Friday, November 02, 2012

Pitching Fred Wilson


Fred, here goes.

I have a startup idea. It is going to revolutionize search, social, mobile, local, and, and. One more thing. Yes, ecommerce.

This deal is so good you are not going to need to do another deal after this one, that good. You could go ahead and retire. That good.

This blog post is my message in a bottle to you. I am not going to email you, I have never called you, we almost skyped once, but all that is bridge under water (Sandy metaphor).

Here's hoping you will take the bait.

Sicerely,
Para.
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Thursday, November 01, 2012

Pandora "Gets" Mobile

Image representing Pandora as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase
Mobile is not an easy nut to crack. Ask Facebook, ask Zynga. It helped that they started early. It also helps music is made for mobile.

First look: Pandora 4.0, the new mobile frontier
"We started thinking about creating a mobile service in 2004," Pandora CTO Tom Conrad told us in an interview. "We wanted to unify the Pandora experience." ..... and Pandora found itself one of the top five most downloaded mobile applications. Over the next four years 75 percent of Pandora listening shifted to smartphones. The company says that over 115 million registered users have tuned into the service on a smart mobile. The platform represents around 55 percent of its advertising revenue. ....... Pandora 4.0 for iOS smartphones goes live for download in the App Store at 5 pm EDT on Monday, 29 October. The Android version is going to take a little longer to show up in Google Play—"in the coming weeks," we were told. The upgrades arrive as the smartphone radio field is diversifying and expanding. Pandora still has a huge profile, but is hardly the only kid on the block. Spotify, Rdio, Last.fm, Turntable.fm all have big followings in the United States. Even Apple has been making noises about setting up a Pandora rival for the iPhone and iPad. ..... "When we launched in 2005, AOL and Microsoft were the largest services; MySpace was the gorilla in the room," Conrad noted. "Clear Channel was getting serious about iHeartRadio. What has allowed us to succeed despite stiff competition is that we are dedicated to the future of radio. We have a simple, elegant product to which we are devoted, and which we think we can produce better than anybody else." ...... Pandora says about half of its revenues go to performance royalties. The proposed legislation in both its Senate and House forms would put rates on a par with those paid by satellite and cable-based radio services. ...... the rates paid to various artists featured on the service. Two thousand will receive over $10,000 each over the next 12 months. "And for more than 800 we'll pay over $50,000, more than the income of the average American household"
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Finland In The Lead


Finland: Plan for universal 100Mbps service by 2015 on track
Back in 2009, Finland announced what might be the world’s most ambitious national broadband plan: a guaranteed minimum service level of 1Mbps for all homes and companies by 2010. That goal is then planned to be kicked up to 100Mbps, served via a fixed connection or wireless, by 2015 ...... by providing subsidies mainly to local cooperatives that have sprung up to serve rural communities. To date, 86 percent of the 5.35 million Finnish population lives within two kilometers of a 100Mbps connection, and the expectation is that this will grow to 95 percent by 2015. ...... European Union’s Digital Agenda for Europe. ..... requires member states to publish national broadband plans by the end of the year to bring a minimum level of 30Mbps service to all citizens by 2020. It also requires countries to bring speeds of 100Mbps to half of the EU’s households by 2020. (As one commenter pointed out, most of Denmark already has 32Mbps wireless coverage.) In other words, Finland is far surpassing what Brussels has mandated. ...... Karvia—like many small towns around the world—faces a challenge of keeping its younger population local. With more reliable Internet, it lets more creative and freelance workers stay in town. ...... “They can do remote work at home and so they have moved back to Karvia,” she said. “People like artists and people who are designing buildings can work at home and I think that this was very important for us to do. Also, they can study at home because the network has made a possibility to study.” ...... there may be a downside to better access ... “In the first year we had nine children born. Normally we have 20 children [per year]—maybe [couples] are watching TV too much” ...... It can cost up to €53,000 ($68,000) per household in the most rural and remote regions. ..... today, fiber optic broadband is at the level of a basic public service (like electricity, water, or roads). ..... “The Finnish strategy as it is does not seem to provide this but leaves it to market forces on one hand and to regional and local authorities on the other,” he told Ars. “The first actors have no obligation to fulfill their part, and the second actors are lacking realistic financial and political means.”
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Facebook Trouble For Craig's List

English: Photo of Craig Newmark.
English: Photo of Craig Newmark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If you can bring the Craig's List flea market feel and to that add the Facebook social graph, you could eat Craig's List's lunch. And that would be sad. Because a lot of us have long used Craig's List for many odd purposes.

Craig Newmark probably wishes Facebook had had a better IPO.

But I don't see Craig's List going away. Wordpress beats Blogger. Disqus beats Facebook Comments. Craig's List has not innovated in a long time. Now there might be some incentive.

Facebook may take on Craigslist with a new Marketplace section
all the classified listings would have the ability to target people based on your own social circle and geography
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Google Also Leads Voice Search: No Surprise

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase
When Siri came out there was talk finally Google has competition. I never bought into that. The front end might have been cute, but Apple and search? Come on.

Why I Won’t Be Using Google’s New iPhone Voice Search

For me it is less about moving from typing text to voice and more about moving from language to language to language.

That would be the faster way to wipe out illiteracy from the planet. If voice inputs and outputs can prove to be almost sufficient a lot of knowledge could move around right away.

Google offers up secret sauce on new voice search
this app gives Siri a run for her money. It is lightening fast, has a clean layout, and gives highly accurate results
Google explains how more data means better speech recognition
More data helps train smarter models, which can then better predict what someone say next ...... more data trumps better algorithms ..... For the voice search tests, the Google researchers used 230 billion words that came from “a random sample of anonymized queries from google.com that did not trigger spelling correction.” However, because people speak and write prose differently than they type searches, the YouTube models were fed data from transcriptions of news broadcasts and large web crawls. ...... As consumers demand ever smarter applications and more frictionless user experiences, every last piece of data and every decision about how to analyze it matters.
Large Scale Language Modeling in Automatic Speech Recognition
The n-gram approach to language modeling (predicting the next word based on the previous n-1 words) is particularly well-suited to such large amounts of data: it scales gracefully, and the non-parametric nature of the model allows it to grow with more data. For example, on Voice Search we were able to train and evaluate 5-gram language models consisting of 12 billion n-grams, built using large vocabularies (1 million words), and trained on as many as 230 billion words.
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A Truncated Subway

Hurricane Recovery Map Oct 312012