From Istanbul To Sand Hill Road

How To Buy a New Playstation 3 for $350

I just saw this web site that helps you get brand name products cheap on Ebay.

It's called AuctionIntelligence, and it's a great idea.

You type in the keywords you are looking for, such as 'Playstation' and it searches Ebay on all the auctions with the misspelt versions of the keywords. If he keyword is wrong (i.e. palystation) then nobody can find the auction, ergo fewer bids and lower prices. I tried it, it works.

It's a very clever idea and a must for cheap bas..rds.

I wonder what other such ideas are there that test the limits of search technologies.

The Ultimate Empowerment of The Consumer

When people talk about "empowering the consumer" they are usually talking about the Internet enabling something that was previously too hard or too expensive.  Publishing a newspaper on a blog, or a book on Lulu.com are two good examples.  However, the empowerment I had in mind for this post is a slightly different kind.

I am talking about ways for you to isolate human epithelial amniotic stem cells from the placenta all in the comfort of your own home.  Am I kidding?  Absolutely not.  Read this marvelous post by my friend Attila Csordas, claiming that " isolating stem cells from the placenta is not more difficult than making a steak, and with proper preparation, investment and timing you can do it even at home..."

Welcome to open source science, welcome to do it yourself biology.

Welcome to the ultimate empowerment.  If you read the the instructions in Attila's post, you can see that they are not impossible, but more importantly, each step is well documented with links into very useful information about each step.  The know-how is out there for all to learn.  And there will be a lot more of it coming.

Use your imagination here, and think what that could mean for the future.  With so much information on the Internet and such ready access to scientific data, what Attila wrote about could very well be commonplace in 5-10 years.  This is a world where people could be "playing around" with their own biology.  I see two big impacts right away.

First, tinkering is the best way to invent things, and this would really push the envelope in scientific and practical discovery.  Second, if you think governments are having a hard time figuring out the laws to govern file sharing, let's see how they'll deal with "amateur genetic engineering".  This will be a huge issue.  Imagine people coming up with "user generated biotechnology".  Much better than the corporate biotechnology where its one drug fits all.  The tools for it are getting cheaper and cheaper.  There was a time woodworking tools were too expensive, there was a time where computing resources were too expensive, they are not anymore.  Why can't the same cost curve apply to biotech tools?  I can see it happening. 

One final word on Attila's post.  The concept of placentophagy.  Now that's a word you won't read on Guy Kawasaki's blog.  It's the "act of mammals eating the placenta of their young after birth".  Apparently, it has all sorts of good effects on the body.  Now, this blog has talked about many strange biological things.  I wrote about a bat eating centipede, I put a video of an octopus hunting a shark, but nothing is weirder and more disturbing than that picture of a goat eating its own placenta.  The animal is a herbivore and it's eating meat for God's sake.  That is just pure horror.

Placentophagy...I'll paypal five bucks to whoever can use the word in a sentence in a creative way.  Here is mine: "What was the name of that French restaurant that closed a week after it opened, wasn't it Lé Placentophagié?"

Last Impressions from Macworld

One of the perks of being a speaker at Macworld is that you get to walk around the show for free.  Half an hour before my panel, at about 1:30pm, I did just that.  There was a sea of people in the Apple booth watching the iPhone demo, taking pictures of the iPhone product.  Does this not impress you?  Let me rephrase.

The conference started on a Tuesday.  It is now not the first, not the second but the fourth day of the conference.  It's a Friday.  It's a Friday afternoon.  Anybody taking a flight anywhere far is long gone.  It's 1:30 and the conference is over at 3:00pm.  But still.  There was a sea of people in the Apple booth watching the iPhone demo, taking pictures of the iPhone product. 

The Apple iPhone and the Power Of Design

Yesterday this time, I was sitting in the audience listening to Steve Jobs.  A day later, I've had some time to think about what I really liked about the Apple iPhone.  I think the best innovation, out of many great ones, is how they've solved the problem of web browsing on a handheld device.  What so many others have tried to solve with technology, they've solved with user interface design.  It's one of the finest uses of design as a serious competitive weapon.

The problem statement is as follows:  The web experience on handheld devices is awful.  It really is.  People are scared to surf the web on a handheld.

The causes of the problem are, in order of severity: 1) Small screen size 2) Lack of a powerful browser that can run common internet plugins such as Flash, ActiveX, toolbars etc. 3) Low bandwidth.

VC's have seen a plethora of attempts to solve this problem, most of which are technology solutions.  In the case of video, a number of companies are trying to transcode the content so that it can play on the dumbed down players on the handset.  In the case of text a number of companies are trying to take the web content, chop it into snippets and send them to the small screen.  Some are trying to glean the headlines and put them in text form so that they are viewable.  There is a whole ecosystem of companies that big web sites hired to reformat their content into the WAP page.  These WAP pages look like the Internet of 1994.  None of these technologies work well.

Enter Apple.  First, they wait until EDGE and 3G is imminent and solve problem 3, low bandwidth.  Secondly, the reality distortion zone, makes Apple put OS X on the iPhone.  That solves problem 2.  Whatever file format that works on your MAC (or PC) now works on your phone.  No need for the "lite" versions of technologies.  You have a uniform browsing experience.  This is already huge.

Then comes the two main design innovations.  First, make the screen bigger by eliminating the keyboard, that's phenomenal.  Second, put the killer UI where a "double-tap" blows up the part of the web page you are reading.  You can also do the "pinch move" and blow up sections you need and go back and forth.  This is the design solution, it is elegant, and looks like it works.  All of the transcoding, reformatting, wapping and all that technological gunk is blown away as if they were made of dust.  This is the power of design.  What an army of technologists couldn't solve by technology, Apple solved by design.

There is a saying that the D-schools (design schools) are the new B-schools.  I don't know if that's true, but the world should be watchful of companies whose expertise is good design, companies like, Stone Yamashita Partners which has design expertise at the same caliber as Apple.

Apple iPhone is Here. Watch out Palm & Blackberry

I had the pleasure of seeing Steve Jobs' Keynote at Macworld, and in one word it was inspiring.  Engadget has great screenshots and basics of the product, so I will get straight into what's surprising about it.

1. It runs Mac OS X.  The full operating system.  No more dumbed down applications.  True desktop quality applications are possible.  No more watered down apps.

2. Only one button on the front.  Instead you have a very highly accurate touchscreen.  Very well designed.  Use your finger to scroll, pinch and let go to zoom into images and web pages.

3. Apple is not an MVNO.  They do what they do best, and that's making great products.  Cingular is their partner and the service

4. GSM+EDGE+ WiFi  No CDMA, sorry Qualcomm.  Automatically senses where you have WiFi and where you have EDGE and switches seamlessly

5. Full iPod capability.  13.5inch screen.  Again a phenomenal user interface.

6. Five hour battery life (talk time and internet access).  This ends the power issue for cellphones.

7. Full browser.  None of this WAP stuff anymore.  If this is successful, all businesses that depend on WAP to succeed are in peril.  How do you see full web pages in a small screen.  Well that's Apple's magic.  Use your fingers to blow up the part of the web site you want to see.

8. The only negative...$499 price tag.   Add a $199 iPod to a $299 Smartphone and you get the iPhone.  On the expensive end of the spectrum, but it's worth it.

They've redefined the phone.  I continue the standing ovation we gave Apple, its employees, and their families here on this blog.

The Interactive TV Promise

Has largely been a broken promise.  While the TV vendors and cable companies pondered how to make TV interactive, two very interactive devices found a way to get near the TV.  These devices are your handset and laptop. Broadband and wifi brought the laptop near the TV and even brought TV into the laptop.  Color screens, EDGE and 3G made the handset more like a TV.

This is what I was thinking of when I read Om Malik's article on the Slingcather.  The one step that's missing for the laptop to take over the TV is a connection from it to the TV.  I used to do this wih powerline home networking coupled with a $50 media player software on my Playstation.  Now large LCD TV's have VGA inputs that do the same, and I believe that is the way to make the TV truly interactive.  Plug your laptop to it and have your TV become your laptop.  One better may be a "internet-ready" TV with WiFi and a browser though the cumbersome remote (a poor man's keyboard) may kill it.  Innovation is needed there.

So this is what I will be looking for at the CES show next week.  Here are the questions on my mind:
- How many TV's are sold with VGA inputs?
- When are Internet ready TV's coming out, when will they hit volume?
- When will we see innovation (a la Hillcrest) in remote controls?

If there are good and credible answer to these questions, then we have the answer to how IPTV will come to our living rooms.  No need for carriers, no need for Set Top Boxes, no need for DSL lines coming to the living room, no need for specialized boxes of any sort.  Empowering the consumer is a key theme of the web 2.0.  It will certainly be a theme for the Living Room 2.0. 

The "$100 Dollar Laptop" Project Launches

The proper name of the project is the One Laptop Per Child, OLPC, project.  It is an ambitious project but one that could be hugely impactful to the well being of the planet.  I've mentioned it on this blog a year ago in a related article.  The news say that it could be as early as mid 2007 when the first group of children get it.  The father of the project, Nicholas Negroponte, says, "it's not a laptop project, it is an education project".  And so right he is.

What I want to underline is that the laptop is not a laptop.  Not for the children who use it.  It is their TV, it is their phone, it is their entertainment machine and it is their access to the Internet.  It is probably the biggest equalizer they'll get relative to children in developed countries.  My hat's off.

I also believe the project, if successful, could become the new currency of charity.  What feels better, giving $100 to a child or giving him/her a laptop?  $1000 buys you 10 (read ten) laptops.  Warren Buffet's big charitable donation would put 300M kids on the Internet.  It's huge.

I hope this project is a massive success.  I am 100% in support of it.