Micro ISVs and Enterprise 2.0

At last – a Twitter use case I get (nearly)

Twitter left me cold when it was launched. I didn't get the point of a blog that isn't a blog, and agreed with The Register that it was more "Web2.0rhea".

Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley talked at length about Twitter in the most recent episode of their podcast and suggested using the feed-able Twitter search tool to look for people with the problem your software solves, in much the same way as one would use Technorati to look for blog posts about it.

However, unless my understanding of how replying to a tweet works is wrong (i.e., only my own followers will see the reply unless the original tweeter subscribes to a search for @ his own user name), I'm still not sure how to exploit it. Any suggestions?

Government money == needless complexity

Some local examples:

• It is apparently possible to pay for on-street parking in Dublin using a mobile phone. I say apparently, because you need to pre-register on a website (http://www.mpark.de) that is currently dead. Since a mobile phone is a relatively secure micropayment device, why not print three premium-rate SMS numbers on each meter – one for one hour, one for two hours and one for three? No need for pre-registration, no need for expensive mobile operator location service licences.
• For about five years a quango has worked on an integrated ticketing system across public transport operators and modes in Dublin with very little to show for it. The model chosen is just about the most complex possible – a prepaid card which must be tagged on and off for each journey, with the possibility of a discount for a second or subsequent journey within a short time. It is likely that there will be no provision for monthly or other passes.
  The state bus operator has offered a magnetic stripe ticket for a lot more than five years that allows unlimited journeys to start in the 90 minutes after it's first validated. This would be trivial to extend to other modes and operators using a statistical revenue sharing model. Indeed, some cities implement this system entirely manually – the ticket is validated by clipping the date and approximate time off its edge.
• Several years ago there was a farcical, aborted attempt to introduce electronic voting in Ireland. For once, a required complication was not introduced - the Nedap voting terminals were ordered without printers to allow for a voter-verifiable audit trail. However, the more pressing problem was that it was decided to automate the vote tallying process as well as vote collection.
  Ireland uses one of the most complex voting systems in the world – single transferable vote with multiple-seat constituencies and random rather than proportional assignment of surpluses.It eventually emerged that the complex tallying software had been continually upgraded during and after testing, right up to the election where it was to be first used.
  The overlooked simple solution – use electronic terminals (with printers), treat the data collected by each one as a ballot box that supports SQL and perform the tallies by hand.

I feel safer now

Someone has been watching far too much TV:

"Weapons Against Robots"

It's all done with magnets

Another case for the "science fiction becoming reality" files.

Science Fiction becoming reality

This is superb:

... however, if Dean Kamen also found one of these in the same factory he found his robotic arm prototype, we're all in a lot of trouble.

Powerset

A new search engine called Powerset has been getting a lot of coverage lately. The approach it takes to searching is a nice one: natural language queries seem to be supported in a more advanced way than by stripping out stop words (compare "what is the melting point of iron" to "melting point iron"), and the presentation of results for short queries is very nice (to stick with the theme, see "iron"). The "Factz" are fun – the software attempts to create an outline of a document found in a search by extracting subject-verb-object triples from the text. I’m not sure this works particularly well.

However, the demo only searches Wikipedia and Freebase. It’s very easy to return relevant results when the majority of documents in your collection are about exactly one topic each and are not designed by their authors to cheat search engines. There have been a few attempts to take advantage of this before; for example Turbo 10 federates searches over a number of academic document collections that are not accessible to web spiders like Google and is worth a look if you are researching a very specific topic. I’m interested in seeing how Powerset handles the full web, but in the mean time it's a better Wikipedia search than Wikipedia's own.

Internet Salespeople

Jason Fried from 37 Signals wrote about a 1995 article by Clifford Stoll which questioned how selling over the Internet could work without salespeople. It occurred to me that the Internet does have salespeople – other customers. When buying a book, a camera, a television, or whatever else you can think of, the purpose of the salesman is first to give you information about the product that isn’t on the box. When you buy something on the ‘net, you find out more about it by searching and finding weblogs or forum posts where customers of the product praise it or vent their frustrations¹.
The second purpose of the salesman is to convince you that a product is right for you. On the Internet, collaborative filtering does this – thousands of other people who own the same stuff as you also bought the iPhone, so you’d better get it too or risk being left behind.

¹ Just be careful about Apple/Microsoft fanboys/haters