Kellogg Technology Conference 2007

I went to a great conference this morning that Kellogg put on, the theme of which was “The Digital Lifestyle.” The keynote speakers were Robert Dotson, CEO of T-Mobile; Marissa Mayer, VP of stuff at Google; and Kevin Johnson, Co-President of Platforms & Services at Microsoft. I had to leave before Mr. Johnson’s speech, but he clearly has the best title. “Co-President” is pretty great.

Dotson’s talk was very interesting. He has had a bizarre career trajectory: Kellogg ‘89, marketing for PepsiCo, Senior Director of Marketing KFC (not a typo – KFC as in Kentucky Fried Chicken), VP Marketing for Western Wireless, Executive VP Sales and Marketing T-Mobile, COO T-Mobile, President T-Mobile USA, CEO T-Mobile USA. He actually made a great argument that selling cell phones was very much like selling chicken. He also said that he sees no need for GPS in phones, he doesn’t think video or music in phones will go anywhere, and has no enterprise focus. Although his arguments for these positions were pretty weak, I don’t really want video or music on my phone, so maybe he’s on to something. I do, however, think GPS and maps have huge potential.

Mayer’s speech was very good as well. She gave a good 10,000 foot view of Google (literal and physical) and dug deep on a few interesting areas of Google, focusing, interestingly, on getting more offline data online. She was also extremely strong in the Q&A and took 15 – 20 tough questions. I was able to sneak one in and asked her how much data she thinks they have indexed to date – she said 500 terabytes…more on this in another post.

Kellogg is a nice, btw. They have aeron chairs, branded bottled water, and a pretty great view. Hats off for putting on a great event!

Google Earth, NASA, and the Mechanical Turk harnessed in search for Jim Gray

There has been an incredible outpouring of support from the tech community to aid in the search for missing Microsoft researcher and tech pioneer Jim Gray who has been lost at sea off the coast of San Francisco for four days. Gray was the first person to receive a PhD in Computer Science from Berkeley (’67 – ’69). Google has
directed the Google Earth satellite technology towards the search and NASA has donated the use of airplanes with high-end image technology. The images these technologies have produced have been divided into groups of 5 and posted onto Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. There are currently 4,000 groups of 5 available for review, but I am guessing they will all be chewed through in a number of hours. The story and MTurk link is Diggable here – hopefully it will be on the front page soon.

Unfortunately, the images look like this:

Apparently Gray’s boat will show up as a white block of approximately 4 pixels wide and 10 pixels long with sharp edges. There is a lot of noise in these, but hopefully someone will find something. I’m going to look through a couple now.

Edit: 150 groups of 5 have been knocked off in 5 minutes. Pretty cool. This has to be the best use of the MTurk to date.

Edit 2: An hour later and it’s popped up on the front page of the Tech section of Digg. 3600 HITS remain, but I think they’ll start to go fast now. Hopefully Arrington and the high profile blog and news sites will pick up the MTurk story soon.

Edit 3: A day later, and Arrington finally got a a post up about this. The comments in his post make it sound like all of the original batch were completed, but NASA photos are now up. This is what these ones look like, the colored dots representing how big a boat would be in the images:

Edit 4: It seems like they keep loading photos into the Turk – the counter is back up to +4000. There are also +900 HITS grouped separately that are password protected and designated to be reviewed by “qualified experts.” Maybe the ones that are flagged by non-experts in the normal batch are passed to this group for expert review? Pretty cool. Good luck!

Google: Organizing .0034% of the world’s information.

I have been doing some research on information, specifically, how much information there is in general, and how much of that information is searchable and indexable online. This is not an easy number to come up with, and is very dependent on what you choose your definition of “information” to be in the first place. Phone calls, IMs, and emails are produced in huge volume, but only certain portions of that data is actually interesting (e.g.: Presidential phone calls v. my personal email). It seems that questions about the size of the web and the information universe were asked fairly often 4, 5, or 6 years ago when people were still getting comfortable with the net. They would ask AOL “how big is the internet?” and some folks at the time tried to figure it out.

The favored unit of measure for massive amounts of data is the terabyte (this is actually a pretty funny wikipedia entry). A terabyte is the equivalent of 1000 gigabytes, or 1 trillion bytes (10^12). I spent a fair chunk of yesterday afternoon trying to find some sort of reliable source that had researched this in the last few years. I used an interesting service – www.chacha.com – in my search. They have been getting a good amount of press recently, so I thought I would give it a try. You go to the site and are linked with a “search consultant” via IM who helps run your search for you. It seems like they screen Google results and give you what they think is best. They make $0.83 a search but only get paid for the first ten minutes (unclear how that meshes, but whatever). Chacha turned up nothing I hadn’t seen already, but it was cool to try it out. This is what I found:

• Alexa (owned by Amazon): 100 terabyte index
• AT&T: 300 terabyte “Daytona” index of customer data (that they apparently share with the NSA)
• Library of Congress: 136 terabytes
• The “Surface Web” in 2003: 167 terabytes

The most interesting thing I found was a transcript of a speech given by Google CEO Eric Schmidt to the Association of National Advertisers on October 8, 2005. Mr. Schmidt said:

…how much information is there in the world? A study that was done last year indicated roughly five million terabytes. How much is indexable, searchable today? Current estimate: about 170 terabytes. So again we’re back in that two or three percent of the indexed and searchable world.

Takeaways:

1. Google had access to 170 terabytes of data in 2005 surmised there to be 5 million terabytes available. That is not a whole lot of coverage.

2. Eric Schmidt and his speechwriters need to check their math. 170 of 5 million is .0034%, not 2 or 3%.

EDIT: To be clear, I love Google and used it for all the research in this. However, I think the volume of actual information out there vs. the volume accessible via the web is difficult to comprehend and if Google’s numbers are right, they are very surprising.

Also, one could argue that Google might have organized the .0034% of the world’s information that is interesting and applicable…

Technorati, Google Blog Search & DMOZ

Technorati has this thing to put into your blog so it shows up on Technorati. So I’m putting it below. Good times.

I think Google blog search works way better, btw. but to register with Google. I’m pretty sure to “claim” your site with Google you have to submit to DMOZ (the open directory project), which has been down recently.

Technorati Profile

Edit: Ha! Once I registered I got this awesome stat from Technorati: Rank: 2,445,365 (0 links from 0 sites)

iPhone + Schmidt + Jobs = crashed Blogger

Blogger, the blogging platform run by Google that I use for this blog, crashed right when Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google joined Steve Jobs on stage at MacWorld to help him announce the iPhone. I guess that combo is a little too much heat for the blogosphere…

Google + CBS…..+ Apple TV?

So NBC and Google announced yesterday…that they will announce today at CES…that NBC will be going straight to the net with some of it’s prime time shows, a move foreshadowed by the uncensored SNL release of the JT “D*ck in a Box” skit last month…

The word is that Apple is going to be releasing the iPhone tomorrow. Apparently it will have two batteries – one for music and one for the phone – I’m sure it will be sleek and snazzy as well. However, I would be far more interested in an Apple TV. A phone will certainly shake things up in the telecom world a bit, especially if there was some sort of VOIP capability, but an Apple TV would be pretty wild. They could easily put Mac Mini (or the yet to be released iTV) hardware into one of their high quality huge flatscreens, and bam, you would have your music, podcast, youtube, DVR and DVD/hometheater hub. I guess you would still need a set-top-box to get your cable/satellite, but who needs a STB when networks going straight to the net?