• I'd really like to start developing games for Android, but I don't know a thing about coding. I'm simply an artist/graphic designer who has some ideas. Do you know where or how I can get started?
• Is there a way to post something of Facebook, but not allow anybody to make comments?
• Should one always believe the Internet blindly? The Internet is huge and is filled with all sorts of information, So, is it always right? Can I, as a reader, rely on it?
• I'm thinking of using my shop vac to suck up small landscaping stones for reuse elsewhere; the stones aren't that heavy- my leafblower can move them. Would it survive this kind of use?
• Is it better to centralize all of my online accounts/aliases with a service like Google and then use something like a Chromebook for my work outside of the house, or to decentralize all of my online accounts/aliases across multiple service and use something else outside of the house?
• I've been getting into genealogy lately, and I'm trying to do it for free, so I am avoiding sites like ancestry.com at all costs. Any tips on free resources?
• While in the grocery store the other day, I noticed several varieties of cooking sprays claiming to be olive oil based. Are these sprays legitimate, or am I just better off smearing a dollop of olive oil in my pan or using a spray bottle loaded with plain olive oil?
• Can anyone recommend a good scanner to digitizing your own books? Short of chopping your books up and scanning the pages, all I've been able to find is some insanely priced archival equipment for libraries (in the $70,000 price range!). Surely there's something out there more practical for home use.
• I am interested in finding traditional music from Japan, Korea and China. I am not interested in pop or rock, but either traditional instrumental or traditional with vocals. Any suggestions?
• I can code just fine, but when it comes to creating images I suck. Besides hiring a graphics designer, I was wondering what most developer use to create image, such as icons, custom buttons, backgrounds for 2d games, etc?

More »

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Nir Eyal (@nireyal), a founder of two startups and an advisor to several Bay Area incubators. Nir blogs about technology and behavior design at nirandfar.com.

Reading Leena Rao’s recent article on Techcrunch about the personalization revolution, you get the sense that the tech world is waiting for a bus that isn’t coming. Rao quotes well-known industry experts and luminaries describing what needs to happen for e-commerce to finally realize the promise of personalized shopping, a future where online retailers predict what you’ll want to buy before you know yourself.

Ironically, Rao and her pundits are missing the zooming racecar that’s speeding by them as they wait for the personalization bus to arrive. That racecar is Pinterest and the new breed of startups marking the beginning of what I call the “Curated Web.”

The promise of personalized e-commerce began over 10 years ago with technology pioneered at Amazon. It was then that the mental dye was cast for what eCommerce personalization would look like, an algorithmic solution for matching customer to products. Web watchers came to expect that someday all online retailers would have such algorithms on their sites and the dream of personalized
commerce would finally be realized.

For over a decade, startups took their best shot at making this apparition a reality. Companies like Hunch tackled the data collection piece of the equation, asking users endless survey questions to determine their tastes and preferences. Google’s Boutiques.com tried to crack the challenges of structuring the data associated with personalized shopping recommendations. Ultimately, these attempts failed.

In September, Google shut down Boutiques.com and the founders of Hunch sold their company to eBay, an outcome far short of their IPO hopes. Previous attempts at eCommerce personalization were unsuccessful because those involved failed to realize they were missing one key element, the interface. Curated Web companies are defined by their ability to use new interfaces to collect and structure data better then previous algorithmic solutions.

Users Want it All

While the tech world waits patiently, expecting the solution to e-commerce personalization to look like Amazon ported to other online retailers, “Curated Web” companies like Pinterest are changing the game by changing the interface. Pinterest will be the first company to nail eCommerce personalization because they understand the importance of having an interface, which matches what the user is there to do, discover stuff they like from across the web. Pinterest has cracked personalization right under everyone’s nose by doing the two things Rao says have yet-to-be invented, data collection and data structuring.

Collecting Data, One Pin at a Time.

Pinterest is becoming the web’s personalized mail-order catalog. Each user is presented with a one-of-a-kind visual interface based on their tastes. They are presented with any product, from any retailer, anywhere in the world. The items they see are curated through people and topics they’ve identified as interesting and what is shown to them improves the more they interact with it. Every time they pin, re-pin, like, or comment on an object, the relevancy of the products displayed on their magic catalog improves. This is what personalization looks like, effortless, simple, social and fun. It’s the interface, stupid.

“Big deal?” you say. “Facebook can do this!” No, they can’t. Social media is for selectively sharing information about you and Facebook is built for presenting yourself in the way you want to be seen by others. Facebook is, by design, about creating a network of relationships and sharing with them selectively. This brings up all kinds of privacy concerns, which reduce the flow of content creation and sharing to limited circles (Yes, I said “circles.” Don’t even try it, Google).

Pinterest has no such restrictions. Pins are inherently open and there is no expectation that anything shared is private. It’s a community built on individuals acting in their own self-interest to capture and collect things that interest them. Facebook and Google+ are just not the right interfaces for capturing and collecting products, and attempting to discover new products amid the newsfeed clutter is hopeless.

Making Sense of the Data

To some, the rise of the Facebook “like graph” foretold a personalized future, where retailers could utilize data collected from what users “like” to serve targeted recommendations. Here, Rao is spot on about why Facebook fails to provide useful data on users’ tastes; it lacks structure.

What does it mean if I “like” something on Facebook? Not much. “Liking” a brand or even a specific product, doesn’t provide useful information. If I “like” Babies’R’Us, does that mean I like the brand, a specific outlet, a product I found there, or am I just hoping to get a coupon? From a personalization perspective, it’s pretty low-value stuff. There is no structure to correlate my actual likes with my Facebook “likes”.

However, Pinterest solves the data structure problem brilliantly. You’d think they’d need some fancy photo recognition technology to tag a handbag by color, make, and model, but I doubt they have any such technology. Pinterest doesn’t even try to solve the data structure problem because they don’t have to.

Again, it’s the interface stupid. By presenting users with a dynamic catalog, and tasking users with the job of deciding whose tastes they’d like to follow, structuring image data becomes irrelevant. Pinterest simply has to make sure the magic catalog appears, tailored to each user’s stated preferences. It’s doesn’t matter if Pinterest knows a thing about what’s in each image on a pin board; what maters is that it’s curated by the user and the user likes what they see. If they like the products, they’ll buy them, and Pinterest laughs all the way to the bank.

So while the rest of the web is waiting for the personalization bus to arrive, Pinterest, and perhaps a few other fast-moving Curated Web companies, will be far ahead. It’s clear, given Pinterest’s astounding growth that e-commerce personalization is here to stay, even if it looks nothing like what you imagined.

Note: I have no affiliation or investment in any company mentioned in this post.

Excerpt image from ClickeCommerce.com

We went to see The Artist last night. I didn’t want to go; if God wanted silent movies he wouldn’t have invented sound, etc. And black and white to boot. Making a black and white 3D movie, maybe. But inexorably the Oscars loom, and the last thing I want is to endure the withering gaze of my long-suffering wife when it wins Best Picture without us having seen it.

Of course it turned out to be great. And in the process, it showed some leg about today’s movies that could be useful to the technology community. Namely, that purpose trumps moral ambiguity. Take Google’s trampling of our so-called digital rights, or more precisely our sensibilities, with a callous land grab of its search monopoly. The outrage is appropriate: by inserting Google + results into search they’re shoving the social network down our throat in direct contradiction to previous promises about doing no evil.

The Artist parades its conceit at every turn of its familiar romance. We’re doing this no sound thing for you because it’s good for you. Things will work out fine. The dog needs no dialogue. The music tells you what to feel. It’s already half over, and besides, it’s already better than the last five movies you’ve seen.

Google Search + parades its conceit at every turn. It’s free, so we can improve it any way we want. We’re already reading everything you write in Gmail, so now we’re blurring the metadata into one big data pool so we can better read your mind and sell the results back to marketers. It’s OK because Facebook already does this. We’d add all the other networks if they would just let us have their data too. And besides, we’re doing this.

It’s really quite brilliant. Here’s all this noise about user rights to data. Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg, for blazing the trail with rolling updates, partial rollbacks, and commandeering of key language elements. “The kids of today are not worried about privacy. They want to share.” And thanks, Twitter, for dangling global realtime alerts and then locking the door. With competitors like these guys, who needs friends? We can do anything we want and we are.

Why now? Is it another version of Microsoft embedding the browser in Windows to have something to give up while protecting Office and a breakup of the company? What is Google’s real motive in jettisoning the illusion of openness and what’s good for the user? I think it’s less Orwellian and more mundane: they think they can get away with it. I think they can, too.

Part of the reason is they are heading off a Google Spring by creating their own filter of social signals. Search is giving way to predictive caching of answers to questions you haven’t yet thought of, a business process layer whose signature is becoming visible via @mentions and private messages. Remember Gmail and Gchat the next time you look for someone. What Google has done is to decouple content from metadata. They may not use the messages, but the signature of relationships will do just fine, thank you.

Very early in The Artist, in a very funny series of takes in a movie within the movie, the protagonist meets his match on the dance floor. The camera work is precise, waiting for the slate (minus the clapboard – no sound), then this odd moment where you see the Actor steel himself for the role, then almost zen like turn and swim into the scene with the resolute look of the professional. After three or four of these takes, you begin to be transformed into the craft and art of it. Like the bridge in a Beatles song that never returns, you crave for it until the next take. From that point on you realize the Actor and Director are in perfect sync, that each scene and each element of each scene is staged for maximum precision of effect.

Once this realization takes hold, the technology is no longer evident. What was established as silent becomes a tableau where we fill in the colors, the sounds, the dialogue, and the effect it has on us. We are no longer the audience, but now empowered as the director, the actors, the stagehands, the writers, the musicians, all conducted by us as the arbiters of meaning. Silently, invisibly, we change places with the people on the screen.

Whether Google has performed the same magic is to be seen. The power play of erasing the old rules seems arbitrary and calculating, but if somehow the move invigorates Google + conversations and drags Facebook and Twitter into the game, the result will indeed serve users. A good track service and @mention alert mechanism would make the hostage service from Twitter irrelevant, and the realtime conversations more than an adequate replacement for the all-but-shuttered FriendFeed.

In a way those orphaned services are social media’s silent movies, superseded in the rush to determine monetization and protect business models yet to be thought of. It’s easy to see the Google moves as clumsy and sinister, but the problem then is replacing them with some new white hat. Just because we got sound and color and digital effects doesn’t mean that stories are better, studios are braver, or good small shows find audiences.

And whether Jack or Ev or Biz or Doc or Dave runs Twitter won’t change things all that much. Whether Google games their own system won’t determine whether we love it or not. What will make a difference is how we perceive the reality of these back lots, how we flesh out the scenes with wit and rhythm, the precision that defines a calculated leap into the unknown or a pratfall. In this ballet of imbeciles and grifters, we still have to choose our friends and protect our families. It’s not up to Google to not be evil. It’s up to us.

Now that Facebook is preparing the biggest tech IPO in history, it is possible to compare its financials and potential market value to Google’s when it went public. At first glance, all of Facebook’s numbers look bigger. Its pre-IPO revenues of $3.7 billion in 2011 are more than two and a half times larger than Google’s 2003 revenues of $1.5 billion (Google’s IPO was in 2004). Facebook’s $1 billion in profits is ten times larger than Google’s pre-IPO profits of $106 million. And its expected market cap of between $85 billion and $100 billion will dwarf Google’s IPO market cap of $23 billion.

Facebook, no doubt, will be emphasizing these differences. But in many ways it is a false comparison. Facebook is going public after 8 years as a private company. Google went public much earlier in its development, after 5 full years. So, yes, Facebook at Year 8 is much bigger than Google was at Year 5 of its trajectory. A better way to see how the two companies stack up is to compare their revenues and profits at the same points in their histories. In 2008, Facebook’s fifth year of existence, its revenues were only $272 million, and it lost $56 million.

If you chart Facebook’s revenues for the past five years and compare them to Google’s for the five-year period preceding its IPO (see below), a truer picture emerges of each company’s size at similar points in time. You need to compare Facebook as a 5-year-old to Google as a 5-year-old.

Matching both companies year-for-year, its is clear that Google grew faster and was always substantially bigger no matter what year you look at. Year 8 for Google was 2006, when its revenues were $10.6 billion and its profits were $3.5 billion. As an 8-year-old, Google’s profits were almost as large as Facebook’s revenues as an 8-year-old. (Google was incorporated in September, 1998, so I am using 1999 as Year 1 for the purposes of this analysis. Facebook started in January, 2004, which I am counting as it’s first full year).

But which company grew faster? It turns out that the 5-year compound annual growth rate for each one’s revenues during these comparable periods (2002-2006 for Google, and 2007-2011 for Facebook) was almost exactly the same: 89 percent a year (Facebook grew a smidgen faster at 89.22 percent a year versus 88.96 percent for Google, but Google started with almost twice the revenue and thus ended up much larger five years later).

Facebook’s growth is astounding, but it is important to keep it in perspective. In many ways, it is still trying to catch up to Google’s past.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — trembled in the face of Facebook’s IPO and all-out war on the open Web, also known as Google. Me, I go back to Bill Gates during the DOJ deposition when he basically said we don’t need no steenkin’ breakup when Google will come along and be invented.

@kevinmarks makes a good college (fitting) try of defending the open schmopen set, while none of us seem to notice Social Spring just keeps on rolling over conventional wisdom. Me, I’m pretty jacked up waiting for what this means for Twitter. Go Giants!

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

In interesting but ultimately not very shocking news, Google has signed on as a major sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which is more or less what it sounds like. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just a little odd seeing Google, which is becoming increasingly political, listed next to such organizations as the Koch Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the NRA.

But this isn’t the moment Google comes out as a closet Republican. It’s actually quite in keeping with Google’s position of aggressive neutrality.

Google says that it’s there because it’s a great place to promote their election-tracking site, push Google+ as a platform for sharing and collaborating, and because the conference is fairly young and tech-savvy. Hard to accuse them of pandering, or of partisan pandering anyway.

And that’s sort of the point. Google will no doubt be sponsoring similar events on the left side of the political spectrum as well (they say as much, but haven’t announced anything specific). The message is: hey, we just provide a service. No agenda here.

Not that Google is totally apolitical, but their fierce opposition to SOPA was more like a mother bear defending its cubs than a deliberate political decision. On the other hand, they did go out of their way to take an official stance against Proposition 8. By and large, though, they have avoided taking a stance on hot-button issues.

Can Google actually remain neutral? SOPA was the product of bipartisan ignorance and greed, not just left or right, but what if the next bill threatening a Google territory were to be led by one party or the other? Or what if Google refuses to support, say, a communications embargo with a terrorist-harboring country, or such like? The dance they’re doing will become increasingly difficult if they insist on putting their neutrality on a pedestal for much longer.

On the other hand, this may be overthinking it. Why can’t a company spend a little cash to have a ring in the political circus, and not choose sides overtly? No reason. But, as has been observed in other contexts, sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

Poland thinks twice about passing ACTA, Google will no longer use CDMA devices as developer units, and a new study begs the question, "Do iOS apps crash more frequently than Android apps?" More »

Many carriers these days are blocking apps from the Market, like Google Wallet or Wireless Tether. Droid Life shows us a super easy way to install them on your unrooted phone. More »

Earlier this afternoon Droid-Life noticed something strange: the Android developer devices page had been modified to remove the Verizon Galaxy Nexus, leading the site to question whether Google may have removed support for the device because of its spat with Verizon over Google Wallet.  Which would stand to infuriate a lot of new Galaxy Nexus users (including myself), who are looking forward to receiving device updates directly from Google and not having to wait for Verizon to get around to pushing their own releases.

Thankfully, we’ve confirmed this isn’t the case: Google says it will indeed be updating the Verizon Galaxy Nexus in the future.

Turns out Droid Life made a bit of a logical leap, as the page stated that No CDMA Devices were supported any more, and other devices including the Sprint Nexus S 4G had been removed as well. In response to the post, Google has written a clarification to the Android Contributors group, in which it explains that CDMA devices are being removed from the Android Open Source Project site because they need carrier-signed .apk files (which users can’t generate). Here’s the post:

Hello! This is a quick clarification about support for CDMA devices.

For various technical reasons, recent CDMA Android devices implement core telephony functionality in .apk files provided in binary form by the carriers. To function correctly, these .apk files must be signed by the so-called “platform” key. However, when an individual creates a custom build from the AOSP source code, they don’t use the same signing key as these CDMA flies were signed with.

The result is that these files don’t work properly, and pure AOSP builds running on these devices can’t place calls, access mobile data, and so on. Because we aim to make sure that we are as clear as possible about the degree of support that devices have, we updated the docs over at source.android.com to reflect this reality.

We will still make available as many as possible of the closed-source binaries for these devices, and Nexus devices will continue to have unlockable bootloaders. And, of course, GSM/HSPA+ devices are still supported, as are any other devices we’re able to support. We’ve simply updated the documentation to be clearer about the current extent of CDMA support.

We are of course always working to improve support, and we’ll keep everyone updated as we make improvements. Thanks as always for your interest in AOSP!

- Dan

Google Cloud Print is an under-appreciated service that can send print jobs from virtually anywhere to a connected printer in any other location. Normally that involves tedious configuration on your network, but Cloud Print can do it in just a few minutes. It's really easy to set up, and there are a few things you can do to extend its support beyond the browser to make all your printing tasks a lot easier. Here's a look at what it can do, how you can set it up, and how to make it even better. More »