From Istanbul To Sand Hill Road

The Science of Immortality

Such a title requires suspension of disbelief to sound credible.  Not in this case.  The video below is from the TED conference, which is arguably the best conference on the planet.  Aubrey de Grey is a biologist who has shown me the most credible scientific arguments so far on whether aging can be prolonged indefinitely.  It is clear, to the point, and inspiring to watch.

The only irony, I must say with respectful poetic license, is that for somebody researching anti-aging, he sure looks like he is pro-aging.  When you look at the image you may think more Dumbledore and Gandalf, but when you click on it you'll realize it's more Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter.

Riya's Journey from Photo Search to Visual Search

I've been following Munjal's account of how Riya changed course from photo search to visual search.  It is  a great read for all internet entrepreneurs, because sooner or later you will have to change course.  That's a fact of life, and easy to say for a VC.  Harder is knowing when to change course and how to do it quickly.  Riya appears to have done the right things to answer both of these questions.  I recommend all entrepreneurs to read the episodes of how this, now well known, startup is changing course.  This is a rare chance to get a glimpse under the hood of how things are done in startups.

More links on the subject can be found on Peter Rip's blog.

Google Got YouTube Cheap

There is a lot out there on the big news of the day, Google acquiring YouTube.  Most imply that Google paid up and that the deal was fairly priced.  I am contrarian on this one.  I think Google got a really good deal.

Compare Google to YouTube.  YouTube does 100M views a day, most of those are through links people put on blogs and send to each other but some of them are search results from YouTube's page.  Actually all views can be considered search results even though what orignated them many not be actual searches.  They serve the result, effectively.  So each view on YouTube is the analog of a search on Google.  What does Google do per day?  Google does a little less than 100M searches per day, see here.  So Google is doubling their daily searches with this acquisition.

And they have the potential to be higher quality searches. They may not be monetized today, but tomorrow they can be, and arguably there are better ways to put ads in video and get much higher CPMs (TV is $10-20 vs. <$1 on the Internet) So clearly video ads are worth more.

And here is the best part in my view.  Google gave up a little more than 1% of their company to get as many 'searches' as they have today with better monetization potential.

That's sounds like a great deal for both sides.  Congrats to all involved.