11 posts tagged “wired”
Looks like a team broke the 10% barrier...
http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard
(( More about the Netflix prize here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize ))
PS: The entrant "Just a guy in a garage" is still in the top 20...
At first, it seemed some geeked-out supercoder was going to make an easy million.
In October 2006, Netflix announced it would give a cool seven figures to whoever created a movie-recommending algorithm 10 percent better than its own. Within two weeks, the DVD rental company had received 169 submissions, including three that were slightly superior to Cinematch, Netflix's recommendation software. After a month, more than a thousand programs had been entered, and the top scorers were almost halfway to the goal.
...
"Just a guy in a garage" was the exception to all this openness. He didn't even have a link attached to his screen name, which kept creeping higher and higher on the leaderboard. By mid-January, there were just five teams, out of 25,000 entrants, ahead of him. And still, no one knew who he was or by what statistical magic he kept improving. "He's very mysterious," says Koren with unconcealed interest. "I hope you will at least be able to find out his name."
His name is Gavin Potter. He's a 48-year-old Englishman, a retired management consultant with an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master's in operations research. He has worked for Shell, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and IBM. In 2006, he left his job at IBM to explore the idea of starting a PhD in machine learning, a field in which he has no formal training. When he read about the Netflix Prize, he decided to give it a shot — what better way to find out just how serious about the topic he really was?
In 2001, Potter cowrote a book called Business in a Virtual World that described how companies could best take advantage of new technology. So he's well aware of the commercial value of improving recommender systems, which tend to perform poorly, sometimes comically so. (You liked The Squid and the Whale? Try this Jacques Cousteau documentary.) "The 20th century was about sorting out supply," Potter says. "The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand." The Internet makes everything available, but mere availability is meaningless if the products remain unknown to potential buyers.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_netflix?currentPage=all
Nice answer...
Why is Google building a browser? A better question is, why did it take so long for Google to build a browser? After all, as Pichai says, "our entire business is people using a browser to access us and the Web."
...and an interesting article: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-10/mf_chrome
Interesting Kevin Kelly take on the recent WIRED title story...
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php
Another take...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061026/102329.shtml
Original article
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all
PS: Speaking of Abundance. Interesting book on three major trends ((Abundance, Asia, Automation)), although the term "Abundance" was used in a slightly different context and with less emphasis on digital vs real goods...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594481717/ref=cm_rdp_product/102-4020406-0906530
Interesting summary from Wired...
The huge psychological gap between "almost zero" and "zero" is why micropayments failed. It's why Google doesn't show up on your credit card. It's why modern Web companies don't charge their users anything. And it's why Yahoo gives away disk drive space. The question of infinite storage was not if but when. The winners made their stuff free first.
Traditionalists wring their hands about the "vaporization of value" and "demonetization" of entire industries. The success of craigslist's free listings, for instance, has hurt the newspaper classified ad business. But that lost newspaper revenue is certainly not ending up in the craigslist coffers. In 2006, the site earned an estimated $40 million from the few things it charges for. That's about 12 percent of the $326 million by which classified ad revenue declined that year.
But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn't mean that someone, somewhere, isn't making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. The monetary benefits of craigslist are enormous as well, but they're distributed among its tens of thousands of users rather than funneled straight to Craig Newmark Inc. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.
The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You're probably experiencing it right now. It's the basis of virtually all media.
In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is "free to air," and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don't charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They're not selling papers and magazines to readers, they're selling readers to advertisers. It's a three-way market.
Source: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
Although a few companies have beeen around for some time, so technically these aren't startups ((Bittorrent ?)) to me - but who is to criticize almighty Wired...
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/12/YE_10_startups
The list is interesting and at least two company names I didn't hear of before ((Powerset and Slide)).
Crazy yet eye-opening ideas. I especially liked the first one...
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/multimedia/2007/12/YE_10_geoengineering
Let's hope the Swiss Innovation Park comes to fruition, so we can add some more ideas...
http://www.nzz.com/nachrichten/schweiz/aktuell/militaerflugplatz_duebendorf_soll_innovationspark_werden_1.555159.html
((German link))
Good article in WIRED:
Malcolm Gladwell calls it the Big Idea book. It's essential reading for today's harried executive. Among the classics: The World Is Flat, The Tipping Point, The Wisdom of Crowds, and, yes, Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. But if you really want to get ahead, don't just read about Big Ideas, generate them. Write your own Big Idea book and you'll be scarfing down foie gras with the likes of Charlie Rose and George Soros, discussing the global implications of your Big Idea. But how to come up with one? Don't sweat it. With this patent-pending Big Idea Book GeneratorTM, we provide the title, subtitle, and premise. All you need to do is pick a random object to serve as a cryptic representation of your Big Idea on the cover (we chose a peanut) and, well, write it. Hey, that's what ghostwriters are for!
Source and full text: http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/15-10/st_bigidea
Ongoing competitions. Enter at any time ..
http://www.wired.com/culture/geekipedia/magazine/geekipedia/x_prize
((As mentioned, it's probably not worth doing it for the money alone...))
A look back at the issues Estonia faced earlier this year...
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-09/ff_estonia
Good article.
PS: See here for a discussion in German about the situation/readyness in Switzerland: http://www.offiziere.ch/?p=247
I have blogged about this before. This area of web software badly needs ((at least some basic form)) of open exchange...
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/08/brad-fitzpatric.html
As the article points out, this will probably happen as a grassroots movement and spread to smaller sites ((as for Jabber in Instant Messaging)). And, as in Instant Messaging, the big SNS will try to defend their turfs and ((most of them will)) only reluctantly open their protocols.
It took Microsoft about 20 years to open some of their popular Office protocols...hope this doesn't take as long.
