Juixe Techknow

Has Google lost it’s focus? It sure sounds like when you take into account all the investments that Google has made recently, such as investing in social game developer Zynga, a myriad of wind and solar energy projects, and even in DNA analysis outfit 23andMe. But nothing can be further from web search and a self driving autonomous vehicle. You may ask, what does developing an artificial intelligence for a driverless car have to do with Google’s mission of indexing the world’s information. Another question is why wouldn’t Google leave autonomous terrestrial vehicles to the military, or Ford.

Most Silicon Valley pundits have been predicting that Google next project would be Google Me, a social networking site to compete toe to toe with Facebook. But no one predicted these investments outside of search, ads, and mobile.

Over the past few administrations, federal funding for the National Science Foundation and NASA have been cut while military spending has increased. Maybe Google is the new NASA. They are funding and starting projects usually considered the realm of large federal agencies such as NASA or DARPA. What other areas of scientific research will Google fund or get into next?  Will Google invest in unmanned aerial vehicles, much like the MQ-1 Predator?

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Google was working on a Googlenet artificial intelligence engine and robots powered with the Android platform.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• Email is not the future of UI. I dislike services that use email for data entry or input device.
• Common source of errors, cut and paste!
• Functional specifications are often times as misinterpreted as the Bible.
• I’m a programmer by day, developer by night, and hacker in between.
• Some features are disguised as bugs.
• One man’s feature is another man’s bug.
• Void is my favorite return type.
• Code Commandment: No code shall PrintStackTrace
• Show me your implementation and I’ll tell you about yourself.
• The words “it does not compute” does not compute, they are not in my default dictionary.
• Get your hack on!
• When a developer says, “pretty much working” it does not mean production quality.
• I’m not sure that a software application larger than “Hello, World” can be bug free.
• If there is a giant red ‘Do Not Press’ or ‘Active Dooms Day Device’ button, someone will press it.
• Every design decision should be a conscious choice, not an accidental assumption.
• Will work for intellectual stimulation.
• If you are a User Generated Content site saying you will censor a topic will only inspire your users to find ways around that.
• What’s your default setting for the Ultimate Bitch Mode setting?

Team Dynamics

• Just like how there are no any stupid questions, there are no any stupid ideas.
• In order to get the most out of crowd sourcing you need to source your crowd.
• Look past people’s past.
• If you are going to shot for the stars you best have a rocket ship.
• When the stars align, shoot for them. And if you shooting for the stars you best bring the big guns!
• When shooting for the stars I bring an Klingon Bird of Prey!
• And on the 8th day God said, “Let there be a TPS report.”
• Life is too short to sell yourself short.
• Don’t think in problems. Dream in solutions.
• Never say maybe.
• The next big thing usually starts as a small idea.
• People will always push your buttons, you need to know how o deactivate those buttons.
• I don’t fear being wrong. I fear not being able to recognize when other people are wrong.
• You can’t delete emails once sent, but you can read them before you send them.
• For every great idea there are hundreds of ways to mess it up.
• Show me the monetization.

Product Placement

• Mark Zuckerborg is a geek super evil privacy villain.
• Boing Boing should just sell out to Rupert Murdoch.
• Panda Express’ logo says, “Gourmet Chinese Food.” Really, Gourmet? Chinese?
• American Apparel might file for bankruptcy, maybe China can buy it out and rename it to Chairman Mao Apparel.
• The company Manpower has a very male chauvinist sounding name.
• If only mother nature would have patented all her innovations, we would all be paying royalties to her.
• Why does it cost $30 for Apple’s iPhone earphones? They like $.50 worth of material and $.25 of labor!
• If you Google for love you will find about 1,930,000,000 results (0.23 seconds). At least one of those results is meant for you.
• Google Finance should have a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.
• The cake is a lie. Do no evil is a lie.
• The next version of the iPhone should be called ivePhone after it’s designer Jony Ive.
• Upset that I’ve had to purchase yet another iPhone headset!!! At $30 a pop the white earphone are Apple’s razor blade business!

Resume Writing Tips

• Resume Writing Tip: Use a good phone line for a phone interview.
• Resume Writing Tip: At a minimum candidate should be able to figure out our URL by a) clicking the link on job description b) from my email.
• Resume Writing Tip: The minimum research a candidate needs to do is lookup the company website himself prior to interviewing.
• Resume Writing Tip: Ensure your cover letter or email is in one font, it shouldn’t look like you cut and pasted from somewhere else.
• Resume Writing Tip: I would leave out MS Access 2000 out of technical skills. It’s also not necessary to list HTML, DHTML, and HTML5.
• Resume Writing Tip: Proof read your resume and fix obvious typos, you can’t say you detailed oriented if you have basic spelling errors.

Quote

• I want to put a ding in the universe. – Steve Jobs
• The problem with Google is that Eric Schmidt is creepy. – Daring Fireball
• They [People] want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. – Eric Schmidt
• People aren’t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them. – Eric Schmidt

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Foursquare style check-ins is a feature not a product. Facebook Places has proven that location base check-ins are a feature easily implemented. That said, Foursquare and other location based services have tried to wrap social games and compulsion loops into their products in the form of mayorships and badges to make the check-in process more meaningful. But as a feature, as opposed to a product, checking into a place, restaurant, or business does not scratch any real business itch. I understand that to a brick and mortar business, having an idea of how often your customers are near your business and marketing to them when they are can be beneficial, but if all Foursquare is doing is checking in then users will eventually experience check-in burnout.

Location based check-ins is a feature and to one degree or another you can lock in your location on Facebook Places, Yelp, Google Buzz, Twitter, Gowalla, etc. But aside from running for mayor of my local dollar store and racking up some virtual badges there is little benefit or purpose for the end user. The missing piece of location base services is commerce, making users into customers.

Like most folks, I hate waiting in line at a restaurant. Too often when you are stuck in line you have someone crowding into your personal space, you feel like you are just wasting time standing there waiting to order some food, and worst is when people call in and their order is taken before yours. Wouldn’t it be great if you can use a location base service to indicate that you are near your favorite taqueria and have the ability to order right there using a mobile app? If Foursquare could do this, I wouldn’t mind given them my credit card number, turning me from a free loading user to paying customer.

There a ton of apps on the iTunes app store that use users’ location to find a store or deal nearby. The Groupon app can locate deals nearby. The Macy’s iShop app has a store locator that uses your phone’s location. If McDonald’s or Starbucks had a location base mobile app that allowed me to order from half a block down by charging my card and had my items ready as I walked in, that would add so much more value to the mobile app user, establishment, and location based service.

It comes as a no surprise to technologist that Google would pull the plug on Google Wave, I just didn’t expect it so soon. I also didn’t expect Google to kill it’s Google Nexus One phone. As a user of Google products, I am always apprehensive to use new Google products because they have a track record of just dropping support for products they deemed unsuccessful with little or no notice. Google has been known to buy products like Jaiku and Dodgeball only to kill them after a year. The other products that I have used and Google has killed include Google Notebook, Google Video, and Google Page Creator. This is one reason I would not use any Google product still in beta, which is most of Google’s products, for mission critical applications. Most of Google’s consumer applications are free, such as Google Docs, Google Mail, and Google Search but only because they provide zero customer support. In fact, you have a better change of finding a Google employee or Product Manager through Twitter than you do through their About Us, Contact Us or corporate website. It’s joke that you can’t even find Google customer support page for any of their products even if you use Google Search.

Google prides themselves in hiring really brilliant engineers, bordering savants and the top 5% of MENSA, and it designs products for users just like them. Basically they design for nerds, and the first response you will ever get when asking a question to a technology focused group is RTFM, and this is how Google treats it’s users. Google expects it’s user to comb through Google Groups, do Google Searches, and ask your colleagues via Google Voice because Google does not see as it’s job to help users with Google products, but to create new products and see what users use, and see how they use it, how much they use it, and how they can learn from users behaviors.

So one is left asking, what product will Google kill next? Orkut? Chrome OS? Google Reader? Google Knol?

Blippy is a site that allows you to automatically share the purchases you’ve made and the products you’ve bought with friends and followers. The way Blippy can detect products and services bought is by monitoring the transactions made on a given credit card. Blippy has been around for a while and many of the questions concerning privacy and security have already been asked. Blippy is just the next logical conclusion of all the information we make public on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. With some common sense, extra precautions, and the correct privacy settings, people feel more and more comfortable posting about the products they purchase, the locations they visit, and their private lives including relationship status and political views. Blippy is one of few companies in the social commerce web space and it complements with the strategy at Amazon that I think Amazon should make an offer of no less $100 million dollars to purchase Blippy before it gets snagged up by a competitor. The social commerce space has just been validated by Apple Ping. Apple Ping complements Apple iTunes by being a social commerce community around music and possibly other entertainment media such as movies and books. Similarly, Blippy can complement Amazon by being a social commerce engine for the products sold by the online retailer giant. Blippy also compliments the large amount of product reviews Amazon has amassed and can easily be turned on for all the users accounts at Amazon with little effort, because essentially every Amazon user has already entered one or more credit card.

More and more companies will have niche social applications around their core business, right now news networks to car companies and everything between are using social sites like Twitter and Facebook, but they will soon ask for more and more control over users data than these sites provide. Instead of being a Twitter or Facebook client to post likes and status updates, large ecommerce sites will develop their own social niche sites around their core competencies, like Apple Ping. Just like Apple has released Ping as a social engine for discovering new music, Amazon needs a similar product to compliment it’s online retail business and it’s social media strategy. The social graph provided by Blippy augments well around the data Amazon already has, such as previous purchases, reviews, and the information to generate recommendations. All things being equal, Blippy adds more value to Amazon which sells product than to Facebook that which impressions.

I’m not an insider, investor, or friends with anyone at Blippy or Amazon, but I just feel that these two businesses compliment each other very well and can take social networking to the next level into social ecommerce. When ecommerce goes social and viral it will mark the beginning of ecommerce 2.0.

I’m not too big into all this social media networking virality stuff, but I been known to occasionally use The Twitter. Here are some snippets from conversations that I’ve had on The Twitter. If you like to say hi, reply the reply button at juixe and techknow.

V-Day Victory!!!

• @techknow: I like the day after Valentine’s Day 50% more than V-Day, that is because I can get all the chocolate covered marshmallow for 50% off.
• @ladyfox14: Hahaha, just make sure you don’t get a stomach ache. It sounds like Halloween all over again.
• @techknow: LOL I did get a tummy ache eating all that chocolate… I overdosed on marshmallows.

In the this conversation, I think of the meaning of life and everything in terms of software development life cycle and software process best practices.

Life as Beta

• @juixe: Life is a beta release.
• @gkmaestro: Then is death the Product release ??? :P
• @juixe: LOL it depends on your views of the after life, death + rebirth might mean upgrade.
• @gkmaestro: ha ha perhaps, then Patches n hot fixes might be moments of happiness in ur life :-)
• @juixe: as a developer, and user, no hot fix has ever made me happy. ;)

Here I must have had in mind some story about when programmers would get royalty on the code the write. If you get paid on the usability f an application, imagine getting dinged $10 per bug.

Bug Bounty

• @techknow: Can you imagine only getting paid if there is no bugs in your code?
• @mcory1: I’d be panhandling if that were the case.
• @techknow: LOL I often think what I would do if I wasn’t doing what I do, and panhandling is an option.

I try not to get political on my timeline but it’s been hard to not tweet about what is happening in the world, fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, earthquake all over the Western Hemisphere, financial collapse in the develop world, world recession, etc. And yet, what technology pundits focus on is what laptop brand world leaders are using!

Economic Fail Because We Focus on the Wrong Thing

• @cote: Watching Papandreou on the Zakaria GPS bit. The Greece PM has a MacBookPro on his desk, in background. Wonder if that’s his.
• @techknow: Greece might default on billions, people protesting in the streets and all you notice is the Mac. LOL. I wonder if he has an iPad?
• @cote: Yeah, a bit too micro, I guess ;)

Again, I try to not get political but when someone makes a comparison of Facebook to a country I had a little something to say, unfortunately it didn’t all fit into the 140 character limit on Twitter.

Facebook Nation

• @ArabCrunch: If facebook was a country it would be the 3ed biggest country in the world.
• @techknow: and it would be a dictatorship not unlike North Korea, where the country is built in labor camps which look like Farm Ville re-education camps and your data can’t travel outside the country without permission of the Fhurer Zuck.