Ho John Lee's Weblog

It’s Veterans Day in the United States. When I was a kid growing up in Maine, every little town had a parade or other observance for Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and it seemed as though every family had at least one member that had served in the military.

In contrast, here in Palo Alto (and probably elsewhere) today, it’s mostly notable for the schools, post offices, and banks being closed. My daughter’s elementary school had one of the teachers’ spouses come in to talk to the 4th graders about being a submariner in the US Navy, and I suspect it may have been the first time many of the kids had actually met someone who’d been in the service. I think that there are actually more veterans around, but it’s not something that makes for great conversation in many social circles in the Bay Area.

Providing for a national defense is one of the core functions of government. Here in Silicon Valley, sometimes I feel like we’ve effectively “outsourced” it to the “professional military” tribe, who mostly don’t live around here, or at least not in my corner of the tech/business crowd. It can’t be a good thing when the institutions providing that service become so culturally and socially remote, regardless of your opinion on current foreign policy.

Suggested reading:

• Michael Yon: Online Magazine (photojournalism and dispatches from Iraq)
• In Flanders Fields (at Wikipedia)
• Remembrancing (Tim Bray)

I spent a lot of time digging up new music a couple of months ago during the pre-launch period beta tests of the Pandora music service. I put together a list of interesting music that I found, and ended up purchasing a number of new albums, and put off signing up for their paid subscription service until I finished working through the new music. I thought the fee was OK ($12/quarter or $36/year) but I simply had too much other stuff to listen to, so it would have been wasted money until the backlog cleared a bit (all the CDs I found from listening to Pandora in the first place).

Given my experience (liked the service, liked the music, put off signing up temporarily when the fees started), and the opportunity for affiliate referral fees from Amazon and others, this move to a ad- and affiliate-supported service could end up generating more revenue in the end.

In addition to many new features (bookmarking, station editing, playlist improvements, etc.), Pandora v2.0 includes a free, ad-supported version. Listeners have the choice to subscribe and stay clear of ads, or use the free service, which will gradually incorporate advertising. What does this mean for you? You can now come back and listen to Pandora as much as you’d like for free–and all the stations you’ve created remain intact.

At a referral fee of 6% of sales, it would take around $50 of CD sales to directly replace the old subscription fee. However, many more users who would turn away if even a small payment were required might try using a free service. And Pandora is the sort of service that creates demand for new music that those “free” users might be happy to purchase from Amazon (or iTunes). I don’t know what their conversion rates look like, but if they look anything like my behavior, Pandora is far better off working on bringing in more music-loving users than trying to collect subscription fees.

See also:

• Pandora
• Pandora launch, DRM, and media
• Pandora is now free (at TechCrunch)
• Pandora : Version 2 (at Pandora.com)

I just wasted 10 minutes getting this to work correctly, so I thought I’d write it down…

Here’s what you need to use mod_rewrite to implement a permanent 301 Moved HTTP response when you move a web site from a subdirectory on one domain to a new top level domain.

(Assuming you’re on a hosted service, and can use .htaccess):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^olddir/?(.*)$ http://new-domain.com/$1  [R=permanent,L]

where the old content was originally in a subdirectory called “olddir” and is getting moved to a new directory on a different server.

This allows you to move the content to a new, separate domain and/or server without breaking your existing links.

link: more on .htaccess and mod_rewrite in the Apache documentation

Although there’s no working system described in any articles I can find about this, the patent application that goes with this is filed on behalf of NASA, so it might not be total vaporware.

From Audio DesignLine:

At last, you think that you have a secure room for conversations. No windows to bounce laser beams off as a means to eavesdrop. The doors are sealed and air tight. But don’t rest too easy. Now there’s a new way of snooping using Gigahertz waves.
…
Reflected electromagnetic signals can be used to detect audible sound. Electromagnetic radiation reflected by a vibrating object includes an amplitude modulated component that represents the object’s vibrations. The new audio interception method works by illuminating an object with an RF beam that does not include any amplitude modulation. Reflections of the RF beam include amplitude modulation that provide information about vibrations or movements of the object. Audio information can be extracted from the amplitude modulated information and used to reproduce any sound pressure waves striking the object. Interestingly enough, the object can be something as unlikely as a piece of clothing. Thus, something as intensely personal as your heart beat can be intercepted by reflected RF waves in addition to audio sounds.

More from New Scientist, discussion at Slashdot, Bruce Schneier (see comments)

There are many applications for remote sensors and other small electronic devices in remote locations without access to the electrical grid, and where batteries may be unsuitable. A group from the University of Texas, Arlington has built a miniature windmill is 10cm (a little less than 4 inches) in diameter and can provide a power output of 7.5 milliwatts in a breeze of 16 km/hour (10 mph).

The novel aspect of this design is in its use of piezoelectric crystals rather than a conventional generator. Piezo crystals generate a voltage when they are deformed, and are commonly found in cigarette lighters and barbeque ignitions. This piezoelectric windmill brushes a series of cymbal-shaped transducers as it rotates to generate electricity.

A conventional generator that used a 10-centimetre turbine would convert only 1% of the available wind energy directly into electricity. A piezoelectric generator ups that to 18%, which is comparable to the average efficiency of the best large-scale windmills, says Priya.

Details are published in

(via Nature)

Just when I’d started getting a little bored with Google-based pincushion maps du jour, I come across something surprising built on the new Yahoo Maps API:
from Justin’s Rich Media Blog:

With the power of Flash 8, you can customize the Yahoo! Maps on your site to actually blend with the surrounding design of the site or application. Forget about a rectangular maps and default colors of the map tiles. Use ActionScript, or the IDE to add runtime filters to the map tiles themselves.

The radar “scan” is animated to rotate around, while the pirate map telescope also serves as the zoom level slider.

I’ve seen so many Google Maps applications in the past few months that the sheer novelty and utility value of new ways to access data and maps has started to wear off. These demos made me stop to take a look simply because they look so much better than what we’ve gotten used to lately, and are likely to precipitate a wave of interesting new ideas.

I’m ambivalent about requiring Flash as a client technology. It’s really neat, and is deployed on a lot (but not all) browsers. It’s also somewhat opaque, and chews up a lot of system resources. I can usually tell when I’ve landed on a web page with Flash content somewhere because the fan in my T42 usually starts spinning up after a few seconds instead of running dead silent.

But in the meantime, this made my day.

(via PhotoMatt)

Elections are today. I already sent in my absentee ballot, but if you have one and you didn’t mail it already, you probably need to take it to a polling location in person before they close or they won’t count it…

This topic for this month’s Mobile Monday was “Funding and Investment”, held at the AOL offices in Mountain View.

Speakers included:

• Colin Wiel (Keiretsu Forum)
• Ken Matusow (Keiretsu Forum)
• Vineet Buch (BlueRun Ventures)
• Martin Frid-Nielsen (SoonR)
• David Fradin (MauiGames)

Quick scribbled notes:
Keiritsu Forum is an angel investing group, making investments of $250K to $1MM in early stage companies, at premoney valuations of $1.5MM to $10MM. They gather 50-80 applications per month via their website, which invite some teams in for screening by member committees to select which ones will make presentations at their monthly meetings.

They are not strictly focused on mobile or technology, and their disclosed investments are eclectic. One company they mentioned makes a self-cleaning kitty litter box.

Vineet from BlueRun Ventures outlined some mobile and communications topics they’re following :

• Convergence of wireline/wireless (Cellular + VOIP / VoWLAN)
• Innovative Mobile Services
• User interface and usability innovations
• Emerging wide area technology (WiMax, not 802.20)
• 3G rollout creating new opportunities

BlueRun is focused on relatively early investments of $2MM to $8MM, while a related fund, Nokia Growth Partners is focused on later stage investments. BlueRun started out as Nokia Venture Partners (but has since taken on additional LPs), giving it a strong global flavor before it became more fashionable. They are early on in their latest fund which just closed a few months ago, and could be a good fit for startup teams working the mobile space.

Martin Frid-Nielsen (CEO of SoonR) spoke from the entrepreneur’s perspective. Their product is a remote access solution for using your PC desktop from the mobile phone, and they have apparently been featured as a plugin for Google Desktop. Aside from the actual product, I found his talk entertaining for his comments on selecting a country for outsourcing their software development.

Their company is based in Denmark and the Bay Area, both high cost areas. They decided to outsource to a Eastern European country, and ultimately selected Albania. Martin also commented that Ukraine was actually cheaper, but there were other issues, “like, you have to pay the mafia”.

David Fradin (President and CEO of MauiGames) gave an overview of their phone-based games. They offer advertisers the ability to place sponsored banners and product placement within their (mostly Hawaii-themed) games, such as golfing, frisbee, and some sort of cycling sport. He seemed to be over-reaching a little when he claimed that their system provided the only method so far that could actually count ad impressions on a mobile phone, perhaps I misunderstood what he was saying.

They have a proprietary API for their ad service, which allows dynamic insertion of background banners into the game scenery and other displays. Someone in the audience asked why they didn’t drop the game development activity and just become something like “DoubleClick for mobile games” and his response was that the existing mobile game developers were mostly from gaming backgrounds, didn’t really understand the potential revenue value of selling advertising in the games, versus selling the game itself, and that MauiGames needed to continue forward with their model to demonstrate to the other companies how it could work (and thus convince them to sign on to use their advertising platform).

MauiGames is in Hawaii, although it looks like they’re actually on Kihei, not Maui. Still, a nice place to work. (Updated – AndyF points out that Kihei is on Maui…)

Our family has enjoyed Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean in the past, so this weekend I thought I’d see how Monty Python went over with our daughter. I think British humor is partially an acquired taste, but the 4th graders around here seem to have a keen appreciation for the absurd, especially if it involves naked people and/or underwear. A bit of animation doesn’t hurt, either.

And Now For Something Completely Different isn’t really a movie so much as a collection of skits that can be watched (or skipped) separately without missing anything.

A few notes:

• The Hungarian Tourist was a big hit. Hopefully we won’t end up with all the kids at school saying “My hovercraft is full of eels”.
• The Man with a Tape Recorder Up His Nose was completely baffling to my daughter, who has never actually seen a tape recorder. We had to pause the DVD for a sidebar discussion.
• How Not to Be Seen: “Why is everyone getting blown up?” People randomly getting shot, blown up, or having 16 ton weights dropped on them was vaguely confusing to her. We don’t generally watch a lot of PG-13 movies with her, although we will probably make an exception for the new Harry Potter movie.
• The Dead Parrot, the Biker Grannies, and the Marriage Counselor all went over well. We had another sidebar discussion on what marriage counselors were and the various sorts of “inappropriateness” that were going on…
• Cartoon naked people, the dancing Venus on the Half Shell, and men in bikinis all got the kid-stamp-of-approval

This is probably not a movie for kids of all ages, but might be entertaining for some. I think we’ll try Monty Python and the Holy Grail before too long.

Ethan Zuckerman had an opportunity to visit Nicholas Negroponte and got a good look at the mockup of the proposed $100 notebook computer for use in rural and developing education projects. This is a work in progress, but seems to have some substance to it as well.

While the actual prototype is being actively banged on (in preparation for a live, but tethered, demo at WSIS on November 16th), Negroponte keeps a cardboard mockup of the machine on the conference table in his office. It’s a clever little thing – I had a hard time putting it down after picking it up.

There often tends to be a focus on the technology aspects of these low-cost “IT-for-the-people” projects, partly because it’s hard, but also because it’s a lot easier to address than the broader social, economic, and policy issues that go with their intended use. I was glad to see some questions about how they thought the overall program was actually going to work in the field:

Scale is clearly a major part of what will make the laptop succeed or fail – the laptop won’t be produced unless at least five countries sign up at a million laptops each. With an initial production run of 5 to 10 million laptops, the price is likely to be between $130 and $150 per unit, not including any distribution costs, marketing, or any digital content that comes pre-installed on the box. As the project scales up, the $100 per box target comes into sight.

The laptop is not “for sale” – it’s going to be available for students only, and will be distributed through the same channels that school books and uniforms are. The laptops will be the property of children, not of the school. Colin Maclay, a Berkman colleague who’d joined me for the visit, pointed out that in many countries, school books and uniforms are sold by (highly profitable) local businesses, and that losing a book contract might be a major blow for local employers.
…
While Negroponte has some general solutions to the interesting problems around distribution and usage, I got the sense that there hasn’t been as much detailed thinking about the on-the-ground challenges as there has been about the physical and software design of the machine.

It looks like they’ll end up with some interesting hardware and software before too long, but it’s going to take longer to figure out how to put the concept into practice. Ethan comes away with a generally positive impression about the project, and is looking into collecting comments and suggestions from existing rural development programs as input to Negroponte’s team:

On the third and fourth fronts of the project – the marketing, distribution and maintenance of these devices and their connection to the Internet, and their use in the classroom – I think there’s a lot of unanswered questions and I think the global community of folks interested in IT in education, especially in IT in the developing world, could assist Negroponte and team with their thinking.

Specifically, I think it would be great for the OLPC team to have a set of requirements and suggestions for nations participating in the program on how to distribute, link, support and teach with the laptops. It sounds like Negroponte would like to make it a requirement that every student in a classroom has a laptop. Should it be a requirement that schools implementing laptops have internet connectivity? Can this connectivity be used the way it is in the SchoolNet Namibia project, to let schools become ISPs, using revenue to subsidize the net connection and, perhaps, the laptops? Will businesses repair the laptops? Or will students do it informally, or start their own businesses?

Colin and I are talking about soliciting suggestions on the distribution and use questions surrounding the One Laptop Per Child project and compiling them into an advisory paper for Negroponte and crew. (If you’ve got questions or suggestions, posting them on this blog is a great way to start a discussion…)

It will be interesting to see whether this gets useful enough to get beyond the concept demo stage. Although I love the vision, it may be possible to do just as much good within a few years with whatever cell phones turn into by then. It’s hard to make a low volume product inexpensive, and high volume production makes ridiculously complicated technology dirt cheap.

Link: One Laptop Per Child – a preview, and a request for help
See also: Six Low Cost Computers for Rural ICT, discussion at Slashdot

Map My Run is a new Google Maps-based application for plotting and measuring your runs. I just tried plotting one of my usual loops around the Stanford campus and it’s pretty close to what I get with my GPS running watch.

You can plot routes by clicking points on the map, or upload a GPS tracklog (didn’t try this, though). These sorts of applications are great for estimating your mileage when you don’t actually have a GPS or some way to measure the course. Unfortunately, Google’s map coverage is still somewhat limited outside the US, so it works great for plotting runs around London’s Hyde Park but not so good for loops around the Vidhana Soudha or Cubbon Park in Bangalore, although if you know your way around you can use the satellite view to make a rough guesstimate.

As an aside, it’s remarkably hard to find a good online map of Bangalore, given the huge number of technology-related business travellers that visit there. Maps of India has a reasonable city overview, but if you want street-level detail, try this one from Superseva (only seems to work on Internet Explorer). It’s an interactive scanned image of a paper map(!).

See also: Gmaps Pedometer, Favorite Run, Walk Jog Run, Motion Based

via Google Maps Mania

I’m not very good at Photoshop, but this portfolio of photo retouching projects by Glenn Feron nicely illustrates the disconnect between reality and the beautiful Photoshop-enhanced images that fill today’s advertising and print media. You can view his before-and-after images by moving your mouse back and forth, some of the differences are quite striking. These images were all part of various commercial projects, but if you have a favorite photo you can apparently send it to him for the full treatment. I’m not sure how well this works when you start with normal-looking people, though. All of the “before” photos are of professional models who look pretty good to start with.

For those who want to play along at home, you can read more about how to remove wrinkles, and blemishes, plump up lips, whiten teeth, tidy up loose hair, add contours, and generally glamourize your photos in these articles:

• Beauty Retouching in Photoshop
• Beauty Retouching

Maybe there should be a service splicing the Amazon Mechanical Turk with Gimp and HotOrNot to help people who need to boost their photo appeal?

Peter Burrows points out the new and improved HP board election rules:

Today’s Good Governance Award Goes To…
…the board of Hewlett-Packard. That’s not a sentence I would have forseen myself writing, given some of the nonsense that’s gone on in Palo Alto in recent years. But yesterday, HP announced that board members from now on would need to win a majority of shareholder votes to be re-elected to the board. If they don’t, they’re required to submit their resignation.

HP press release:

Under the policy, any nominee for director who receives a greater number of votes “withheld” from his or her election than votes “for” such election will tender his or her resignation for consideration by the nominating and governance committee of HP’s board of directors.

More Amazon stuff this evening:

Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade will provide paid access to books by the page, and the ability to “upgrade” access to the full contents of the book.

Press release:

The first program, Amazon Pages, will “un-bundle” the physical-world experience of buying and reading a book so that customers can simply and inexpensively purchase and read online just the pages they need. For example, an entrepreneur interested in marketing his or her business could purchase the relevant chapters from several best-selling business books.

The second program, Amazon Upgrade, will allow customers to “upgrade” their purchase of a physical book on Amazon.com to include complete online access. For example, a software developer who buys a Java programming book will not only get the physical book delivered to his or her home, but will also get 24×7 Web access to the complete interior text of the book. Buy a cookbook and you will not only have it on your shelf, but also be able to access it anywhere via the Web.

Personally, I like owning actual books, as I find them much easier to read and carry around than a computer or PDA. But something like this would be handy to get at my personal collection while travelling. Plus it might cut back on the volume of books I end up donating to the Palo Alto library.

This shouldn’t affect fiction book sales at all (who wants half a novel?), but could put a dent in sales of some types of reference books.

This seems a little bit like a “book” version of the old mp3.com service. If you owned the CD, they would let you stream the bits from their server. I seem to be slowly reconstructing my own private version of that service in our house, although if disk storage increases quickly enough I may just switch to duplicating the content everywhere.

More comments at TheStreet.com

I came across a cryptic link to mturk.com on supr.c.ilio.us, asking “Isn’t that how the Matrix came to be?”

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate “artificial, artificial intelligence” directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this artificial, artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

All software developers need to do is write normal code. The pseudo code below illustrates how simple this can be.

 read (photo);
 photoContainsHuman = callMechanicalTurk(photo);
 if (photoContainsHuman == TRUE) {
   acceptPhoto;
 }
 else {
   rejectPhoto;
 }

Given the source of the link, I was a little skeptical at first read, but it appears to be a legitimate beta project that just launched yesterday at Amazon. At least, the documentation links point back into Amazon Web Services, and at least one person seems to know someone there.

This is an interesting idea that should find some useful applications. Spammers have supposedly been doing something like this to defeat the image-based Turing tests used to screen comment posting systems, offering access to porn in exchange for solving the puzzles, and there are other anecdotes of using low cost offshore labor for similar tasks. Having a simpler web service interface for finding a human key operator somewhere will probably allow smaller and more experimental applications to emerge.

Update 11-04-2005 08:09 PST – Slashdot, TechDirt, Google Blogoscoped on Mechanical Turk, pointer to BoingBoing on porn puzzles and spam, captcha.net

CNET has put together a photo roundup of several low cost computing projects from the past few years:

• The Popular PC initiative from Brazil in 2001 was intended to cost around $250, but ended up around $600.
• The Mobilis Wireless laptop from Indian technology firm Encore Software features a 7.4-inch LCD screen and six-hour battery life. It costs about 15,000 rupees, or about $277.
• The Mobilis desktop is powered by Intel’s XScale PXA255 200/400MHz processor and has 128MB of SDRAM. It comes with a carrying case that hides a full-size, roll-up keyboard and opens up as a desktop stand. Its price tag is 10,000 rupees, or $230.
• MIT Media Lab have a plan for getting $100 laptops in the hands of millions of people around the world. One notable feature of their prototype is a hand crank for providing power in places where electricity is undependable or unavailable.
• The Personal Internet Communicator from Advanced Micro Devices features Microsoft software, including Internet Explorer, the Windows Media Player and a version of Windows. The device is sold through Internet service providers, which will set the local price; it was listed at $185 without a monitor when it debuted.
• The Amida Simputer is a product of the Indian companies Bharat Electronics and PicoPeta Simputers. It runs Linux, uses a stylus, and has a 206MHz processor, 64MB of RAM and two USB ports.

Some thoughts following the Microsoft splash this week:

The big PR launch for Windows Live last Tuesday announced a set of web services initiatives. It probably drives a lot of Microsoft people crazy to have the technology and business resources that they do, and to have so little mindshare in the “web 2.0″ conversations that are going on. I haven’t read through or digested all the traffic in my feed reader, but it looks like a lot of people are unimpressed by the Microsoft pitch. Been there, done that. Which is true, as far as I can see. The more interesting question is whether this starts to change the flow of money and opportunities around developing for and with Microsoft products and technologies.

If I do a quick round of free association, I get something like this:

Microsoft:

• corporate desktop
• security update
• vista delayed
• who’s departed this week

Microsoft is a huge, wildly profitable company. It initially got there by being “good enough” to make a new class of applications and solution developers successful in addressing and building new markets using personal computers, doing things that previously required a minicomputer and an IT staff. Startup companies and individual developers that worked with Microsoft products made a lot of money, doing things that they couldn’t do before. All you needed was a PC and some relatively inexpensive development tools, and you could be off selling applications and utilties, or full business solutions built on packages like dBase or FoxPro.

Microsoft made a lot of money, but the software and solutions developers and other business partners and resellers also made a lot of money, and the customers got a new or cheaper capability than what they had before. Along the way, a huge and previously non-existent consumer market for IT equipment and services also emerged. Meanwhile, the market for expensive, low end minicomputers and applications disappeared (Wang, Data General, DEC Rainbow, HP 98xx) or moved on to engineering workstations (Sun, SGI, HP, DEC/MIPS) where they could still make money.

The current crop of lightweight web services and “web 2.0″ sites feels a little like the early days of PC software. In addition to recognizable software companies, individual developers would build yet-another-text editor or game and upload it to USENET or a BBS somewhere, finding an audience of tens or hundreds of people, occasionally breaking out into mass awareness. Bits and pieces are still around, like ZIP compression, but most of it has disappeared or been absorbed and consolidated into other software somewhere. I have a CD snapshot of the old SIMTEL archive from years ago that’s full of freeware and shareware applications that all had a modest following somewhere or another. Very few people made any money from that way. In the days before the internet, distribution of software was expensive, and payment meant writing and mailing a check, directly from the end user to the developer.

Google has become a huge, wildly profitable company so far by building a better search engine to draw in a large base of users, and using their platform to do a better job of matching relevant advertising to the content it’s indexing. Now, a small application can quickly find an audience by generating buzz on the blogging circuit, or through search engines, and receive two important kinds of feedback

• Usage data – what are the users doing and how is the application behaving
• Economic data (money) – which advertising sponsors and affiliates provide the best return

Google’s Adsense and other affiliate sales programs are effectively providing a form of micropayments that are providing incentives and funding for new content and applications, with no investment in direct sales or payment processing by the developers, and no committment from the individual end user.

It’s simply a lot easier for a small consumer targeted startup to come up with a near term path to profitability based on maximizing the number of possible clients (=cross platform, browser based), being able to scale out easily by adding more boxes (not hassling with tracking and paying for additional licenses), and with a short path to revenue (i.e. Adsense, affiliate sales). A developer who might have coded a shareware app in the 80’s can now build a comparable web site or service and find an audience, and actually make a little (or a lot of) money. Google makes a lot of money from paid search ($675MM from Adsense partner sites in 3Q05), but now some of that money is flowing to teams building interesting web applications and content.

In contrast, in the corporate environment (where it’s effectively all Microsoft desktops now), things are different. Most organizations won’t let individuals or departments randomly throw new applications onto the network and see what happens. This is a space that usually requires deep domain expertise, and/or C-level friends, in order to get close enough to the problems to do something about it. But the desktops all have browsers, and the IT managers don’t want to pay for any more Windows or Oracle licenses than they are forced to, so there’s some economic pressure to move away from Windows. But there’s also huge infrastructure pain, if your company is built on Exchange. There’s less impetus here for new features, the issue is to keep it secure, keep it running, and make it cost less. Network management, security, and application management are all doing OK in the enterprise, along with line-of-business systems, but these are really solutions and consulting businesses in the end. The fastest way to get “web 2.0″ into these environments is for Microsoft to build these capabilities into their products, preferably in as boring but useful a way as possible. Not a friendly place for trying out a whizzy new idea, and generally a hard place for a lightweight software project to crack.

On another front, Microsoft also has most of the consumer desktop market, but by default rather than by corporate policy. Mass market consumers are likely to use whatever came with their computer, which is usually Windows. They’re also much more likely to actually click on the advertisements. Jeremy Zawodny posted some data from his site showing that most of his search traffic comes from Google, but the highest conversion rates come from MSN and AOL. MSN users also turn out to be the most valuable on an individual basis, in terms of the effective CPM of those referrals on his site.

So let’s see:

• Many new application developers are following the shortest path to money, presently leading away from Microsoft and toward open source platforms, with revenue generation by integrating Google and other advertising and affiliate services
• Microsoft has access to corporate desktops, as well as mainstream consumer desktops, where it’s been increasingly difficult for independent software developers to make any money selling applications
• Microsoft is launching a lot of new me-too services in terms of technical capability, but which will have some uptake by default in the corporate and mass market
• Microsoft’s corporate users and MSN users are likely to be later adopters, but may be more likely to be paying customers for the services offered by advertisers.
• Microsoft could attract more new web service development if there were some technical or economic incentives to do so; at present it costs more to build a new service on Microsoft products, and there’s little alignment of financial incentives between Microsoft, prospective web application developers, and their common customers and partners.

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch has a great set of play-by-play notes from the presentation and a followup summary. He thinks the desktop gadgets and VOIP integration are exciting.

what really got me today was the Gadget extensibility and the full VOIP IM integration.

In the past, Microsoft grew and made a lot of money by helping a lot of other people make money. Today, the developers are following the money and heading elsewhere, mostly to Google. This could quickly change if Microsoft comes up with a way to steer some of their valuable customers and associated indirect revenue toward new web application developers. They are the incumbent, with huge market share and distribution reach. I don’t think they’ll ever have the “cool” factor of today’s web2.0 startups, and I don’t think they’ll regain the levels of market share they have had in the past with Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer. But they could be getting back in the game, and if they come up with a plan to make some real money for 3rd party web developers we’ll know they’re serious.

Yahoo has a major update to Yahoo Maps this evening, bringing it back on par with Google Maps, and with a full set of web APIs for building mapping applications.

From the Yahoo Maps API overview:

Building Block Components

Several Yahoo! APIs help you create a powerful and useful Yahoo! Maps mashups. Use these together with the Yahoo! Maps APIs to enhance the user experience.

• Geocoding API – Pass in location data by address and receive geocoded (encoded with latitude-longitude) responses.
• Map Image API – Stitch map images together to build your own maps for usage in custom applications, including mobile and offline use.
• Traffic APIs – Build applications that take dynamic traffic report data to help you plan optimal routes and keep on top of your commute using either our REST API or Dynamic RSS Feed.
• Local Search APIs – Query against the Yahoo! Local service, which now returns longitude-latitude with every search result for easy plotting on a map. Also new is the inclusion of ratings from Yahoo! users for each establishment to give added context.

They also spell out their free service restrictions:

Rate Limit

The Simple API that displays your map data on the Yahoo! Maps site has no rate limit, thought it is limited to non-commercial use. The Yahoo! Maps Embeddedable APIs (the Flash and AJAX APIs are limited to 50,000 queries per IP per day and to non-commercial use. See the specific terms attached to each API for that API’s rate limit. See information on rate limiting.

This restriction is more interesting:

Sensor-Based Location Limit

You may use location data derived from GPS or other location sensing devices in connection with the Yahoo! Maps APIs, provided that such location data is not based on real-time (i.e., less than 6 hours) GPS or any other real-time location sensing device, the GPS or location sensing device that derives the location data cannot automatically (i.e. without human intervention) provide the end user’s location, and any such location data must be uploaded by an end-user (and not you) to the Yahoo! Maps APIs.

So uploading a track log after running or hiking is OK, but doing a live GPS ping from your notebook, PDA, or cell phone to show where you are isn’t? I think this is intended to exclude traffic and fleet tracking applications, but it seems to include geocoded blog maps by accident. I don’t think they’d actually mind that.

There are several sample applications to look at. The events map seems nicely done, pulling up locations, images, and events for venues within the search window.

To display appropriate images for events, local event output was sent into the Term Extraction API, then the term vector was given to the Image Search API. The results are often incredibly accurate.

I’ve been meaning to take a look at the Term Extraction service, it looks like it might be a handy tool for building some quick-and-dirty personal meme engines or other filters for wrangling down my ever growing list of feeds.

Announcement at Yahoo Search Blog

More from TechCrunch, Jeremy Zawodny, Chad Dickerson

You may have that this site has been slow at times lately.

It’s currently running on shared hosting account at Dreamhost. Most of the time the load average is pretty reasonable, around 2 to 6, but in the past week or so I’ve seen it spike above 50 or even 100 a few times.

This morning I’m seeing the highest load average yet, and the site is effectively offline for the moment. The server is still keeping the connections open, but nothing is actually coming back.

[lira]$ uptime
11:21:52 up 19 days, 22:25, 10 users, load average: 583.32, 695.46, 271.13
[lira]$ uptime
11:22:53 up 19 days, 22:26, 9 users, load average: 1004.16, 957.32, 387.55

I’m not sure if this is related to recent software upgrades on their end or if there’s a new customer on this server with an application that’s behaving badly.

…30 minutes later…

Looks like they’ve rebooted the server. Still not looking too happy though.

12:02:05 up 12 min, 5 users, load average: 155.32, 66.01, 29.54

Stopped by TagCamp this weekend. This is TagCity, which a sort of physical tag cloud built by having people add blocks tagged with places they had lived or would like to visit.

Palo Alto and San Francisco were well represented, although I was a little surprised at the number of votes for Paris and Tokyo. You can read more of the place tags in the full size (3072 x 2304) image.