John Battelle's Search Blog October 2008

CM Conversations: Joel Hyatt

Continuing my crowdsourcing of questions for one-on-one conversations at this week's CM Summit is Joel Hyatt, CEO of Current. Founded in 2005, Current is "the only 24/7 cable and satellite television network and Internet site produced and programmed in collaboration with its audience." The company has grown to nearly…

Continuing my crowdsourcing of questions for one-on-one conversations at this week’s CM Summit is Joel Hyatt, CEO of Current. Founded in 2005, Current is “the only 24/7 cable and satellite television network and Internet site produced and programmed in collaboration with its audience.” The company has grown to nearly $64 million in revenues (2007) but has yet to hit profits, early this year it filed a public offering ($100 mm in proceeds), which has not completed due, one presumes, to market conditions. Still and all, a cable channel that counts more than 50mm potential viewers is a serious asset, and current.com, its online presence, is a vibrant community as well. It doesn’t hurt that the company courts a difficult to reach demographic – young, educated adults.

Current has been at the center of a lot of innovation in media, a recent example is “Hack the Debate“, a partnership with Twitter (co-founder Evan Williams will also be speaking at the CM Summit).

Current is an ambitious project, backed by serious players, including Al Gore, who serves as Chairman. Hyatt, who runs the company day to day, also serves on the board of HP and the Brookings Institute, and has been quite involved in politics, serving as National Finance Chair for the Democratic Party in 2000. Previous to Current, he co-founded and led Hyatt Legal Services, which provided low-cost services to middle and lower-income families.

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On Speech Based Interfaces to Search – and Beyond

This stuff is going to get real, soon. From Google's latest Technology Roundtable Series: [This] video, "Applications of Human Language Technology," is a discussion of our enormous progress in large-scale automated translation of languages and speech recognition. Both of these technology domains are coming of age with capabilities that…

This stuff is going to get real, soon. From Google’s latest Technology Roundtable Series:

[This] video, “Applications of Human Language Technology,” is a discussion of our enormous progress in large-scale automated translation of languages and speech recognition. Both of these technology domains are coming of age with capabilities that will truly impact what we expect of computers on a day-to-day basis. I discuss these technologies with human language technology experts Franz Josef Och, an expert in the automated translation of languages, and Mike Cohen, an expert in speech processing.

BTW, isn’t it funny how so many VP level people (note the guy introducing the piece) at Google says “Google” exactly the way Larry and Sergey say it, and not at all the way most of the rest of us say it? There’s this funny, compressed, geeky inflection on the “ooooo” sound.

Microsoft’s U Rank

Microsoft has a quiet test running in its research labs that may be of interest to some of my search geek readers. It requires registration, alas, but it might be fun to check out. Called "U Rank" here's a snip from an email sent to me from Microsoft: Some…

Microsoft has a quiet test running in its research labs that may be of interest to some of my search geek readers. It requires registration, alas, but it might be fun to check out. Called “U Rank” here’s a snip from an email sent to me from Microsoft:

Some of the interesting features of U Rank include:

Create the perfect search results for you: Put results in just the right order and add images and video results for added context.

Annotate results: Write notes to summarize important information under each URL.

Short-cuts: Move your favorite sites up; then put an ! in front of the query and go straight to the top result.

Lists: Keep lists while you’re researching (“hotels for my next trip”, “DSLRs for me”)

Collaboration: Share URLs with friends (“related projects”, “our reading list”)

Recommendations: Tell your friends what you like (“best books,” “favorite restaurants”)

The goal of the research project is to learn more about “how” people use search technologies, like whether they take advantage of the ability to edit search results and how they share the results over time with friends and family.