Category: Random, But Interesting

Why does Google hate the word tag?

Google Image Labeler is a good idea but a terrible name – it sounds like a product Dymo might have created. Google has licensed “The ESP Game“, invented by Luis von Ahn, and is harnessing collective intelligence to tag images in its image database. This is just an experiment, of course. But it’s a clever one – -if a critical mass of images are tagged, Google will have solved a very intractable problem for itself.

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Nope. (hat tip to Tweney)

The man hours devoted to separating me from my Kiehls face lotion. I mean, my goodness. If I wanted to destroy a plane with two ounces of face lotion, why, I might just figure out a way to add water later while in the air.

At SFO, there were at least ten full-time lotion swipers at work when I went through. I wonder, did they hire new staff? Repurpose others? There are at least ten more security screening sites like the one I was at in SFO, so that means 100 full time lotion swipers. At SFO alone. All day.

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Man, do I know the pain he went through to make this decision. It’s very hard to watch something you really love and worked so hard to build continue without you, but when you are not an owner in some way, it’s harder still to understand why someone else is taking all the profits, and control, while you do all the work. I know Danny is a very reasonable guy, and the fact that he could not get the new owners of SEW to cut him in on the fruits of all his hard work means the folks running his ex-company are really not paying attention to where value is created in the media world these days.

Best of luck, Danny, I am certain you will do screamingly well in whatever you do next!

Bloomberg reports that because Google has so much cash (more than $10 billion and growing very quickly), it’s subject to SEC regulations as a mutual fund. Why? More than 40% of its assets are liquid, and Google wants to invest those funds in high yielding instruments, just like a mutual fund might.

Time to buy someone, Google…

“The strangest and least economically rational technology bubble I’ve ever seen.”

Those are Paul Kedrosky’s words, discussing what now nearly everyone agrees is, well, some kind of bubble in the Web 2.0 space. I’m hearing it everywhere, and even more to the point, I feel it as well, in some odd and uncomfortable way.

Hold on, Battelle! Aren’t you the guy who wrote an Op Ed in the New York Times claiming we’re NOT in a bubble? Yeah, that’d be me, and I still hold to my arguments in that piece. We don’t have a bubble in IPO markets, and despite a few questionable deals, the major companies aren’t on a nutty buying spree either, so there’s no bubble in M&A exits infecting large company stock prices. The only folks who might lose thanks to the current Web 2 funding rush are the VCs – and, well, they can afford it.

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That’s how much Google stock Google execs have sold. I really don’t think much more needs to be said. It’s quite a figure.