Ted::Talks()

Tech::Windows on a Mac

The hot news for the past couple of days was the announcement from Apple on their new product, called "Boot Camp" which enables Microsoft Windows XP to run natively on Intel-based Macs. AAPL got a boost from the news, gaining nearly 16% in two days.

The software is still in Beta and the stability or performance is yet to be proven, but it sure is a significant event that marks the first true cross-platform product between Apple and Microsoft.

I've been thinking about this Apple-Microsoft mashup possibilities for a while now, and the more I think of it, the more it makes sense - especially from Apple's standpoint. This announcement confirms Apple's vision to provide a powerful hardware platform that fullfills the customers needs. However, there is no sign that Apple will make their software available to PC users. This confirms my belief that Apple is still fundamentally a Hardware company.

I believe that once they enable OS X and other great softwares to run on PC's, they will instantly have a bigger market and growth opportunities. They will be able to compete with MS head-on! This is going to be a huge change in the way they build products, but if you think about the market-cap difference (AAPL: 60B, MSFT: 280B) between the two companies, you will see where the real money is. If you can get 10% more of the operating system market, their market cap can easily double up - almost instantly.

Tech Tags: bootcamp boot+camp apple microsoft os+x windows+xp aapl msft

Web::Vast - a new mashup opportunity

Techcrunch profiled a new service called vast today. Here is an excerpt from their FAQ page:

Vast is a search service - we scour the web across millions of sites and billions of pages to find nuggets of information - jobs, cars, people, and other classifieds, and offer the resulting database to end-users and other web sites. We currently offer the largest database of cars and jobs, and one of the largest databases of people profiles on the entire Internet.

The Vast crawler even digs deep to find some of these listings, which you won't find currently on any search engine! The Vast API is available, free and unlimited, for commercial and non-commercial use. Vast does not act as a broker, agent, or dealer, and the results aggregated by Vast always point back to the original listing for all of the information and to complete the transaction. Think of it as Froogle for classifieds, but with an open interface for partner sites and developers.

This is very exciting for me for several reasons:

• I'm interested in any new services related to classifieds or personals
• I am fascinated with any search / crawl technologies that 'interprets' the content for classification
• They are letting other websites to use the indices for free

They crawl over 3 billion pages, so that will include the core and the edge of the web. Then they filter out irrelevant pages using their own unique technology. As a result, you get only relevant items from any page on the web.

I immediately thought this could be a potential competitor to edgeio, but Keith says that he believes its more of a competitor to oodle in the sense that edgeio users are publishing (submitting) their ads via edgeio, whereas oodle collects ads from the web. I think that's a great distinction point.

This is what Naval Ravikant says on this issue:

Not at all. EdgeIO focuses on blogs and covers a lot of categories. It has a few thousand listings. EdgeIO seems to be building a destination site as well, with some RSS exports.

Vast crawls the whole web and at the moment only covers three categories. Vast has about 16 Million listings. Vast is not meant to be a destination site but more of a content router for other sites.

EdgeIO has a good team and a powerful vision of the future, but the two sites are pretty different.

I like vast especially, and most importantly because they are letting other web sites to use their database. Someone just asked (in the comment section at techcrunch) how this is different from Kosmix, and I believe this openness is the biggest difference. I guess they have different vision and philosophy. On the bottom of their website, there is a link titled "Steal This Site", which leads you to their API page. I can imagine tons of new applications that creatively utilize (social bookmarking, rating, tagging, etc.) their data popping up in the near future. This is great for small companies and great for the consumers!

Tech Tags: vast edgio kosmix techcrunch classifieds

Tech::PC Forum 2006 - Day III

I've attended a session called, "Security and Citizens: Peer-to-peer Security", this morning. It was quite interesting, but it was a very high level discussion. I am now sitting at the "New Business Models: Power to the Edges" session. Leonard Liu just talked about outsourcing engineering projects to China - something for me to think about.

So far, the highlight of this morning is meeting Mike Jones from Microsoft. He confirmed my approach to InfoCard and I'm glad that I have a working-level counterpart at MS that could help our InfoCard adoption.

I just attended the roundtable discussion, "The Accountable Net: Trust, Reputation & Identity". It was an a hour and a half session, which is really short for the heavy nature of the subject. We talked about Certified Email (goodmail), Identity Technologies (Identity Gang, InfoCard & Yadis) and Reputation (AttentionTrust & Truste). Like I said, only 30 minutes were allocated for each subject, so it was really difficult to have in-depth discussions. However, it was still very intriguing, interesting and exciting to see all the relavant people sitting in the same room talking about important issues.

I personally believe that the focus of attention should move from Identity (or I should say Identifier) Technologies onto the social, trust issues. Meng Weng Wong announced that he is starting the 'reputation gang' and I think it's a great start.

Tech Tags: pcforum06 pc+forum mike+jones leonard+liu certified+email goodmail identity reputation trust identity+gang reputation+gang infocard yadis truste attentiontrust meng+weng+wong

Tech::PC Forum 2006 - Day II

My session started early this morning (8:15am, that is) - maybe too early. It was good in general, but I think I could have done better. Regardless of my performance, I think it was a great discussion with lots of interest from the audience.

Mary Hodder asked/argued whether reputation (e.g. eBay feedback score) can be taken out of the context and still be meaningful. (She talked about this before, and we did have a heated discussion a couple of months ago at the reputation roundtable) Keith Teare made a nice statement on how verified reputation helps edgeio and then gave me a chance to talk about how the aggregated reputation can be meaningful. This was the low-point of my Q&A session - I didn't fully understand the question, and ended up talking about something else...

I can only hope that the message still went through, and wish to be able to meet many interesting people in the remainder of the conference.

afternoon

I attended Edgeio's exciting presentation. Met several interesting people, including TJ Kang, the CEO of ThinkFree.

evening

I just came back from a wonderful dinner banquet. I sat next to Michelle Law (Greylock Partners), Isaac Kato (General Catalyst Partners) and the one and only Hermann Hauser (Amadeus Capital Partners). I, of course, had a chance to talk about my business, but also we shared stories on numerous topics ranging from new cultural phenomenon to the birth tale of New Zealand:)

Tech Tags: pcforum06 pc+forum mary+hodder keith+teare thinkfree michelle+law isaac+kato hermann+hauser

Tech::PC Forum 2006 -Day I

I am attending the PC Forum 2006 in Carlsbad, California. This year's theme is "Erosion of Power: Users in Charge" and I was lucky to be invited for tomorrow morning's panel, "Where's the Upright Virtual Wheelchair?". We are going to talk about how startups are building services that empowers the end users to own and control their own information.

I just registered and they gave me a nice fleece and a backpack. We'll see if I'm gonna get some real values from this conference.

3:30pm

Lots of celebrities here - I've just met Esther Dyson (of course), Pierre Omidyar, David Hornick, Keith Teare, Mike Arrington, Brad Fitzpatrick... I even sat next to Johannes Ernst on the plane coming here. 

4:00pm

Barry Schwartz just talked about how having too much choice can be a bad thing and the default choices are important (that is, when the user choose not to make choice, what does he/she get?). I think this is very relevant to the problem that my company is facing. The more, the better - but the less is more!

4:30pm

I just stepped outside to get a cup of coffee and ran into Dan Greenfield from Earthlink. (We're having a meeting tomorrow) He jokingly said that half of the startups in the PC Forum will be sold before the end of the conference - now, that'll be fun!

5:45pm

Pierre Omidyar has been on stage with Esther for about half an hour. They are talking about lots of stuffs, but they just talked about reputation, authentication and privacy. Esther just mentioned Opinity twice in a row! Pierre also keeps talking about how they (Omidyar Networks) look for companies that provide environments for self empowerment that has positive social impact. Knowing his keen interest in this field I think it would be terrific if I can sit down with Pierre in the next couple of days!

Tech Tags: pc+forum esther+dyson pierre+omidyar omidyar+network opinity users+in+charge