In recent year it seems that cleansing took the US (or at least San Fran and NY) by storm. A lot of my friends went through some kind of cleansing process. The idea of cleansing is to clean the body from all the toxic that accumulated in it for years.
As many of you know, my life today are on a crossroads. As part of it, in the next few dyas I’ll be moving apartment. Future location is stil unknown. As a veteran mover (Just in recent years I lived in 7 different apartments in 3 different continents) I already know that the secret for a good move is to be able to get rid of all the junk we accumulate in our life. But this time, I decided to take it to the extreme and practice a life Cleansing.
It’s like what Brad Pit say in “Fight Club” – the things we own turn to actually own us. Maybe, sometimes we need to know to let go and simply start fresh. Cleanse our life from our old stuff, habits and our old us.
So while packing my life this time, I put down a strict set of rules:
- If I didn’t use/wear it for the last year, this item go to donations/garbage.
- If I didn’t use/wear it for the last six months, the item will go to a separate pile. In the end, half of the things on this pile have to go for donation or be thrown away.
- Anything that comes in multiplies (like a bunch of sets of wine glasses for example), must be cut off by at least 70%.
Yes. It is hard to get rid from all the things that somehow feel that defined me for a long time. But hopefully, the result of this ritual will be a better, more streamline, new me.
Do you know who sells your private information to advertisers out there??
As someone who has been deep into the analytics and advertising business in the last few years, the fact that web sites out there are trading on our personal information is not a big surprise. Still, sometimes even I get abit of a shock seeing how efficient this trading can become.
Yesterday I decided to check on prices fro flights from San Francisco to Cancun Mexico. I did a search in 3 sites: Kayak, Priceline (through Kayak) and Delta.com.
Just two hours later I got the following text message from AT&T on my personal cell phone: “Now roam in Mexico for just 25 cents per minute standard time…”.
It’s one thing that companies are trading your email address for quick profits. I long time got used to that and I always use my “junk” email adress. But when it happens with my cell number, I start to feel a lot more sensitive. Unfortunately both Kayak (a service which I love) and Delta has my cell number, so I dont know who to blame here.
Personal feeling aside, I think this is a great example of how targeted behavioral advertising can be so much more effective than normal one. First, as this is very relevant to me there are much higher chances that I will actually buy the product. Second, if I would see this ad as a banner or Hulu, I would actually pay attention to it and not treat it just as disturbance.
With the advancement of targeting technologies and behavioral exchanges form Google and Yahoo, we will start to see many more ads like this in the coming years. What we need to make sure is to define where the line corss between better more relevant ads and the complete dismiss of our privacy.
Yesterday Google announcemnt about their new mobile navigation app created an havoc in the shares of GPS companies. Germin for example lost more than 1.2 billion dollar in just one day. Most days I will favor the any company who compete with Google, but this time I have no mercy for Germin and the rest. For too long these companies ruled the GPS market not really innovating and giving consumers what they really need.
I decided to make a quick list of some of the features I would like to see in my perfect GPS system. Here it goes:
Connectivity to Yelp. When I look for a Burger place, I want to see the top Yelp results on the map.
Voice uploads and personalities – Why can’t we buy new voices. Wouldn’t it will be cool to have Homer Simpson as your GPS system voice? And if we already have voices, why not give it a little more personality based on the character you chose.
Voice activation – Like the name. The ability to use voice to do searches.
Route by view – The ability to choose the between possible routes based on the view it will take me by.
Suggestions – If I need to do a 6 hours drive, wouldn’t it will be great to get suggestions for attractions that are on the way?
Recommendations – Similar to the Amazon concept of recommendations, if I chose to go to a specific attraction why can’t the GOS recommend me other attractions people who went there also went to.
Events – I would love to have the ability to see on the map a list of music events appearing near me.
And of course – live traffic maps and calculation of route time based on traffic.
I just read Eric post on Techcrunch calling Google behavioral targeting system a bust.
For everyone who are not aware of this solution, about six months ago Google started to deploy a new version of Ad Sense which will use behavioral targeting instead of contextual targeting. This was one of these moments that tens of ad networks out there feared. In theory, if Google will start to use their vast amount of data gathered on users they should be able to win also this emerging market and take everyone else out of business.
After reading this post that claims that not many publishers opt in to use Google’ solution, I decided to use Google Ads Preference tools to actually see what profile Google built on me.
To my great surprise the answer I got is: none (see image).
Now – I’m using Google Reader on a daily basis. I’m using 3 different gmail accounts. Google is the default and almost search engine I use. I browse many sites on which Google display ads, I even updated my Google profile with my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.
How can it be that Google can’t understand my interests (or at least have a calculated guess)???
(And no. I did not clear all my cookies and I use just one browser).
Since the iPhone first came out there were many conversations around the web about why Apple refuse to support the Flash player.
Most keep explaining Steve Jobs need for perfection and the fact that the Flash player can eat the already fragile iPhone battery life quite fast.
But while thinking about it today I thought that the real reason for Apple refusal is completely different.
The day Apple will introduce a Flash player on the iPhone they will also introduce something else – Flash games and applications. Right not in order to develop and run an application on the iPhone, developers need to learn and write code in Objective C. These applications are not cross platform, meaning that an application developed for the iPhone can’t be run on an Android or Nokia phone.
By not providing a cross platform option and as the main platform for application developers, Apple succeeded in creating a huge community of developers dedicated to the iPhone platform. Many will say that the number of applications on the Apple App Store is the number one advantage Apple has on Andorid and the Palm Pre.
But if suddenly developers will be able to develop their app just once using Flash and then run the same app (or with small modifications) on other platforms as well, Apple will lose its grip on the App Store. Also don’t forget that there are probably many more developers and designers who know Flash development than ones who know specific iPhone development.
So is this the main reason Apple is blocking Flash from the iPhone? Does Steve wait for the very last minute where competition with other phones will dictate the introduction of Flash on the iPhone? What do you think?
* Quick note: I’m sure some people will say that Apple can install a Flash player on the iPhone but block it from the iPhone SDK. But note two things:
1. History shows that developers and hackers will always find a way to go behind Apple and find a way to use the Flash player. And if too many hacked iPhones will be able to run Flash applications, it will put more pressure on Apple to allow it also in the official applications.
2. The main use of the Flash player will be embedded in the Safari browser. The iPhone SDK allows you to embed and use Safari inside your apps, basically allowing developers to gain access to Flash.
A few days ago I got a letter from my bank telling me that I earned X amount of rewards point on my credit card and that it is enough to get some cool rewards such as iPod, gift cards and hifi systems.
Excited, I decided it might be time to try and cache these points that I always ignored. But before deciding which present I will give myself, I dived into the rewards web site to do some research on all the various options. Quite fast I noticed something weird.
For 5,000 points I can get $50 right into my bank account. For the same amount of points I can also get a $50 gift card in various stores like Gap, Sears and others. Same goes for 10,000 points. I can get $100 in cache or a gift card for $100.
I have to ask this: Why the hell will someone choose to get a gift card that limits him to use the money in just one place, instead of getting the exact same value in cache he can choose to use wherever he wants???
Well, as you can imagine I decided to forget the gift cards and look for cool electronics. This time I chose a few things that attracted my eye, like a stereo system for the iPod, a portable DVD player and a noise cancellation headphones.
For each of these things, I first searched how much they cost in Amazon. I was surprised to see that the stereo system which will cost e 14,000 points actually cost just $99 in Amazon. Now remember that I can actually get $100 in cache for just 10,000 points.
The same thing went with all the other products.
Conclusion: The best way to use your Visa points is to go for the clean cache option. it’s the less sexy option, but it is the most value for your points.
In the last few months it seems that Facebook is trying to go after and in many ways copy Twitter. Starting from changing how your status messages are shared to the new search capabilities and of course the acquisition of FriendFeed.
Many bloggers and news papers wrote about this race after Twitter, but not enough actually stopped to ask whether going after Twitter is the right thing to do.
Don’t get me wrong. I completely understand why Facebook is trying to go after Twitter. Advertising on social networks still hasn’t proved itself as a huge business and real time search promise to be the next Google.
But I fear that in this race, Facebook might lose many of the things that still makes it much more dominant than Twitter (Facebook just became the 4th largest site in the world, way ahead of Twitter).
Try to think how you use Twitter and how you use Facebook today. Look at how your friends are using these services. Although sometimes these services looks very similar (distributed messaging system), in reality people use them in a very different way.
While Twitter became the number one option for self (or brand) promotion and getting in touch with your fans or customer, Facebook is still all about your connecting with your friends.
Look even at the terminology both services use. To “Follow” someone is something much less personal than to “Ask to be a friend”. While most people (exclude celebrities) follow sometime hundreds or thousands of people in Twitter, in Facebook they still connect with just tens or low hundreds of people.
I also noticed that I see a lot more conversations formed in Facebook comments than on Twitter (using @mentions). Not to mention that people are still sharing many more pictures and videos on Facebook than on Twitter.
All these facts makes it much easier to filter the noise and connect with your friends on Facebook than on Twitter. The risk Facebook are taking is that by duplicating Twitter functionality, they will actually change the way people are using it – letting brands, consultants and self promotion take hold of it. And when it happens, there is no way back.
So what should Facebook do? Should they keep going after Twitter or should the focus on inventing advertising solutions that work on their current platform.
Or maybe the can they try and do both? What do you think?
Check out this short video of Carly Fiorina (Former CEO, HP) about the most important capabilities a business should have.
One of the more important things she say is “Customers not always can tell you what they want, but they can always tell you what’s wrong”.
This is indeed something that every startup out there should carve on its office walls.
One of the emerging trends among mobile startups is augmented reality. In short, augmented reality is the ability to display relevant information as a layer on top of our real live world. You can see some video examples of this from a company names Layer.
These startups are taking advantage of the latest technologies in modern mobile phones like GPS, Compass and camera, to pin point your position in the world, understand what you are looking at and than add layers of data directly on your screen. So for example, you can look at a street through your cell and see all the top resteraunts from Yelp results.
But now let’s take a second to think and imagine how this could be used in the future. One of the ideas I was bouncing with a friend of mine is the following: Imagine you could simply point your cell screen to a person in a bar, and immediately see his Facebook profile (if you want to think and contribute to this idea, please contact me).
Or think about some sort of a real life world of war craft, where again, when looking at someone through the layer of augmented reality, you will see his virtual identity as a mighty wizard.
And if you really want to take this into the science fiction movies realm – put the screen inside a special glasses instead of your cell. Think Arnold the robot in Terminator. You can basically walk around the street, and with a light touch on the side of the glasses, start to see a complete different world.
All these sounds like far science fiction… but a lot of today technologies sounded like this ten years ago. Is this the world we are going toward? What do you think?
Do you know who sells your private information to advertisers out there??
Since the iPhone first came out there were many conversations around the web about why Apple refuse to support the Flash player.
A few days ago I got a letter from my bank telling me that I earned X amount of rewards point on my credit card and that it is enough to get some cool rewards such as iPod, gift cards and hifi systems.
In the last few months it seems that Facebook is trying to go after and in many ways copy Twitter. Starting from 
One of the emerging trends among mobile startups is augmented reality. In short, augmented reality is the ability to display relevant information as a layer on top of our real live world. You can see some 
cell. Think Arnold the robot in Terminator. You can basically walk around the street, and with a light touch on the side of the glasses, start to see a complete different world.
This blog is Shahar Nechmad' stream of Consciousness.
