Seeing this application left me speechless.
It is not much I can tell about it other than data visualization on steroids. Watch and enjoy:
Now, I am pretty sure you would like to play with it yourself, so here it goes: Tag Galaxy by Stan Schroeder.
I have published this video also on my Romanian blog koolapp: web-ul viitorului. web de calitate (Koolapp: web for the future. quality web) as an exemplification of smart or just nice data visualization models.
We are discovering new information sources every day and in our attempt to keep up with the news we are trying to cover everything. Sooner or later, we are realizing that it is just way too much.
We were visiting tones of sites to fetch our news and then we've got the RSS feeds. We were reading tones of feeds and then we've got feed aggregators. We were using different IM protocols and clients and then we've got Meebo. We have been using various emails and then we've got GMail. We have joined social networks and started to microblog and then we've got FriendFeed.
So far we have solved one side of the content flood problem: aggregation. But this is definitely not the end of the game. The next step will be indexing all this information and the search giant is not yet doing much in this direction. And finally we will need smart AI-based content filtering.
Regarding too many feeds, I think there is an untapped market for very intelligent filtering and recommendation tools.
The future is not FriendFeed. The future is for aggregators plus smart/AI filters. Those that will figure it out will lead the content market.
FilterMyRss is a simple feed filter that uses keywords to identify only the posts that may be interesting.
Matoumba uses a Digg-like approach for learning from your behavior. By voting up or down the stories in your feeds, you teach Matoumba what are your fields of interests and prefered feeds and in time Matoumba will be able to tell you which information should be important to you within all the feeds you suscribed to, or even within the feeds from users who share the same interests as you.
The approach taken by FilterMyRss is simple and resembles the way we are using search engines. Probably its best use is for tracking the apparition of the terms of interest on various I can think of how marketers can be using it while searching for feedback about their products.
On the other side Matoumba seems to have learned from others (Digg, Reddit, etc.) and is using a smarted approach that aligns with the current social media filtering approaches.
In a time where rich media is used everywhere, Loic Le Meur's idea of creating video comments is starting to get a lot of traction.
Replace traditional text based comments with video.
I have been talking about Seesmic, a company whose founder is Loic Le Meur, in a post where I was remarking that more and more content is produced in video format. Loic's bet is that the traditional text comments can be replaced by short videos where the person replying is expressing his thoughts on camera. Seesmic currently provides a WordPress plugin and plans on distributing plugins for more blogging systems.
One of the first sites that added this feature was TechCrunch, but at that moment I have thought that this decision was based on the fact that Mike Arrington has invested in Seesmic.
However, as crazy as this idea seemed originally, people like Jason Calacanis and Alexis Bonte are starting to praise it.
Today I'm glad to say I was 100% wrong about Seesmic. I still hate the name, but I love where he has taken it. Video comments on blogs are brilliant.
Alexis uses the "100%, 40%, 10% rule" to explain why video comments, even if sometimes difficult to produce, are are a good idea.
While I do love rich media content (just check my site InfoQ.com where we've been using rich media for quite a while) and find it refreshing, I am still concerned by a couple of aspects of video content for which we are lacking some important tools:
Should Microsoft and Yahoo stop fighting for the search market and just leave it in Google's hands?
Microsoft is dropping the Live Book Search, but launches Live Search Cashback. Where does Microsoft want to be positioned in the search market?
This whole discussion started when Tim O'Reilly has published in a blog post the following advice:
my advice to Yahoo!: continue with your plan to outsource search to Google, just like you did before 2002, and plow those increased profits and reduced costs into your own innovation, strengthening the areas where you are #1, exploring new ideas that will make YOUR users insanely happy, and generally focusing on what makes Yahoo! great, rather than on what doesn't. That is, unless Microsoft makes you so good a deal for your search assets that you just can't say no. But either way, let yourself be quit of the destructive competition and focus on adding real value for your users.
My advice to Microsoft: outsource your search to Google too!
In reply, Mike Arrington is raising quite a few good points
- We are just getting started in search.
There are so many areas on search that remain to be conquered. Semantic search. Real language/AI search. The deep web. Media search.- Search monopoly and a healthy internet are mutually exclusive.
- [...] the CPC (cost per click) model is flawed, but in Google’s favor because it puts fraud risk inefficiently on the advertisers, who have no way of controlling it at the search engine level. CPA (cost per action) models work much better, but Google has done little more than test them.
Not far ago, I was also expressing my concerns related to video content search, even if there are quite a few contenders on this market.
In the following comments and new Tim's post, both have finally agreed that Tim's original advise was not about leaving Google approach to search unchallenged, but rather something that sounds more like Seth Godin's Purple Cow: instead of playing the catch up role, Microsoft and Yahoo should be investing their money and energy into researching something new, worthy and remarkable.
I also think that Tim O'Reilly opinions were triggered by the Microsoft's attempts to monetize search through the introduction of Microsoft Live Search Cashback, a new service on which the opinions are quite disputed right now.
However, there are signs that Microsoft is starting to look differently at the search market, as it has currently dropped the Live Search Books project (which was a reaction to Google's Book Search).
What is wrong with Twitter's current architecture? How would you fix it? What parts must be scaled out and how?
Alex Payne, one of the Twitter core developers, has finally blogged on this topic and described the real problem:
Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency's sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system.
Many of the best practices in scalability are inapplicable to the peculiar problem space of social messaging. Many off-the-shelf technologies that seem like intuitive fits do not, on closer inspection, meet our needs.
A good explanation of the problems was published on TechCrunch:
The issue is that group messaging is very difficult to achieve at a grand scale. Other large sites such as Wordpress and Digg are mostly dealing with known problems, such as how to serve a large number of pages or a large number of images. Twitter is unique in that it needs to parse a large number of messages and deliver them to multiple recipients, with each user having unique connections to other users.
Many ideas have been published on what and how to fix it.
Russel Beattie was talking about a decentralized implementation in the form of Jabber bot in his posts Decentralized Twitter thoughts and has even created a demo Peep - an Open Twitter Server.
Eran Hammer-Lahav who created Nouncer, a developer platform for building microblogs, explains in Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I his experience on dealing with such architectures.
This is a 'discussion' I've caught last night:
Tim Bray: How many geeks, I wonder, are scribbling Solutions To The Twitter Problem on their internal mental whiteboards at this very moment?
Alex Miller: Seriously, though, I really wonder how many twitter 2.0s are *launching* right now
asteris: Too many, but not enough to produce a solution, apparently.
Currently there are a few alternative similar systems, like Pownce or Jaiku, but considering that the feature set and the traffic and the additional environment is not the same, it is difficult to say if they were able to address all the problems Twitter is facing.
The above mentioned alternatives and most of the suggested solutions have been discussed over and over again. Alex Payne is assuring the Twitter users that:
We'd like people to know that we're motivated by the community discussion around our architecture. We're immersed in ideas about improving our system, and we have a clear direction forward that takes into account many of the bright suggestions that have emerged from the community.
If you have ideas you'd like to share you can reach me on Twitter. Or you can try applying your ideas by working on Twitter.
What we see at Twitter today is a very useful and popular service, but one with very complex underlying technical challenges to overcome. Twitter will require not only a new architecture approach and a big injection of the best minds they can find [...], but will also need a little patience from users and those of us observing.
Be able to describe your business as shortly and understandable as possible.
Venture Hacks have posted a whole entry on the idea of:
Summarize the company’s business on the back of a business card.
calling it the high concept pitch.
The definition given by Venture Hacks is:
A high concept pitch distills a startup’s vision into a single sentence.
The post also talks about how to create your high concept pitch and what benefits you are driving from having one.
Guerrilla Marketing refers to unconventional marketing practices. These are usually employed by startups and bootstrappers as they don't require big budgets, but rather lots of imagination and energy and unconventional thinking and practices. Terms like viral, buzz, alternative marketing are usually associated with guerrilla marketing
- The purpose of the marketing - The physical action you want your prospect to take.
- How you’ll achieve this purpose - your competitive advantage and benefits.
- Your target market - who are you aiming to benefit?
- The marketing weapon you’ll use - online, offline, magazine print, etc.
- The niche and your position and what you stand for.
- The identity of your business - Not who owns it, but what you stand for.
- Your budget - This should be expressed as a percentage of your projected revenue.
You can read a detailed explanation of the 7 steps of the 7 steps of Guerrilla Marketing Strategy on Building an effective Guerrilla Marketing Strategy
People are now looking for the videos in search. It’s gone from serendipitously finding videos or someone forwarding it to you, to actively going out and searching for it. (Bill Tancer)
After looking at a couple of video content sites I have expressed a couple of personal concerns related to this type of content:
so I have decided to look what solutions are available at this moment. I have put together a list of the major solutions:
blinkx, which claims to be the world's largest and most advanced video search engine, explains what is needed to achieve good indexing results while working on video content:
blinkx listens to the sound track using speech-to-text technology, looks at the images on screen using advanced video analytics, and reads other information embedded into the file by using media-analysis plug-ins to extract, for example, closed captioning. In this way, blinkx is processing as much information as possible to enable both extremely accurate search, and more advanced operations such as automatic hyperlinking of related content or implicit query, which understands the content a user is producing and viewing.
Most of the above video search engines (those that are not directly hosting video content) have developed partnership networks with some of the most well known video sites, but I guess the next step would be to have their technologies adopted or plugged directly into these so that the search can be performed on site.
In case I have missed any of the existing video search engines, please leave a comment and I will update the above list.
Companies don't seem to be worried by the YouTube market share and they are launching new video related products every day.
Not so long ago, we have heard from Seesmic about video-based comments that comes in the form of a Wordpress plugin and their plans to provide similar plugins for Moveable Type and Typepad.
We also have video for intellectuals provided by FORA.tv 
:
and BigThink 
with their short very topic focused videos:
One thing that I liked on FORA.tv was the possibility to watch either the whole video or just the Highlights, an approach that is somehow addressing one of my main concerns related to video content
(This video for intellectuals/smart people tagline sounds like something I have heard about in the .ro space too)
I must also mention the online TV guides with video: MeeVee
(unfortunately, I've had to spend some time trying to find a program that was really available, so I must confess that I wasn't too impressed by their services) and also the video on demand solutions like Sezmi 
, which "combines traditional TV content, movies and internet video".
Last, but not least, there are all those products offering new approaches for monetizing video content, but these will be covered some other time
While I'm most definitely loving rich media content, I am still having a couple of concerns related to video-based content:
There cannot be an online business discussion without covering the demographics topic. At eBusinessIntro/DaAfaceri this topic has occurred over and over again and it ranged from school and personal education up to what can be done by the online players. Unfortunately, there weren't any clear conclusions other than the basic things:
You should be interested in getting the money and not how you are getting them.
Give the prospective users more options and at some point they will realize it is useful.
But what is so special or uncommon about the .ro users that make the online players discuss it over and over again? Well, except the facts that we are really missing the basic information (like how large is the market) and any real and trustworthy demographics (age, studies, etc.), there may be a couple of more interesting aspects that the online businesses should be aware of.
So here is how I would characterize the online community according to my short experience in this (particular) space
The .ro user space is very young (sometimes even childish), most of the time unfair, but definitely passionate.
Is it something in this that can be used? I guess this is up to you. And in case you are having a bit of a hard time to believe the above, then I'll encourage you to check the comment threads in the following samples (warning: ro knowledge is required):
How would you characterize the .ro users?
Do you know the barter section of Craiglist? If not and you have some old stuff around your house that you'd like to trade out go check it in your area. Even if there is not very much in this Craiglist section maybe you'll got the chance to at least get rid of those old and not so useful things.
But what if you are a student in a campus? Then Bubblevine 
may help you:
Bubblevine is the place for college students to buy stuff and sell stuff.
According to its creator, entrepreneur Monica Yoo this idea is originated in her own college experience:
While I was a junior in college at Trinity, I was looking for apartment furniture on Craigslist but found that the stuff I needed was all over town, often in sketchy areas that I wasn’t comfortable going to. Meanwhile, college kids were throwing away stuff at semester’s end.Source: Buy & Sell Your Stuff on Campus with Bubblevine
A more generic trading site is Love2trace 
whose more detailed review can be read on Startup Houston post: Get Your Trade On At Love 2 Trade
Vladimir Oane is founder and CEO of ubervU whose main product www.uberVU.com is still in demo 
. Vladimir is also Marketing Manager at CaptainGO which is present online through www.captainGO.com. His presentation was called: Sharing a Romanian Entrepreneur's mastership to reduce the frustrations of an online business startup (n.b. it was quite a challenge to translate the original title: "Invataturile maiastre ale unui antreprenor roman care o sa va scuteasca de frustrari atunci cand va deschideti o afacere pe Internet").
Presentation key points:
Vladimir's talk was enternaining and he has emphasized a couple of key points that are usually avoided by people talking about startups.
Now is the time for the promised surprise!. Vladimir was the first one answering my call to share his slides, so now you have the chance to view his presentation in full format. I would encourage you to check also the quotes in the slides which are particularly great
Florin Grozea is the first Romanian singer blogger. Recently, in collaboration with Branient (whose manager is Emi Gal), Florin has launched www.eOK.ro
Key take-aways:
With his showbiz background, Florin feels very natural 'on stage'. He had to answer quite a few questions related to the legal model of www.eOK.ro. Florin has also answered my call for his presentation so here it is: DaAfaceri eOk (PDF) (Note: do not try to open the file by clicking the link. Right click and save target link. The file has the wrong format and will not be correctly displayed in your browser)
This is my first attempt to cover a romanian meet-up. Hopefully, there will be other such posts, but for this I would like to get your feedback. Please do let me know if you found the format of the post good, if the content was enough good to give you an idea of what happened there, etc.. Also do let me know if you have suggestions on how to get it better. Please feel free to criticize!
I must confess that I am pretty happy that the presenters have agreed to send me their materials for publishing (and this was against all advises I've got before!).
In the end I would like to send my special thanks to both Vladimir and Florin for giving me the possibility to offer you access to their presentations.
Update Mircea has also agreed to have his presentation featured here. I will be posting it shortly at the end of the Offline from eBusinessIntro/DaAfaceri Meet-up where his talk was covered.
The meet-up was organized by the DaAfaceri college organization and was meant to offer the college people the opportunity to get in contact with a couple of local online entrepreneurs. There have been around 50 people and 4 speakers: Mircea Scarlatescu, Emi Gal, Vladimir Oane and Florin Grozea. I have extracted a couple of key points that have appeared during the presentations.
Mircea is co-founder of FYB 
whose presence online is www.ImobiliareRezidentiale.ro, www.FloriLaBucuresti.ro and www.Termopane.com
Presentation key points:
Friends may prove to be very good advisers/commenters after couple of beers.
Mircea has referred to Trilulilu quite a few times during his presentation and somehow avoided to use his sites as example.
Emi Gal is Managing Director at Brainient. www.braintv.ro and www.vertimo.ro are two of the most important project of the company. Brainient in partnership with Florin Grozea has launched in March 2008 the first site for legal music eOK.ro
Key take-aways:
Emi has received quite a few questions as what was the initial vision, what is the future of www.braintv.ro
Update 1: I really have to apologize but most probably I will not be able to post the rest of the entry this evening. But to compensate for this, I must let you know that Vladimir Oane has already sent me his presentation so you'll be able to see it in full format. Thanks a lot Vladimir. I still have hopes to get the other materials too.
Update 2: The second part has been published. Both featured speakers have sent me their presentation materials so you'll have full access to those.
Update 3:Mircea has agreed to have his full presentation embedded here. I will be posting it shortly. Thanks a lot Mircea!
Update 4: Here is Mircea's presentation:
Almost all new businesses are starting by having a tagline or at least stating their mission. Or if you want, making their initial sale pitch. Why is this so important?
I don't have any major in this field, so I'll just tell you what I think. Understanding the value of a new business is very complex and may take a lot of time. Your prospective target (clients, readers, etc.) are usually flooded by information and most probably they are lacking time. But you want their attention. At least for a moment.
People are usually allocating just a small fraction of their attention and memory to new things. Your goal is to take full benefit of this small slot. A word or a phrase or an image that resonates with your audience is your best bet.
You want to be able to catch their attention as quickly as possible. Explaining your business is not gonna work. At least not in that short time frame. So, you need to have a tagline, a mission statement, or a sales pitch: your 'catch-audience-attention-as-quick-as-possible' key phrase.
Let's see what experts (like Guy Kawasaki) have to say:
A vision that is clear, that is consistent [...], a vision that is unique (Gary Hoover)
You need to focus on your core competencies (Miguel Rabay)
Guy Kawasaki's "Don't Write a Mission Statement, Write a Mantra" is also addressing the subject:
I think it is that part of the year when you are doing a major change. Mine is to rebrand this old blog. But what exactly do I mean by rebranding?
Firstly, I have picked a new, not very shiny but breathy template. This will allow natural text flow and hopefully will make it really legible.
Secondly, I will post on this blog entries related to online business, research and anything that may fit into the internet category. Just to give you a preview, here is a set of sample posts:
Last but not least, please send your feedback. Now and anytime you feel like. I love hearing from you all.
About me: Software architect, Web Aficionado, Cloud Computing Fanboy, Geek Entrepreneur, Speaker, Co-founder and CTO of InfoQ.com, Writing also about NoSQL on the myNoSQL blog
