, that’s correct. A Keep it Real policy. Maybe that was the problem during Vinny Ferrari’s cancellation call. They should take some tips from Chappelle’s Show.

 

Microsoft… The Times are Changing

A lot of stuff has happened here and a lot of people are talking about it. Recap:

1. Gates leaves Microsoft (or rather, he splits up his role and gives it to Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie) and will work full-time at the Gates Foundation.
2. WinFX is renamed to .NET 3.0.
3. WinFS is cancelled. Why? No one quite really knows. I have some ideas…
4. Martin Taylor, a key advisor to Steve Ballmer and head of the marketing for Windows Live "leaves Microsoft". 
5. Warren Buffet, the world's 2nd richest man, has decided to give up his fortune to charity, giving 85% of it to the Gates Foundation.

Good news and bad news I guess. I'm not really sure where Microsoft is headed, but one thing's for sure. There is a lot of potential for success between now and the middle of next year. The question is whether the right steps will be taken to ensure that success.

 

The Death of the Internet…

Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted against an amendment that would make Net Neutrality forceable. Many people don't know what Net Neutrality is — yet in the future, it will affect us all. If we didn't have Net Neutrality, there would be lots.. and lots.. of problems. Imagine not being able to access your Yahoo mail account because it's infinitely slow. Or trying to access your Yahoo mail account, only being told that you can't – but you can access AT&T's special mail service. Net Neutrality is what keeps the internet running. It basically means that you can access the largest corporate website as easily as the smallest personal blog.

The nation's largest telecommunications companies — AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — have banded together to decide which websites will load fast, slow, or not at all. "They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors." [Savetheinternet.com].

Google, Craigslist, eBay, Yahoo — all of these services would grind to a halt. Since they would have to pay these greedy telcos, it would be impossible to keep their sites running. As Craig from Craigslist explains it, this whole thing is ridiculously wrong. Imagine the sidewalk as the pipes and wires of the internet. According to the telecommunication companies, if you're walking down the sidewalk and having a conversation with someone, the sidewalk is going to get a cut of the value of your conversations.

This whole concept isn't fair. It's not right. Net Neutrality should exist to keep the internet running — the internet itself has been driven by innovation. The smallest mom-and-pop stores can put up websites and the biggest companies can roll out amazing new features, all for the public to use. Net neutrality is about the people. Anything else is for the profit of corporations.

In an effort to twist the public's view of what's best, the telcos have set up an incredibly stupid site called "Hands off the Internet" — itself, a fake grassroots site that isn't even set up by the public. The real site to go to, set up by the public, promoted by some of the greatest founders of the internet and the most notable people in science, entertainment, and politics, is Save the Internet.com. If you truly want to be able to use the internet as it is and be able to take advantage of the amazing technology that exists and will exist in the future, write to congress.

 

Facebook, Going for $2 Billion

Yeah, Facebook is on the selling block, supposedly. Mark Zuckerberg and the group of sophomores that built the site turned down an initial offer of $750 million, in the hopes of $2 billion (although I thought I read somewhere that Zuckerberg "never wanted to sell the company"). That's a huge success, considering it started two years ago. Facebook is now the seventh most-trafficked site on the Internet. The article I read said that Viacom would be a good candidate to buy the company — they own all the MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central networks. I guess that would be beneficial to Viacom so they could somehow know what the latest trends and stuff are, and I'm sure they could deliver better targeted advertising on the site (but hopefully not *more*). From a business point of view, Facebook is like the jackpot of marketing information about the youth in general. A company could make billions by simply parsing the information on the site — what students like, what they like to do, etc. — and deliver targeted advertising.

 

The “Our Customers are Stupid” Strategy

For the past couple of years, Apple has been a major driving force in the computer industry, pushing out sleek, high-performance Powerbooks and the ubiquitous iPods (seriously, everyone has one now). Recently though, Apple has started to bore me. At first, the company stealthily released the iPod and after a few months and a few redesigns it exponentially rose in popularity. Soon, Steve Jobs started dropping mysterious one-liners in keynote speeches and Apple started hyping up special launch events. Sure, in the beginning it was pretty crazy. The iPod mini, iTunes, those crazy computer-in-a-monitor iMacs… it was ridiculous.

Then things started to get weird. We started to realize that there was a sort of similarity in every launch event — there wasn’t any real innovation being showcased; it was more of a tweaking of a certain product, or even just a small feature addition. It was almost as if while we were drooling over our new 5G Clickwheel iPods, Apple executives were snickering and watching movies on their iPods. At first I thought, okay, the iPod Video is cool, and the Nano is cool, and they just got Intel’s backing so we can expect some cool Macbooks. However, the latest launch event (and a few of them before it) have proved that Apple has been following the “Our Customers are Stupid” strategy, and now everyone’s caught on:

1. Apple unveils Mac Mini except with an INTEL CORE DUO!!

2. Apple unveils the “ipod Hi-Fi”, a gigantic black/white box that you stick your iPod into and it outputs music. God, that’s innovation.

3. Apple shows off their new 1GB Nano model, only $149! Just in case you thought 2GB was too much.

4. Apple recently added Showtime to their iTunes Music Store. Their three hit shows include Sleeper Cell, Weeds, and Fat Actress. Ever heard of em?

5. And finally: Apple is selling leather cases for their iPods for the amazing price of $99.

So now it should be pretty obvious, Apple is sucking the money out of our wallets in return for some boring products. Nevertheless, people will continue saying “whoa, that’s cool” at every launch event and Apple’s going to turn some good profits on their mysterious hype and marketing ploys. Oh well. I’m still looking for that new touchscreen, bluetooth-enabled video iPod. I bet Steve has had that for at least 3 years.