The Pengas Blog

Why aardvark? u guys had something great going on here.. selling out so soon, with so much potential to make you much richer than the $50M google gave u… just like smule who had a fantastic head start with the ocarina and other apps.. they raised $3.9M dollars thereafter. the aardvark community grew strongly quickly and created a niche that no other search engine does nor did. real time answering from real people. sure, u have yahoo answers et tal.. in those u hope that someone knowledgeable will pick up the glove and provide you with the info you need. by using vark, u can get good answers in minutes, and the more you ask, the more the system learns about how to route the question to the right person and figure out which answer was a good one. there was an attempt at the beginning of the interent revolution. at the time i was at my 2nd year in college studying computer scient. one of our teachers started a small venture where people answer each other’s questions. the implementation was not at it’s best, but it kinda worked. after two years of operations the money had run out and the creative ideas of how to make money dried as well, so they shut it down (for the life of me, i cannot remember the name of that company). what vark is doing differently is several things. one, it uses jabber/xmmp protocol to be present right there alongside gmail contacts with google talk, or any aggregator (like adium) that supports this open source protocol. the heart of the system is the algorithms to analyze a given question, suggest the right tag (ie topic) and route it to whoever is a good authority in the field (usually more than one person). those people are online (naturally) and can either pass or answer. you can then continue discussing the issue with them, rank it as a good answer or flag it as an inappropriate one. if u did not get the answer you want, you can resubmit it, change the tags and hope for the best. i started testing aardvark since the day it launched it’s beta and later on the iphone app. at the beginning there were not many users, and not so many questions to answer, but quite slowly, over a period of two months it was working really well. best case scenario, i got a solid answer in less than a minute. nothing i could do with google or any other search engine. the social aspect is interesting as well. people love giving answers to what they know about. there is an innate desire in humans to help each other out… u may say it is an ego thing (and to some extent u are probably right), however, people get our of their way to provide answers sometimes, doing basic research, giving good links and more. so why is google buying aardvark? good question. two answers: one, the small team of aardvark are ex google employees with top notch management with yale and stanford grads. these are serious people with the creativity and leadership ability to makes things work. they understand google and it’s weaknesses and have found a way to monetize. two, real time person to person (rtp2p) search does not exist. and the aardvark team has shown us that it can be done, and done well. so where is the money? meaning… how does the aardvark makes it’s profit. good question again. and the answer is simple: just like google’s adwords, the aardvark places results that are paid for. for example, let’s say someone is asking the community if they can recommend or know a computer technician in the upper west side of manhaatan. some people will respond giving their input, but this question can be routed directly into a paying customer, who wants to be notified immediately when someone is looking for a technician in the metropolitan area. long short – a lead engine. i have answered several questions and provided links to products on amazon, using my amazon referral id, so why not others in a streamlined maner, where the vark directs all of those potential leads to the user. aardvark also plants automatic answers. i was questioned by the devel team about the quality of that feature a couple of months back, when i was looking for someone to build a loft bed in my studio. i got an answer from service magic, a well known lead generator for all type of construction work. if haven’t tried aardvark u definitely should. they are at http://vark.com, they have a free iphone app and they can be added to your fav jabber client as aardvark@g1.vark.com. Confirmed: Google has Acquired Aardvark.

google provides me with email alerts whenever the word “pengas” pops up on the news/blogsphere. we are a small family and i am interested in learning if there are members of us out there in the world (like greece, israel, US, canada and australia).

today i got an email from this service which, supposedly, had found a mentioning of “pengas” in it. when i opened the link (Lucky in Love: A Flower for My Hair), i did not find any pengas. what i did find is penga. more specifically: “…I basically followed the tutorial Penga from Convention of a…”.

so what is going on here? my alert is for “pengas”, and here i am with a result of “penga”…
my guess is google is using a rule engine to better understand a word. gramatically, pengas can also be penga’s. for example, think of the game “pengas’s peril” which is everywhere. i get notifications about it as well.

so for google’s engine penga and penga’s are related, hence, i get both results if i omit the apostrophe. but what google doesn’t get, is that i am not making any abbreviations. pengas is my fully qualified last name.

here is where i believe the semantic web will make a difference. by using metadata to describe the essence of the word (or context) i will be able to instruct google that pengas is NOT penga’s. it CAN be pengas’ (for singular or plural), but please don’t waist my time with redundant results.

unfortunately google is lagging behind it’s services in other areas as well…
take a look at this page…

this is has 54 map locations that i have created on a google docs spreadsheet. using the map gadget, i’ve put them all on a map and published it as a web page and then embedded it into the site.

this page take over a minute to load on certain browsers. on chrome (mac version) it does not load at all.

absolutely ridiculous. i actually published this issue in the google docs help forum

as u can probably see i got not answer since november of last year.

long-short. google needs to stay on it’s tows and get things together. it is these little things that will separate them from their competition. search sites like wolfram alpha.

really? hmmm… interesting view from Microsoft…
Microsoft: Google’s Nexus One will hurt Android. the last time balmer expressed himself about the smart phone market was the iphone.. check it out for yourself: this can also mean that microsoft is brewing something up in redmond… maybe a new smart phone with natal built in, that can interface the xbox360 online games? interesting times ahead of us for 2010 where slate/tablets are the hottest things since cinnamon rolls with sprinkles on top… it was just good enough for the entire market to hear rumors about apple entering the market with a device that we see a boom of products launching over at CES from DELL and HP/M$.

since jobs introduced the iphone the world has gone crazy, hasn’t it?

people are now connected to the cloud 24/7, with push access to their emails, calendar, sharing locations with the GPS data, streaming music and videos, playing fantastic games where ever they are, and overall living a better world, while having a copy of their digital life and a serious access point to the world in their pocket.

what can i say?

for the 6 years i have been in the US, i used the same shitty phone i got as a part of the deal from t-mobile when joined. it never really made sense to switch because nothing made sense to me. i remember playing with a palm pilot back in the day. my college roommate showed it off, pulling the stylus out, managing his calendar and notes. i thought it was boring. what a clunky big device that i need to carry on top of my desktop (did not have a laptop back then, they were too expensive) and cell phone… i need to sync my note with that cradle thing only when connected, and the worst of it all, i had to pull out that silly stylus and practice the letters which corresponded to the alphabet.

yes, hard to believe, a hard core techie such as my self, using an old nokia for so many years… i did not jump on the blackberry wagon when it came out. did not understand why i needed to pay so much and use such a huge device. i was waiting patiantly until a device came along that could do more, that would make sense, that will be existent in the cloud as possible and will be a true companion.

the iphone did and still does all of that for me. and then some.

first, i read 90% of all my feeds through the iphone, it is quick and efficient. i sync my calendar over the air (over 11 different ones) which i share with people all over the world, i do voice recording, follow my stock portfolio, weather, get instant directions based on my location, find the magnetic north, measure short distances with a sonar, measure BPM, play strategy games, stream my personalized radio stations from pandora, tether my data plan, study musical chords, connect with the vark community, listen to police radio, follow global financial trends, retouch my images, shop and eat healthy and “locavorilly”, tune my guitar, search for metals, play the ocarina, wire money, search for flights, tweet, skype, tether my nikon DSLR, learn about the universe, search for sexual offenders, post to my blog and more.

yes, there are over 100K apps in the app store, and a big challenge is interfacing the good ones. Lots of people got rich, lots of people are about to get rich, and us, the consumers are the biggest winners here.

the iphone did what no other phone could (yet many had tried, and still trying), revolutionize the way we interact with technology on daily basis. finally, we found ourselves connected to each other 24/7, and all is within a couple of finger swipes away. thank you apple.

many companies have been looking at apple take the lead. many had seen apple’s stock more than double itself. when jobs previewed the iphone i bought apple stock for the first time. they were less than $80 back then. easy bet wasn’t it?

the question that troubles CEOs around the world is, what is next? what can match up the success of the iphone?

at the moment there is only one answer i can think of: android.

i am a linux user and fan from the slackware days. you know, those days when installing linux meant using 7 floppy discs to boot the kernel. the days when u were able to install linux u were a guru.

android is one of the best thing, in my eyes, that could happen to this industry and google’s support in created an affordable device is spot on: give us something affordable that works. well, android does more than just that, and google’s tailored in services make it a great operating system. the real questions is: can the hardware manufacturers step up to the plate and provide quality phones?

in a recent post i had discussed google’s need to produce hardware lest it ends up where microsoft is: lagging behind, too big a ship to turn and respond (that article is here). there is something to be said about software licensing as opposed to full vertical integration (in the case of apple some horizontal as well). i said much in that article so give it a read if you find that topic interesting.

sooooooooo…. what is an iphone killer… is the droid an iphone killer?

sadly no in my eyes. sadly, because i am a firm believer in competition and capitalism. the free market creates such competition that we, the buyers, benefit from the most. but no, the droid is not an iphone killer because the hardware just doesn’t just cut it. first (and the debate can actually stop there), the battery cover keeps falling off. that my friends can be so annoying that the droid may find itself smashed on a wall.

but let’s ask this question from a different angle. what is missing on the iphone?

good questions, u answer… what is missing in the iphone indeed?
well, one thing is affordable (i.e. free) turn by turn voice commanded navigation system.

droid has that, and google made a bald move there, which came highly appreciated by consumers. clearly an app that is worth getting the phone for.

well… yes and no.

yes, it is a great app and i would love to have it available on my iphone, and certainly it is worth considering.. but no, because the iphone does so much more, and so elegantly, with gesture man, with multi touch gestures..

okay.. back to the last question: what does the iphone DOESN’T have?

it doesn’t have flash. yeah man. it doesn’t have flash…

WHY?

so many posts out there try to understand what is going on.. seems that adobe got pissed lately with apple and produced this message just to let us know that apple is holding all the cards…

in this post i am not going to dive into the details of how good the iphone processor is and what are the demands from flash are etc. what i do want to discuss (after quite an intro) is adobe flash 10.1 and air v2 that were released november 11th.

an iphone killer will have flash available to it, that can scale down to the needs of the phone, and will allow diligent development of creative apps, and especially especially games. think about it. the core developers for flash is much much bigger than the core developers for the iphone. while more developers out there are taking the cocoa framework challenge, there is still many of them out there who did wonders with the iphone. a quick mention would be “N the way of the ninja“, one of my old time favorite games build with action scripts.

now that air supports multi touch i can vision a rapid development of apps for an enabled phone. check out this video right here.

there are actually a ton of features that you can look into right here.

the iphone will have decent competition when a serious hardware will be developed AND an already available development platform is used (i.e. webOS or FLASH). i for one would love to see some serious competition for the iphone, and i hope the google phone will deliver it, so we can start enjoying better and smarter phones, and hopefully a much much reduced rate for our plans (white space unlimited data plan anyone?).

heck, maybe we WILL have an xPhone one of these days: check it out.