Viking

For those of you at Thack, the materials can be downloaded here: goby_overview_Thack_materials

Pics & a map from my hike this weekend with Mike, we climbed Mount Chocorua. Really nice weather, about 2 hours up and 2 hours down. In the “small world” category, met someone from my hometown in North Carolina on the peak, and ran into another friend on the way down! More pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/viking2917/sets/72157626998182342/

EveryTrail – Find the best Hiking in New Hampshire

Mark Suster wrote a great post on whether the startup life is for you or not. His post really nailed it, particularly around the roller coaster ride that is a startup, and how you really have to embrace the rollercoaster to enjoy it. I had one of those weeks that really reflected that, so I thought I’d share.

Gonna be a great week. Meeting with an old friend in San Francisco, followed by a meeting with a very smart and well regarded entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist, that I’ve met with before and like very much. Hoping to meet with a couple of high profile reporters as well. Then down to LA, where I’m on a great panel at a conference, and going to meet with two potential customers to try to close some projects.

Monday. start off the week with a 6am flight out of Boston for the west coast. Up at 3:30am. Ugh. It’s President’s day, a holiday, for normal people, who are off. Oh well, this is what I do. Pick up a USA Today in the airport, our product, goby, is featured with a very positive review and picture in USA Today. WOOHOO! Hard to beat that as a way to start off the week. Reading my email in the airport, my friend’s company needs him to fly to Chicago so that meeting is off. DAMN! Manage to wedge in a replacement meeting the next day with one of my advisory board members; get some great advice and contacts. Reporter meetings appear not to be happening. I think of another strategic partner I should meet in LA and drop a note; meeting looks good.

Tuesday. Get a random mail from someone I know who wants to explore strategic partnerships; since I’m randomly in the area, we get together and have a very interesting conversation. Walk out of that meeting, the venture person I was meeting with has come up sick and can’t make the meeting. All that prep the night before wasted. DAMN! On the positive side, I’m close to the golden gate bridge, no other meeting to arrange on short notice, so I take a walk across the golden gate bridge on a beautiful day, before driving down to the airport and hopping a flight to LA.

Wednesday. Get off the plane, one of the big meetings I have, the person has come down with Bronchitis and can’t meet. DAMN! But another meeting with a potential strategic partner miraculously appears (WOOHOO!) and I squeeze in a very interesting meeting that didn’t exist before I left. My second meeting drops me a note and lets me know he’s had a basketball injury and can’t meet either. DAMN! Then on to my other meeting, which goes well enough but doesn’t result in getting the business (at least yet!). Slog to the hotel through LA rush hour traffic, grab a drink and a pizza, then off to the hotel room to prep for the panel tomorrow. In bed at midnight. Just before I go to bed, get a mail that we’ve been accepted to speak at one of the biggest and best advertising conferences (WOOHOO!).

Thursday. Up at 6. Conference is going well. Meet a lot of interesting people. Panel goes very well, so far as I can tell (WOOHOO!). Somewhat by chance I make some great connections and have some great conversations with my co-panelists that may help the business very shortly.

Friday. Get a call from one of my colleagues, a deal we’ve been chasing and was looking dicey, we now have what looks like an agreement. WOOHOO! First deal this quarter and couldn’t come at a better time. Get a mail from one of my other colleagues 30 minutes later. Google’s changed their algorithm and punched a huge hole in our search traffic. DAMN! Hop on the plane, and miraculously, the seat next to me is empty so I have some breathing room for the first time in like 10 flights (WOOHOO!).

That’s the roller coaster for the week. A lot of weeks are like that. Big highs followed 30 minutes later by big lows. If that sounds like fun to you, you belong in a startup!

Went out last week to Phoenix for my third Phocuswright with goby. goby did well (we won our category and were a finalist for the final competition). As part of my demo, I showed a long weekend in Phoenix. Michelle’s brother lives there and so we decided to spend a long weekend there, and planned it as part of my demo. Before arriving at the show, we stopped at Los Reyes de la Torte (the Kings of the Sandwich), a hole in the wall Mexican spot between the airport and the Westin where we were staying. The “tortas” were roughly the size of a basketball – (apparently the Man vs Food TV show had a run-in with these sandwiches) – intimidated, I decided to go for the King Steak Tacos. Good choice. Conservatively, I’d say these were the best steak tacos I’ve ever had. Seriously.

After the show (if you’re interested in the show you can read more here), we bugged out of our fancy digs at the Westin and moved downscale, to the Hospitality Suites, near Tempe. $50 a night gets you a decent room, free cocktail hour, free breakfast, pool, tennis courts, shuffleboard, and about one hundred Germans in town for the Iron Man competition. Hotel prices are coming down…..! Thursday night we hit up downtown Scottsdale for a run past the art galleries. Lots of fun stuff there, although it was surprisingly uncrowded and a number of the shop spaces were vacant – perhaps the economy (especially the tourist economy) hasn’t completely recovered there. More steak tacos at Blanco’s Tacos & Tequila. Great margaritas and decent food. Not amazing, but decent.

After sleeping late Friday (roughly 12 hours sleep the last three days!), we cruised up to Taliesin West, the Arizona encampment of Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s a pretty amazing place, and he was an amazing guy. I had thought it was a “traditional” house, but apparently for many years the house was open to the elements – the windows were not windows, but open spaces in the building, often covered by canvas but not truly enclosed. It was built entirely by Wright and his students – as the early days were described, it felt much more like a commune, but with architects instead of hippies. They went there every winter, and basically had to set up camp, clean the critters out of the building, and almost start over. It was/is a place deeply focused on their work (Wright held court every day in a wool suit!), but out in the desert of Arizona. The architecture is amazing, and the list of interesting architectural memes invented by Wright was really quite astounding – I had no idea he’d come up with the idea for recessed lighting, integrated pathway lighting, carports, hinged doors, drive-up bank teller windows, and many others. The architectural/sonic design of the Caberet was amazing. The Caberet is an auditorium hewn completely out of rock, half underground. As I sat in the audience, the tour guide stood in the audience and played a music box. 2 feet from me and I could barely hear it. Yet when she went onstage 30 feet away, and put the music box into an alcove designed for a piano, and played the music box, it was 10 times louder. Really amazing sonic design, blasted out of rock and finessed by hand….All in all a really interesting view into a powerful character (sounds like he was a bit of a tyrant), who led the life of the mind until his early nineties (he had dozens of architectural commissions on his drawing board when he died at 91). Well worth a visit.

Friday afternoon we went on to Ponderosa Stables for a one hour horseback ride with Larry Michelle’s brother and his wife Wendy), to the T-Bone steakhouse, for a decent steak dinner. Coming over the ridge on horseback for some amazing views of the Phoenix valley and downtown was very cool. Then a ride back by moonlight to the stables and a ride home. My horse Q is apparently famous, having recently been in a local Powerball commercial as well as apparently having dressed up in medieval garb for a local church’s photoshoot as a knight’s horse (?!). Not entirely sure where that is coming from. Also learned that apparently there is a such a thing as a horse chiropractor, to which a number of the horses have been subjected/treated. Who knew?

Last night Mexican dinner at Frank & Lupe’s in Scottsdale. Fun atmosphere, slightly cool and they had the heat lamps going which was nice. Good margaritas but the food was your basic, decent Mexican, nothing special.

You can see the things we did (and few we didn’t) at: http://www.goby.com/lists/Apres-Phocuswright/3ZV and photos are here.

Wow. Things are really getting interesting. I’ve been talking for a while now about the convergence of search & travel, search & local, search & mobile/location based services. This is just another proof point (a $700M proof point). It doesn’t really affect Goby directly – we really haven’t been playing in the airfare space, we decided a long time ago to leave that to people who already do it well. The biggest potential losers in this deal are the metasearch players and online travel agencies – Kayak, Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz, because Google can now build a user experience for flight search that dis-intermediates those companies and connects users directly to airlines for purchasing.

There’s also an interesting tension with many travel advertisers – Google receives billions of dollars in travel advertising revenue, but increasingly travel companies are viewing Google as competition (through things like Google Places pages and Google City Tours), and might take their ad $ elsewhere. The other interesting potential loser is Microsoft, for two reasons. First, Bing Travel is a great differentiator for Bing, and now Google has said they will build a competitor, where previously they had none. Second, Bing Travel (an enhanced and re-branded version of Farecast), was powered by ITA – it will be interesting to see how long that lasts!

Interesting times indeed. As airfares become more and more of a pure commodity, at Goby we’re thinking the action in the industry will turn to finding experiences – the real reason people travel. And Goby is perfectly positioned for that.

(btw – in addition to the obvious, Google is a winner in that they get a huge pool of deep engineering talent, and vertical expertise in the travel industry. They also pick up an interesting and not well publicized asset of ITA, the Needle project).

Had a great (and very informative!) visit with Robert Scoble, his coverage is here. He said some great things about us (“more important than foursquare”!), but one of the most rewarding things was that his wife loves Goby as well. It’s one thing to impress someone technical with what you’ve achieved – it’s even more rewarding when people who aren’t in it for the technology see the usefulness of something in their daily life.

Here’s the interview:

Does Blog Search have a future?

Blogs are one of the richest sources of information for certain classes of information. Yet they are frustratingly hard to find or extract information from, and the state of the art (Google, Technorati) feel 100% stagnant. Here are a couple of example use cases I have that aren’t well served by existing tools:

1. Recruiting. When I recruit for a particular role, I’m looking for thought leaders or people with insight and passion. Usually these people have blogs. If I could see, for example, a list of all the people in the Boston area with blogs that blog about web development, I’d probably find some rock star developers. No easy way to do this today.
2. Travel planning. I’m thinking about a stay in southern Utah at a Bed & Breakfast. Who’s blogged about their trips there that might have some good perspective for me?
3. Music Discovery. Great blogs like Aurgasm, Quietcolor or TheMusicSlut are great ways to find music. But how many others like that are out there?

The current serious choices are pretty much limited to using normal search (Google, Bing etc), or using a Blog search engine like Google Blog Search or Technorati. With Google Blog Search, you get pretty much a toned-down version of Google: a search box with 10 results – you can’t really search for *blogs*, you can only search for *posts*, with the relevance ranking determined by some version of PageRank. There’s no real sense of the authority of a blog (other than that of PageRank), and no real opportunity for discovery – just punch in your keywords and hope for the best.

With Technorati, you do get some increased power. You can search for blogs as entities distinct from an individual post, and blogs do get assigned an authority score. But the experience seems to fail as often as succeed. A search for “boston web developer” blogs on Technorati returns three blogs, all with an authority score of 1 ( the minimum) – pretty sure there are more than 3 of this kind of blog in Boston! And there’s no way to sort the blogs by their authority score, at least that I can see. The Technorati blog directory also seems to be mostly limited to “authoritative” blogs – personal blogs (for example my own) seem to have little or no representation. But on long tail topics (say, music reviews of obscure artists), blogs by “real people” are often the only place to find this kind of commentary. Most importantly, there seems to be little innovation happening in Google Blog Search, Technorati, or more generally – the field is stagnant.

What would the characteristics of a good blog search tool be? What’s lacking in today’s approaches?
1. Comprehensiveness. There’s hundreds of millions of blogs (Billions?) – yet Technorati doesn’t seem to find many of them. (Google is more comprehensive, but limited by the “search box + 10 results” interface).
2. Ranking of blogs relative to search query and/or authority of author. (Of course this ranking problem is non-trivial. There are some interesting ideas on authority for twitter accounts which could perhaps be leveraged, e.g. http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/)
3. A faceted, searchable directory of blogs supporting discovery. Categorization technology has come a long way. It ought to be possible to categorize every blog against a reasonably detained taxonomy or facet set (say, the Open Directory categories, or something better), with 80% accuracy, across some common facets: topics, locations, age of blog, date of last post, and so forth. Even at 80% accuracy, this asset would be quite effective. And with a little UGC thrown in, the 20% that matter, and are wrong, will quickly get corrected. Using a microformat like hCard, blog authors could document their blog’s metadata quickly and accurately. Blogs also typically have some consistent thematic elements, such as an “About” page or a Blogroll list, that could be mined for interesting metadata. This kind of experience would power a new way to discover fresh and interesting blogs & content.
4. Recommend other, similar blogs. Powered by the facets above, or by a blogroll analysis, or something similar, a recommendation feature for similar blogs could be implemented, based on information readily available in an “almost standard” format.

Verticalized Blog Search Engines might also provide some task-centric capabilities. As I’ve written before, the future of search is about providing task-centric search capabilities. In music for example, The Hype Machine has some very interesting behaviors it can support, simply by virtue of being focused on music.

The obvious question: what business or investment model would support this kind of vertical search engine? In the Goby world of travel and entertainment, there’s a long history of various ways to monetize that kind of content. In the “pure content” world of blog search, it’s less clear – a pure page-view based CPM ad model isn’t likely to work. If the New York Times can’t make that kind of model work, a startup probably can’t either. Perhaps some form of interest-based, downstream ad retargeting approach might get enough leverage that it could get to critical mass. Alternatively in some domains a “freemium” model might work, where additional tools (say for recruiters or brand managers looking for a competitive edge). Given the scale of the problem, it’s not clear a bootstrapped company could take this on – the infrastructure requirements (bandwidth for crawling, servers, etc) probably require a non-trivial level of investment.

What blog search tool do you use? Do you use a blog search tool? or just Google? Is anyone innovating in the area?

Have been on a binge recently of listening to contemporary African music….as mentioned in my post on seeing Angélique Kidjo in concert, African music is really fun because it’s completely accessible, and yet constantly challenges your ear because it moves in unexpected directions. Spurred on by a few recent conversations I thought I would use this post to share some of my recent favorites, plus try out the Yahoo Media Player javascript tool, which works really well.

A number of the tracks are from the Festival in the Desert (http://www.festival-au-desert.org/), which is on my list of trips to take before I die – it’s a festival held out in the desert in Mali. Mostly the performers are African musicians but Robert Plant did a cameo there once (track below). I also included a track from Toubab Krewe, who are, strictly speaking, from North Carolina! – but spent a significant amount of time in Mali. Enjoy!

I Ka Barra by Habib Koité & Bamada
Aldachan Manin by Tinariwen
Fafa by Vieux Farka Touré
Soweto Daal by Wasis Diop
Teme by Alpha Yaya Diallo
Politique by Adama Yalomba
Win My Train Fare Home (If I Ever Get Lucky) – by Robert Plant & Justin Adams
Devil Woman by Toubab Krewe

There’s a convergence coming, between the worlds of search, travel, local, and social. It used to be that if you were traveling, you used a guidebook and map and talked to the concierge, then you graduated to TripAdvisor and Expedia (and if you were adventurous, Kayak). People’s use of search engines tended not to intersect with their travel planning. In recent years of course Google has become a de facto part of the travel planning experience – although by no means a perfect one. And some search engines have introduced travel products (notably Bing Travel). And for planning your weekend, search engines have historically not been of much use at all – they don’t understand the concept of time or location very well (“this weekend” is just a few keywords to them), and don’t understand your task (when I search for beaches on Cape Cod, why do I get back results for restaurants with the word “beach” in them?). Robert Scoble has some thoughts on this subject, here. Google appears to be moving in this direction, with their rumored acquisition of ITA, which powers many airfare metasearch sites including Kayak. Their abortive attempt to acquire Yelp shows how search & local are converging as well.

But there’s a new game in town – social/local gaming, in particular with things like Foursquare and Gowalla, that combine social gaming with local-search-like results, allowing people to broadcast where they are and what they’re doing. There’s an evolving “stack” of technologies, including location databases and engagement tools, nicely summarized by Chris Dixon. (I disagree with his assertion that location databases will become commoditized – the information is too hard to come by, and companies like InfoUSA make hundreds of millions in revenue providing this kind of data. Not to mention the startups like SimpleGeo and Locationary and for that matter Goby, that are tackling the problem, but I digress).

This kind of engagement is going to have a profound impact on how people plan travel and figure out their weekends. DeepDish Creative (http://deepdishcreative.com/wordpress/2010/02/foursquare-for-tourism/) is talking about how destination marketing organizations can leverage these tools to promote their destination. But I see two problems with this generation of tools as they apply to this problem:

1. They are after-the-fact. I tend to engage with Foursquare after I’m already AT someplace – Foursquare isn’t really involved in my decision process, it simply records what I’ve already decided. As a result, it has limited use (not no use, just limited use) in making decisions.
2. These tools only recognize a limited set of entities, primarily businesses (in fact, primarily restaurants). It’s hard to check in at a U2 concert, because it’s an event, and it’s hard to check in at the Grand Canyon, because it’s not really an entity, it’s a generalized (and off-the-beaten-track) place. God help you if you want to check-in on a hiking trail!

Addressing those last two elements would create a resource that will not only appeal to my vanity & let me broadcast what I’m doing, but more importantly help me decide.

The key need here is a semantically meaningful database of things, to key all your features off of, and search tool to find & organize them – not just a pile of URLs. The system needs to know that Yo La Tengo is a band playing at the Fillmore on the 23rd of April, with a date and a location – not just a pile of keywords without any meaning. Any system like this needs to cover hotels and restaurants as well as non-business entities like hiking trails or concerts, and once you leave hotels/restaurants, this information is hard to come by. Once you have the database of entities, it is straightforward to build a platform for people to engage with their networks, in the context of that content. Once you have a strongly categorized, rich database of things to do, and a strong network of people telling you what they are interested in, you can provide compelling recommendations as well as support discovery. And, strangely enough 8), that’s where we’re headed with Goby – we plan to be right at the intersection of this convergence.

So I’m riding the train in to work on Friday and my daughter texts me and says she’s got an extra ticket to Angélique Kidjo at Somerville Theater that night and did I want to go? Let’s see, long work week, tired, my car’s 25 miles away at the train station….but some things you don’t turn down – your daughter invites you to a concert, you go!

Angélique Kidjo is a Grammy award-winning Benin-born African pop diva, and her music covers everything from traditional African music to smokey jazz that would feel right at home in a Paris nightclub to Brazilian-sounding funk. The show reminded me why I love African pop music, and why it’s so important to see it live. The energy in the show is absolutely not captured on her studio recordings, great as they are. Plus – you can’t see her dance on the cd! For two solid hours Angélique danced through every song, and I don’t think she repeated a dance move the entire night – she has more moves than a human should be allowed to have! The other reason to see African music live is that they all dance – and the audience participates in a way that western musicians usually don’t encourage. Angélique roamed both aisles up and down both ways during one song, weaving her way through the crowd. Towards the end, she invited the audience up on stage to dance while she sang – “first come first serve, it’s kind of crowded up here!”. By the end of the song, she had 40 people on stage, everything from six year olds to sixty year olds, professors and students and football players up on the stage dancing.

She started off the show with a traditional song she grew up singing, accompanied by a rhythmic clapping. I was completely unable to clap along with the rhythm – it was totally foreign to someone who grew up on Bach and Led Zeppelin – completely irregular, and yet she repeated the rhythm over and over again, so it had an internal logic for her. One of the other things I love about African music is that it is completely accessible, and yet the melodies always move in unexpected directions. One of the things I love about travel to foreign countries is that it challenges your assumptions, and African music has that same effect – you have to *listen* because it doesn’t do what you expect.