Dim-sum-wis-dum

Is there a better way to delineate happiness than this? From the Federal Palace Restaurant in Hong Kong.

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You don’t have to figure out life all by yourself if you tap
http://life.alltop.com/

How Ford got my trust on a comparison to Toyota Prius; @chrisbrogan what do you think?

I love Chris Brogan's blog. He goes into how businesses can improve their use of Internet-based media, among other techniques they can use to improve their standing in the community and our trust in them. His book "Trust Agents" goes into how companies are doing just that.

Here we have a new trust agent to study. His name is Steve Kovak and he runs the teams at Ford that build safety features into their cars like radar systems and airbags and the like.

Of course, what did I do? I told him quickly I bought a Toyota Prius, a car I really love.

Now with some company representatives that would have gotten a snide remark. Look at how Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, publicly berated an employee for using an iPhone at this week's company meeting.

In fact, that's what I sort of expected from a Ford employee. Except you should look at how he did react. 

What did he do? He admitted he bought one too. Then he promptly praised it. Then he explained how his product was different. He also made sure to mention his company's advantages (that they've been doing this longer). All three got me to trust him. Well, as much as I'd trust anyone pitching a product.

But in the first video you get why he did that: he thinks these features are important, no matter what car you buy next. He's passionate and he has the data to show that these features will save lives.

It's why I talk with so many people who use other hosting companies and why I keep up to date on what they are doing better than Rackspace, who I work for. This is how you win trust and you turn people from Toyota fans into Ford fans.

I wonder what Chris Brogan thinks about how Steve Kovak handled himself?

Domain Squatters are bastards who now take startup equity as payment. Argh.

Why Google won't create the next Twitter or Facebook or Posterous

TechCrunch just published an interview Mike Arrington did with Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, and one quote there caught my eye:

We don't want to work on problems that only affect a small number of people.

Ahh, that seals it, Google is the new Microsoft. See, when I worked at Microsoft I heard this kind of horsepucky all the time too. The executives there would only really get behind things that looked like they were billion dollar businesses and let me know it early and often. I remember talking with Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, about this too. He wanted HP and Atari to market his newfangled personal computer. They told him to pound sand, which is a good thing because otherwise we wouldn't have Apple today.

The thing is, innovations usually come about when it doesn't seem like anyone is interested. Let's go back to 2006 when Twitter was first released. I remember showing it to other people. They thought it was the lamest thing they'd ever seen. See, no one was sitting around and saying "I have a problem, I need a way to blog but I want to be limited to only 140 characters."

Another way to look at this? Henry Ford's quote:

"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said 'a faster horse.'"

See, things like Twitter are like avalanches. Big companies love to create an avalanche. After all, that's how you get on the front page of Wall Street Journal and find new ways to grow, etc.

The thing is to create an avalanche you've gotta make it snow one snowflake at a time. Big companies don't get that part of the equation. Why? Creating snowflakes is SMALL and isn't interesting to multi-billion-dollar companies.

It's why I travel the world. I'm looking for who is making snowflakes. I'll leave the avalanche business for the big boys.

Got a snowflake? Let me know.

Oh, and Eric, have fun looking for the big problems. I bet that some kid in a garage in Israel or Colorado will get there first.

Real-time social wars: where's the money?

So, I've been studying Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, and Google's Wave and other things for some time.

Last week I also visited Yelp, which is growing at a million new users PER MONTH.

Twitter is growing at about 4 times that rate. Facebook is growing about 2x that rate.

So, these are the big players. It's clear that they are getting massive adoption. I don't see that slowing down or stopping for any of these players.

But where's the money? To figure that out you've got to see where they are coming from. What is their usage model?

Facebook's? They built the rolodex of the web. They have the white pages. Sorry, Yahoo, you are toast there. TechCrunch reports that Yahoo wants to be the place people go for social search. That's done. Facebook is it. Strength? They are the white pages. Weakness? Not much interaction with brands and businesses.

Google's? That's where you go to search for most things. Especially businesses. Looking for Sushi in Palo Alto? You go to Google. I also go there to find people's emails, blogs, and Twitter accounts, but they don't have that locked up. Facebook, for most people, does a better job of finding blogs, emails, and phone numbers. Strength? Mobile integration thanks to iPhone. Breadth of usage, thanks to all the dozens of things Google does, from Picasa to Google Maps. Business listing and location is best of breed, but... Weakness? Google doesn't get social software. It just doesn't know what to do to make a Twitter. They bought Dodgeball and Jaiku and then squandered those purchases. The founders aren't really very social people and the culture there is very engineering focused, but not very human focused. Will they overcome that? My bet is no, but they will keep trying.

Twitter's? They understand how to get people to participate in public, which makes search possible. Plus simplicity and openness of their APIs make brands and celebrities hot and bothered (they tell me that Facebook and Google are too complicated to use in comparison). Strength? Publicness and engagement of both developers and celebrities and brands. Weakness? They don't have a good list of businesses like Google does and they don't have a lot of hooks that keep users engaged like Facebook does. They don't iterate fast enough to take advantage of new learning and they are -- so far -- squandering their lead in real time search (it has actually gotten worse over the past year instead of better). New APIs like retweeting and location have been announced, but not really baked into the service yet.

Yelp's? In cities where Yelp is getting adoption, they've found the best business integration of all of these and businesses are now paying to "offer" their users things to get new customers into the door. This is where the real money is and over the next year you'll see Facebook and Google figure this out. Strength? Best of breed business recommendations and best mobile experience for finding local businesses. Weakness? They don't have the general engagement that Facebook and Twitter have. Also, Yelp is only strong in a few cities and is in the midst of a landgrab that could be stunted if Facebook or Google ship a local business service soon.

So, where's the money?

Twitter seems to have moved away from the idea of competing directly with Facebook and Google over a business listing service. That's a shame, because Twitter has the potential to be a powerful business interaction service. We were just in a sushi restaurant in Boulder, CO, which is already using Twitter in an interesting way (we'll have a video about that up in the next week or so) but will you search for sushi in Boulder like this on Twitter? No. You might praise or complain about the restaurant on Twitter, though, and Twitter is moving to charging businesses for more features like group management tools (at Rackspace we use TweetRiver, other businesses use CoTweet, but I can imagine a world where Twitter does these features themselves, or acquires one of these companies and charges for extra features like these) or tools that give more insights into what's happening in the marketplace. Or, look at services like TweetMeme that are tracking retweeting behavior. That will provide an early warning system into Twitter for many businesses in the future.

I think Twitter is going to miss the real money, though. The real money is going to come out of those business listings. Yelp has it figured out. Facebook is stuck inside its walled garden and is doing everything possible to figure out how to become more public, so it can turn on search features. Even today Facebook hired "Mr. Open" David Recordon. If I were Mark Zuckerberg I would rebrand the public part of Facebook as "Facebook Public" and make it very cool to publish there. For the past few days I've been using the not-released-yet Facebook 3.0 iPhone app. You can see this "publicness" all over the place. Zuckerberg understands why Twitter got businesses hot and bothered and is doing everything possible to get his 300 million users there before Twitter figures out it needs to do a business listing and search service.

How will Facebook collect the cash? Well, go to Google and let's do that sushi search for Boulder, Colorado again. Did you see how that list works? Facebook needs that list. Twitter isn't even close. But what's missing? PEOPLE! Imagine if this list, when it's brought to you by Facebook, shows that #1 has been liked by 14 of your friends? Businesses get that for free. But what don't they get for free?

Yelp's "offers." Businesses PAY to "offer" things to customers to try to move up the list.

So, if you're the #3 business on the list, you might say "bring your iPhone in and you'll get free beer." Doing that will cost you money, both in the free beer and the advertising you'll pay Facebook or Google or Yelp to try to move up the list.

Google has the list. It doesn't have the humans or the offers. Yelp has the offers but doesn't have hundreds of millions of people. Facebook has hundreds of millions of people and the "like" system, but not the offers.

So, who will get there first? Now you understand the battlefield. Who will win the war?

My bet is on Facebook. Why? Well, they just hired the guy who built Gmail and the monetization system at Google.

Beautiful Day

What if Henri Cartier-Bresson used Google Maps instead of a Leica?

Technology is not dead. It is exponential.

Electricity greatly improved our quality of life. But I'm not going to get excited about buying a basket of utility companies. Same for the Internet. Can't live without it, but can't live with it (in my portfolio).

--James Altucher via online.wsj.com

James Altucher will eat his words. To count tech out at a local minima is absolutely absurd. Fred Wilson is right: Tech is alive and well. But there are deeper reasons than what Fred Wilson mentions.

Other than computing technology, what field can boast exponential gains? Green tech is much talked about of late, but what are the rates of improvement for battery power, photovoltaics, and clean energy? Miniscule, in the single digit percentages. We can only wish for exponential advancement in almost all fields of technology. It's just not a reality.

With computers, we are blessed by the exponential curve of Moore's Law. Ray Kurzweil plots this exponential curve:

Just look at the innovation that has happened in 40 years. Bill Gates is famed to have said in 1998: "If General Motors had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty five dollar cars that got 1000 miles/gallon."

Instead, GM has gone bankrupt, and now we have one-inch-thick netbooks that we can buy for less than $300 that provide 300,000x the computing power of the ENIAC, which cost $500,000 and filled a very large room in 1946!

The exponential march of software begets the exponential march of software capability. Software has gone more and more high level. Instead of slinging machine-readable bits, we started writing assembly. Then C/C++. Then Java and Perl. Now, Ruby and Python -- each step is less efficient for the computer but more efficient for the human. In 1946 you needed a PhD to even get near a computer, and only now are we seeing the rise of the truly interconnected, paperback computer that costs next to nothing but is indispensible for everyday life -- not just for an educated elite but for every person on the planet.

The advent of the Gutenberg printing press and modern mass-produced book changed society at its core -- at its basic fabric, humanity as a whole became more educated, more equal, more enlightened, and far more human, rising out of the depths of ignorance. The rise of cheap, ubiquitous books formed the modern world. But now we have a book that is infinite in length and unbounded in capability to teach, share, educate, and think.

So we've got an exponential engine of innovation, and it is transforming society before our eyes. And we're at a such a local minima where the WSJ is calling the whole engine dead.

We're still only beginning this mad experiment of infinite and ubiquitous computing. The greatest, most earth shattering software has yet to be created. On the upslope of an exponential, you'd be insane not to go long.

Apartments on the peninsula really run the gamut.

I have been apartment-hunting this week and have seen everything from super tidy crate-and-barrel square-box apartments in Foster City to cramped but warm/friendly communal spaces in Bernal Heights.  

One house I saw near downtown San Mateo really took the cake when it comes to oddball yet strangely fascinating.  It was a 5-room house with a huge backyard that included a number of fruit trees (avocado, fig, apricot, fuji apple, lemon, orange) and other fruit-bearing plants (10 different kinds of tomatoes, a blackberry bush), a full garden with corn, squash and the like, and a fire pit around which they "conduct Buddhist ceremonies." They plucked a ripe fig off their tree for me to take home.

The house is populated by "hippies who shower," though I had to raise my eyebrow a bit at that claim.  Here's an excerpt from the intro e-mail one of the girls wrote to me (yes, she included the scrolly header up top)...
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Hi Stephanie,   We met briefly last evening when you came over to see the house, and I regret not being able to talk to you a bit, and get to know you.     A little about us:  M****** and I are both healers and we work day jobs, M****** builds magical healing tools, and I do intuitive readings.  M****** works at a coffee shop, and I work at a local furniture store.  We are both masseuses and energy healers as well, and we are pretty free about offering help to people in our lives if they need it.  I love nature, painting, dancing, and singing, and M****** plays guitar.  M****** teaches [Renaissance] swordfighting in the backyard, and I teach channeling classes out of the house sometimes.  Generally, authentic, deeply compassionate, honest people are a match for us.  Creative, nature loving, spiritually interested people are especially welcome.   Warnings: Sometimes the house gets messy, and stays that way for a week until someone has the energy to clean it.  A couple of our housemates smoke, but they do it outside.  And, there is cat litter.  'nuf said.   A****

Obama is a badass. There, I said it.