Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: Google (Page 4 of 6)

They May Not Be Evil, But Their Tagline Is Hellish

Google has finally done it — come up with a tagline. No, I’m not talking about the motto (“Don’t Be Evil”), or the mission statement (“to organize the world’s information”). As Danny Sullivan reports today on his blog, SearchEngineLand, the company has gone and uncorked the phrase to end all phrases. Saywhat Okay, are you ready for it? Are you sure? Okay, drumroll, it’s…..“Search, Ads & Apps” !! No, I’m not kidding — that is it, friends. I know this really tugs on your emotions. But, please, try to control yourselves … from tearing up with brand euphoria.

I’ve always maintained that writing a tagline is like writing poetry. It may be the highest form of advertising writing there is. (And Google, we’re told, is an advertising company!) But this one, I’m sorry. This is no tagline — it’s a three-part laundry list. Okay, Google, great — you do all these things. Got it. Three of ’em. Check. Like we didn’t know that?

This is like Coke saying “Water, Sugar, and Fizz.” Or Nike: “Soles, Laces, and Uppers.” How about Apple? “Pixels, Pods, and Jobs.”

Got any more? Hey, this is fun….play along.

Minnebar Rocked!

Excellent speakers and panels, and a great crowd yesterday at our local BarCamp event. More proof that we have a vibrant tech community here in Minnesota! Major expertise, lots of energized developers and entrepreneurs, and some exciting, budding startups in the works.
Also more proof that online and offline community can be mashed up successfully…. Minnebarlogo

It was great to see a top VC firm in state, Split Rock Partners, as one of seven sponsors of Minnebar. I told partner Michael Gorman he blended right in wearing a tee shirt and shorts — love that! 🙂 And I saw him in the Ruby on Rails session that I also attended. (We have an outstanding group of “RonR” developers here, by the way.)

The turnout for the GetGoMN session was fantastic, with Scott Littman and George Reese telling the story behind the recently launched site to support entrepreneurs. Getgologo175w Lots of great questions and input from several people. I’m convinced that promoting Minnebar on the GetGo site contributed to the record attendance. The biggest turnout yet for a BarCamp in this country! Yeeeee-haww!!!

Minnebarrooftop_2 Photo: Beers on the roof with event sponsors John Roberts (left) and Harold Slawik (right) of New Counsel plc, and Bill McLeslie of ipHouse. The event wi-fi was awesome — Bill hooked us up with 7 megabits of bandwidth. Gorgeous day in the Twin Cities — the high hit 83 F!

Minnebarintraining My favorite photo at the event: We start ’em young here in MN. Matt Bauer, ace developer just recruited to MotionBox in NYC (but he didn’t have to move!), shows a developer-in-training how it’s done. Matt had just finished his session on Adobe Flex.

Lots more photos on my Minnebar Flickr set. Other photo sets are linked on the Minnebar site. I suspect you’ll also be able to read some more about the event at the Star-Tribune’s Vita.MN site and in the Pioneer Press, because they both had people covering the event.

Coolest thing I learned at Minnebar? I met a former Google employee (an early employee), who moved back here from the Valley his wife, who was also a Google employee, and he’s about to launch a cool new web app online. Stay tuned….

Kudos again to the three hardest working event organizers on the planet (volunteers, yet!): Dan Grigsby, Ben Edwards, and Luke Francl…and, especially, a great big thank you to the sponsors. This all-day event is an annual thing, but evening events are held throughout the year, too. So, watch for the next “MinneDemo” and come learn and celebrate Minnesota innovation with us!

Shut Down by Google, They’re Baack – with ‘iReader’

A Minneapolis-based tech firm, almost put out of business by Google last year with for scraping its site with its ePrecis technology, is back today as Syntactica. [As Syntactica president Henry Neils said to me last week, “Like they don’t scrape everything out there.” Hah!] Under this new company name, they’re introducing the iReader Web Previewer tool. Ireaderlogo So, take that Google! It previews the content of a web link without clicking on it — by studying the language, the linguistics, behind it. Pretty heavy stuff, but this team of developers has been working on perfecting this technology for years, so this is certainly no upstart. Perhaps they’re onto an application of it now that will stick, and that the powers-that-be will allow to happen. User acceptance will tell the story, of course, and that’s why reaction in the blogosphere will be big for these guys. Smartly, they’re opening the technology up via open source XML web services, I learned last week.

Ireadernytimes

Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web has already done a great post called iReader Previews The Content Behind Links. It tells the story well, so I won’t repeat it. It’s also worth taking a look back to see what he blogged about ePrecis in October 2005 on ZDnet, calling it “next generation search.” [By the way, the old ePrecis site, which, interestingly, still shows up in a Google search(!), won’t seem to come up today. Must be getting hit too hard.]

The beta they just launched is an easy plug-in install for IE or Firefox (Mac or PC), and it’s sure to create a lot of conversation out there. Try it out on some of your favorite news sites, like the NY Times, CNN, MSN, etc. Seems to work great on the story links down near the bottom of the NY Times page, for example, where stories are grouped into categories. Let me know what you think. Or better yet, tell the company: they’re about to launch their blog, too, where you can do that.

Note one VERY KEY thing: you can turn the iReader plug-in on or off! So, if it’s bothersome to have these little “preview windows” showing up for you on some sites, just right-click your mouse to toggle it on and off. Not sure how you do it on a Mac yet, though, in Firefox. I think they’re adding some notes on the downloading page…

[Disclaimer: I have a consulting relationship with Syntactica.]

Minne-GOOG?

Google has Minnesota in its future — or certainly should. So says my neighbor Ed Kohler, who blogs at TechnologyEvangelist.com. (He’s literally just a couple miles from my place in Bloomington, MN.) He just put up a spectacular pitch for why Google should buy the soon-to-close Ford plant property in St. Paul for a data center site. Ed, you are the man! Talk about a compelling case. Wow, would this ever put Minnesota back on the map as a major computing center. [It really was once. Seriously.]

Minnegoog_1

The University of Minnesota even brought the “Gopher” search and retrieval protocol to the Internet in 1991. How many of you remember that? I’ll bet Larry, Sergey, and Eric do…

Other states are, of course, all over Google to locate facilities inside their borders. But we can surely make a better case than North Carolina, with all the recent flap going on there regarding the outrageous tax incentives secretly offered to Google. We wouldn’t need to bribe them — we actually have something they could really, really want.

Last year, Larry Page threw a bone to Ann Arbor, Michigan — where he went to undergraduate school — by opening an ad sales office there. I learned about that when I discovered the Ann Arbor SPARK blog suddenly started running me as a “guest blog” one day last year. [Thanks, guys. Never even been there, but happy to help!] Landing that Google office was a coup — well, a morale booster, anyway — for a state that’s in dire need to create jobs to get their economy back on track. But it’s small potatoes compared to what a data center on this jewel of a property on the Mississippi could mean in economic terms, for both Google and Minnesota.

This piece of land is literally a one of a kind. Ford’s been there 83 years! Henry himself purportedly chose the place. I mean, Google — your own hydroelectric dam??? The possibilities for this property, to so many varied interests, are mind boggling. One of those eventual outcomes, of course, would be more high-rise condos. But who the hell wants those? The neighboring residents of Highland Park surely don’t! The battles between forces opposing potential developers for that property are just starting to heat up. And, unfortunately, that could drag on for years. How nice it would be for a big monster player like Google to come in and shorten that process considerably… 🙂

Why, as Ed so eloquently argues, shouldn’t Google take a serious look at the state that brought us such Internet legends as Gopher and the Allaire brothers? [In fact, I’m gonna ping my friends Jeremy and JJ right now and send them this link, so they can weigh in on this, too!]

So, the gauntlet has been tossed. Are you listening, Governor Pawlenty? …and whoever else is actually taking leadership in this state for real economic development. Ed’s laid out the case for the “Minne-GOOG” data center. Now let’s see if our guys have the cajones to pick up the ball and take a run at selling it to Larry, Sergey, and Eric….

Go, Gopher(s)!

Flyspy: ‘Consumers Take Charge’

That’s how conference producer and host Phil Wolf, CEO of PhocusWright, described this next session at the the Travel 2.0 conference. He said it was one of the sessions he was most looking forward to, and also said it could be called “reverse yield management,” which I found fascinating. No doubt about it, Web 2.0 and Travel 2.0 fans, airfare search has entered a whole new phase.

One of the main reasons I trekked to Hollywood this week to cover the conference was to hear Minneapolis-based Flyspy do its first sneak-peak pitch — a limited coming-out, as it were, within its chosen vertical. Whatisflyspyslide Robert Metcalf, the founder and visionary behind chart-based Flyspy, was invited a few weeks ago by the event’s producers to introduce his service at this high-profile annual gathering of online and traditional travel execs. He told me he had to think about it for a while, but ultimately decided, even though it’s still early (the site isn’t quite in full beta release yet), that it was just too tempting an opportunity to miss — to get the kind of reaction he could get here.

Robert Metcalf is a very experienced software architect and developer of complex web sites. [He’s shown on the right in the onstage photo.] He describes Flyspy, which he’s been planning and developing very quietly for almost three years now, as the hardest problem he’s ever tackled. “The way airfare data works, it’s just a very, very complex system. When I got into it, I couldn’t believe it.” But now he feels all the hard work is paying off. He describes Flyspy as an “intelligent, at-a-glance airfare search engine.” [See sample Flyspy chart, which illustrates the frequent peaks and valleys of airline pricing, and just how volatile certain routes can be.] He said his main benefit is a “dramatic reduction in fare search time” because of his unique charting approach. The site provides actual, real-time flight data, not historical or predictive data as two other well-funded startups do (and to whom he says he’s often erroneously compared). That would be FareCompare and Farecast, respectively — firms that were also invited to speak in this session (though mysteriously the latter didn’t show). Another key difference I learned with these two sites compared to Flyspy: you can’t actually book a ticket at either.

Though in limited alpha mode, Flyspy has already been discovered and reported on this year by TechCrunch, Wired.com, and Fast Company, and others, and I’ve written about it here previously myself. “It just seems to resonate with people,” says Robert. You can find links to previous coverage at Flypsy’s “About” page.

Flyspyslide1

Robert says that Flyspy’s approach provides “market clarity and market transparency,” resulting in “high customer confidence.” What he’s learned from a significant amount of feedback he’s already received from his site’s users is that searching and booking on Flyspy eliminates buyer’s remorse. “We allow the consumer to really understand the market for trips they’re planning and their various options. And that results in a positive transaction instead of a negative one.” In other words, it takes away that nagging, uncertain feeling we’ve all had: “If only I’d had more time to search, I know I could’ve found a better fare.” Time is the valuable commodity today, and Flyspy addresses that consumer need head-on, he says.

Flyspyslide2

Flyspy’s Value Proposition
In his presentation, Metcalf said decision-making time is much faster and search much simpler with Flyspy than with all the other sites — whether you’re comparing to the old-line “Travel 1.0” sites (often called The Big Three), the airline sites themselves, or the newer so-called Travel 1.5 “meta search” sites. I guess that makes Flyspy a genuine Travel 2.0-era search site. Metcalf said Flyspy requires only one search, not many, to get the full picture — which is a major time differential. The number of data points on one of his charts would require 240 searches elsewhere. And Flyspy has the “most Google-like interface” of all the airfare search sites, he says. It’s really dead simple for the consumer.

Flyspyslide3

Partners Lining Up Before Launch
Toward the end of his talk, Metcalf took the opportunity to announce that Flyspy has several partnerships in place, even before the company officially launches. Well, he didn’t actually name who they are — just hinted broadly. These strategic relationships include:

1) A leading business magazine, where Flyspy will be a regular feature in the travel section of their web site
2) A frequent flyer web site with 15 million page views/month
3) A leading blog platform with 50,000 blogs and 18 million visitors/month
4) A leading online CRM solution with 500,000 users, where Flyspy will be the sole travel partner
5) A major daily newspaper (circulation 600,000) wherein Flyspy charts will be featured weekly
6) An industry publication with a monthly circulation of 80,000

After this session, I grabbed a shot of airline pricing transparency expert Nelson Granados (left) with Robert Metcalf. Nelson is an associate professor at Pepperdine University, where Flyspy is a case study this semester in two of his MBA classes. He previously held a similar position at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, and has also worked for Northwest Airlines.

Nelsonrob_1

In my interview with Robert Metcalf at lunch following the session, I learned he was approached at the conference by several firms that are interested in licensing Flyspy’s data, and also by at least one major, brand-name site that would like to feature Flyspy as its exclusive airfare search partner. “I’m very glad I came to the event,” he said. “I met a lot of great contacts and intend to follow up.”

Watch for another post soon recapping this high-energy conference. As I learned here, travel is the world’s largest industry. But the latest iteration of the Internet seems to be breathing new fire into it…

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