Daniel Lyons's Blog, page 7

Bluefin Labs mixes science and media, and what they’re doing will blow your mind

I just had coffee with Tom Thai, who runs marketing at Bluefin Labs, which is one of the most exciting companies I’ve come across in a long time. Bluefin sells a social TV analytics service that tracks what people are saying on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites about the shows and commercials they see on TV.

It’s extraordinarily powerful stuff and it’s catching on like crazy. Bluefin is still a pretty young company — its first product was launched last August and the company has only 45 employees — but they’ve already signed up more than 40 TV networks as customers, which is basically everybody in the US.

Bluefin is also now reaching out to ad agencies and in some cases directly to brands, which can use Bluefin to see what people are saying about the commercials. Customers include PepsiCo, Kraft, Mars and Estee Lauder. It’s a subscription model. You pay based on the number of seats you’re using.

The power of Bluefin is that networks and advertisers can listen to their customers and respond by reshaping sitcoms or changing ad campaigns based on what you’re hearing. Another place where there will be huge and obvious impact is political campaigns. This fall’s election will be a big test of Bluefin’s capabilities.

Bluefin grew out of a project at MIT that uses incredibly sophisticated machine intelligence and was originally intended to sift through massive amounts of data to study language acquisition. Deb Roy, the co-founder and CEO, is a tenured faculty member at MIT and director of the Cognitive Machines Group inside the MIT Media Lab. He created the algorithms as part of what he called the “Human Speechome Project.”

If you want to learn more, you can check out a very good article in MIT’s Technology Review about Bluefin.

And if you want to have your mind blown, go see Deb Roy’s talk from the TED conference in March 2011. He brought down the house, and deservedly so.

The changing (not for the better) values of Silicon Valley

Venture capitalist and longtime Valley guy Bill Davidow pens a thoughtful piece in the Atlantic about how values have declined in tech since the days of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. In a nutshell: In the old days the emphasis was on helping customers; today it’s on exploiting them. Google, Facebook and Zynga get zinged. Not that they care.

Spotted on Facebook

Sadly, I played bass. Big mistake. Sigh.

Once upon a time we put a man on the moon. Now we pee our pants over retina displays. WTF happened to us?

I remember being a kid and having the nuns pull us all out of class and cram us into a tiny room where we would sit on the floor and watch NASA launches on a black-and-white TV. These weren’t all moon landings, and I know we didn’t see the first moon landing at school, because that took place in the summer. But every time they launched an Apollo mission, we watched. I remember all of us sitting there and being amazed by what we were seeing, and even now, all these years later, it’s still amazing what those people did.

But today I spent two hours watching Apple announce a new MacBook Pro with a retina display, a new version of OS X and a new version of iOS that has … gasp … Facebook support integrated into it. All around the world, people were sitting at their screens, watching live blog coverage of this event, hanging on every page refresh.

Forgive me, but this makes me sad. So many great minds, devoted to such trivial bullshit.

Android has 3 times as much share as Apple, and Ramon Llamas is about to get hit with an Apple fanblogger attack for reporting this

Ramon Llamas is the smartphone analyst at IDC and from what I can tell he’s a really nice guy. But he’s about to have a very bad day.

You see, Ramon just did something insane: He put out a press release predicting that in 2016 Apple will be eclipsed by Microsoft and end up in third place in the smartphone market, with Android in first place and Windows Phone in second.

Llamas predicts Apple’s market share will decline to 19.0% in 2016 versus 20.5% today.

To reiterate: Ramon is saying that Apple’s share of the market will actually be lower in the future than it is today. Heresy!

One bright spot for Apple fans is that Llamas says Android also will decline. Llamas says Android has hit its peak and will fall from 61.0% to 52.9% in 2016. However, that still puts Android in first place.

As for Microsoft, Llamas predicts the Borg will jump from 5.2% to 19.2% in 2016, just edging out Apple. How on earth can this guy believe that Microsoft will have any kind of share in mobile phones? They’re too late. They missed the boat. They’re done. Toast.

Mobile, you see, is supposed to be the place where Apple finally exacts revenge on the Borg for what happened in the personal computer market.

So of course in the world of Apple fanbloggers this crazy talk from Llamas represents an attack on the Mothership and must be countered. How long until the mockery begins?

Frankly I don’t put much stock in predictions, and I personally don’t care which platform has what share. I like all three platforms and could be happy using any of them. But I do enjoy watching Apple’s unpaid PR Cylons go into full foaming-at-the-mouth attack mode.

Feel free to post comments reminding the world of the following things:

* Apple makes more profit than all other phone makers combined.

* Apple sells only 3 models versus 3 zillion Android models.

* Android is a rip-off of Apple and Apple will sue it out of existence.

* The iPhone’s tiny screen is actually the perfect size because your thumb can reach every part of the screen.

* The iPhone has buttery smooth scrolling that is pleasing to technology connoisseurs.

* Verizon and AT&T both reported the iPhone made up the majority of their smartphone sales.

* Android is fragmented and developers hate it, but they love iOS.

Those things are all true.

And yet I just did the math and it appears that Android, with 61% market share, has roughly three times as much market share as iOS. Can that really be true? Three times as much?

This isn’t a prediction. This is where things stand today.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say that Android is the top-selling platform, and by a fairly large measure. But I’m confused, because of course this can’t be true because we all know that Apple has won.

If I were Apple, or an Apple fanblogger, I would just do what North Carolina has done with climate change, and simply pass a law that makes it illegal to report numbers that contradict our worldview.

Anyway. For now it looks as if Android, which came into the market after Apple, has three times as much market share. Three times.

And even four years from now, Android will still have nearly three times as much share as Apple.

Even if you hate Google, and hate Android, you must admit that’s a pretty significant accomplishment.

Or don’t admit it. That’s fine too.

Good luck today, Ramon. Beware the Cylon Raiders.

Henri the philosophical French cat

Jesus wept

I just got pitched on a mobile app called "eye saw you." Check out the super compelling video below. This one is a must-have.

Month of Microsoft: I am sending back the Windows Phones and Windows computers, but if you want my Xbox you will have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

My final report about spending a month using Microsoft products went up on the Beast this morning. (You can read it here. Bottom line: Great products, some of which I will really miss. The Lenovo W520 powerhouse laptop is highly recommended as a desktop substitute. I really do not want to send it back. Windows 7 is stable and fast, but you knew that. Windows 8 is mind-blowing and is going to shine on tablets. I used it only on a laptop, a Lenovo U300, but saw it on a few tablets and, well, when they come out, I want one. Same for the Arc Touch mouse, which has won design awards, and deservedly so. It's the best mouse I've ever used.

But the real star is the Xbox, and thank God our Xbox doesn't need to be returned; we bought it last year. If you do not have an Xbox, you need to get one. I mean it. Even if you don't play games (I don't) it's a fantastic living room hub. Get the Kinect, and see what the future looks like.

Microsoft has a great opportunity to provide an entire ecosystem where everything works together seamlessly. But for now the parts still feel not well tied together. And there's too much MicroCruft hanging around, old services and products, redundancies, and so forth, that make things too confusing. Microsoft needs a Steve Jobs to come in, take control of everything on the consumer side, and start killing off lots of useless products and building out from a simple core. They need a product dictator, someone with a vision for how to unify everything.

The big challenge Microsoft has (that Apple doesn't) is that Microsoft has to try to achieve all this stuff on the consumer side while also running a huge enterprise business. It may be that you can't really do both. Time will tell, I guess.

One thought I had over the weekend, while walking around wearing my tinfoil hat and talking to myself: What if Microsoft doesn't really care about the consumer space? What if being an also-ran in mobile phones and Internet search is just fine by Microsoft, since it keeps people from noticing that, in the enterprise side, Microsoft not only dominates but is getting stronger? And maybe that's where the real money is going to be made — building out the cloud, handling big data, delivering back-end and front-end services to big corporations, slowly gobbling up workloads that used to run on big iron, chipping away at software makers like Oracle and SAP?

Well I'm sure Microsoft isn't deliberately trying to fail in the consumer space. But the fact that the Borg makes so much money on the enterprise side surely must soften the blow. And it can't hurt that a few highly visible failures probably help keep the DOJ at bay.

Anyway: A big thanks to Microsoft for going along with this. It had been a long time since I used Microsoft products on a day-to-day basis, and I really enjoyed it. I'm really excited about all the stuff that is coming out of Microsoft these days, and I think by this time next year we're all going to be talking about them a lot more.

“I already hated Instagram and the posers who use it, and now I just hate them even more.”

That’s the money quote from my rant on the Apple v. Android “class war,” sparked by Instagram becoming available on Android. It went up on the Daily Beast this morning. You can read it here.

"I already hated Instagram and the posers who use it, and now I just hate them even more."

That's the money quote from my rant on the Apple v. Android "class war," sparked by Instagram becoming available on Android. It went up on the Daily Beast this morning. You can read it here.