Category: Random, But Interesting

Slashdot has the news.

Earlier this year I had the distinct honor of giving the commencement address at Berkeley for SIMs (the School of Information Management and Systems). SIMs graduates tend to be interdisciplinarians, and often end up at places like Google, Yahoo, or other Valley companies. While I was there, Marc Davis, a professor there who I had spoken to a few times during my tenure at Berkeley, sidled up to me and told me some news I have had to keep under my hat till now: he’s teaming up with Yahoo to lead a joint research effort. I’m very pleased that a SIMs prof is heading up this endeavor, as it means Yahoo’s research will be pushed across many fields, not just engineering. I’m looking forward to seeing what he might do.

Now you can add your gripe. (Thanks, Andre)

From the site:

Most of the time, you punch what you want to know into Google, and you instantly get what you’re looking for. But have you ever had that experience, where you try query after query and no matter how hard you try, you just can’t find what you’re looking for? That’s what this site is for — because the things Google can’t find is more interesting than the stuff Google can find. Click New Entry to add your own entry to our collection of Can’t Find On Google.

Tweney points us to “Guess the Google” – a good way to screw around during conference calls.

The site throws up 20 seemingly random images and you try to guess the keyword that generated them.

Ah, it’s Friday. Travel day for me, left Laguna and Safa’s excellent conference this morning. Over the three days we heard from an interesting mix of international CEOs (Tom Online, Hurray!!, Daum), and a lot of search/ecommerce (Marchex, WebSideStory, Overstock, Indeed). Safa did not do the typical investor conference, where CEOs just present company Powerpoints, he really drew folks out into conversations. I enjoyed it a lot. The highlight for me was last night, when I joined a panel with Steve Jurvetson and Jerry Yang, quite an honor. Jurvetson invested in Baidu, HotMail, Skype, and many, many other successful companies, and it was fun to hear his thoughts on Yahoo, MSFT, Google et al. Jerry was his usual understated self. Over and over he said “We can’t presume (insert competitor here) will stumble, we have to assume they will succeed.” He said he keeps working because the thinks the competition is getting really strong, and he wants to continue to help guide Yahoo through this phase of the battle.

Steve pointed out that it was going to one hell of a battle, that in fact MSFT was girding for a company wide holy war, one that he thinks they must win. Now it gets interesting….

A company that was much discussed during the week was MySpace, which is owned by Intermix Media. The CEO presented there, and the stock shot up during the week. That might have something to do with the fact that the company settled (without admitting wrongdoing) an adware/spyware case based on practices it claims it has since abandoned, but also, there were an awful lot of investors in that conference room, and on the second night Safa had a really interesting and entertaining panel of teenagers who told us how they use media (I asked him if we could steal the idea for Web 2.0, and he gave his consent….). All of them used MySpace, it was pretty much a clean sweep. None of them used anything else for social networking and the like. I think the investors were taking notes….it felt like ICQ all over again.

I just saw a Miva ad that explains how they came up with their vaguely alien logo/typeface, which honestly, I did not like much when I first saw it (Miva is the old FindWhat plus whatever they bought over the past few years). Apparently, they combined the symbol for infinity with an arrow that goes up and to the right. If ever there were an example of packaging irrational exuberance into a neat corporate logo, here it is. Then again, I did pay attention to the ad, so there you have it.