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.

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$.

this is quite alarming isn’t it?

i mean, 1 of 3… and majority of them do use pc’s as their main system (all windwos

falvor). what does that really mean?

well, for starter it means that their system crashes often. it means most probably they do not have any type of identity theft available within their browsers. it means they do not use up2date email services.

mostly it means that these small businesses do not have a budget for an IT guru to setup and maintain their system. that’s pretty lame.

in 2010 most businesses rely on the internet as their means of communication both internally with co workers and customers/clients. email is yesterday’s snail mail.

back in the day (post google day, that is) having an IT guru manage your business meant, most probably, an exchange server, maybe an active directory, a set of pc’s (nt4 and up) and some apps to run the business logic. maybe CRM.

that would have cost you much, depending on the amount of stations and people within your company. pc’s would go back, hard drives would crash, memory sticks would die and lots of viruses would have gone through your firewall.

back in 1997 i managed the network of the tel aviv college for science. we had 3 different networks: solaris, nt4 and novel, with hundreds of stations. later on we added two more linux networks. all of which included a file server, mail server, web server, tape backup, domain controller, backup domain controller, cd tower and what not…

today i am happy to be able to provide all of these services single handedly. how? with google apps. i take it all to the cloud. in fact, i have been testing google apps since the day it launched and had not looked back since.

think about it for a second. it is all stored, stripped and backed up on google’s top servers. SLA gives you 99.9 uptime per year. managing it is a breeze (for someone in the know) – it just works. moreover, no need to pay licensing for office, maintain version compatibility nor answer silly questions.

if a hard drive dies – RIP. if a computer burns – RIP. heck, if an entire office burns down (a major concern for companies world wide after 9/11) – no problem. we buy a new computer, launch the browser and there you have it.

moreover, we sync it all to your smart phone and you have full access to your business 24/7. this type of platform increases productivity. it allows your employees to focus on getting the job done. period.

i encourage clients who do not have proprietary, desktop based, application that run their business logic, to go with linux. ubunto is a free option. if you have the funds, go with a mac. it will, by far, increase the throughput of your people.

spend your money wisely, save on hardware/software/operating system cost, save hundreds of dollars on a team of IT guys and take it to the cloud.

when i do custom development to clients, it is, more often that not, automation of some business process, or creating database driven application to assist them in seeing (literally) their business flow. nothing like a solid visual to help you make good business decisions.

guess what… when i do that, the application is web based. again, no client installation, no local cashing. all is on the cloud. the company is available from anywhere in the world for minimum cost and maximum efficiency. nowhere in the history of high tech did we see such a cost effective system that gives you so much freedom, reliability, flexibility, and especially scalability.

when it comes to high tech, soon enough you get caught up in these types of conversation: “yeah, sure, it is a good idea.. but will it scale?”. the question here is, can you go from 10 employees to 100 with your current system? or if you support an operations of 100 clients now, can you do it with 1000?

going obama on you, i will answer YES YOU CAN. in fact, i support several companies remotely with 100% satisfaction. the only issues i cannot handle is hardware failure. for that i need to fly in or sent a local techie to get things done (which is why i choose hardware very carefully).

point being, if you have an anti virus or not, what really matters is how you are set up. if you are all cloud base, then by all means, you don’t really need an anti virus. if you don’t – then you should, by all means, be worried.

One in three U.S. businesses has no anti-virus protection | VentureBeat.

upper west side sunset, originally uploaded by nir.pengas.

just a beautiful moment in the days before winter in NYC. taken from an upper west side studio, hanging from the fire escape looking south west.