Creating user incentives

December 21st, 2008 § 3 Comments

I’ve recently spent a good amount of time looking at systems used to motivate users of consumer websites. Across the board, the systems that are most successful 1) have a social component 2) highlight relevant scores within user profile and 3) award points that have no actual or implied dollar value. « Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook: Reach and Saturation by Country, Part III

December 18th, 2008 § 2 Comments

I checked in on Facebook’s growth and added to the data set used in Part I and Part II. The data is a bit too big for a spreadsheet so I used iCharts to make a dynamic chart that allows for easy visibility. Use the slider on the side to zoom in on the other 90+ other countries. Notice that their global growth continues to accelerate. « Read the rest of this entry »

Good reads

November 27th, 2008 § Leave a Comment

Lots of good reading material recently. A few good ones:

Is it a Terrible Time to Move? (Kedrosky) The Daily Beast

Anatomy of a Meltdown The New Yorker

Hitched to Someone Else’s Dream (Stonyfield Farms) Inc

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace Rolling Stone

Thinking Outside the Box (Costco) Fast Company

Mary Meeker/MS Tech Trend Outlook

November 6th, 2008 § Leave a Comment

Very interesting presentation put together by Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley and presented yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Investment Research after the storm

September 24th, 2008 § Leave a Comment

The last two weeks have kept most in the finance community glued to the headlines trying to figure out which earthquake will hit next. Mainstream media analysis has been focused on global economic issues and with numbers like $700B being thrown around, the $5.7B investment research industry, which has felt a substantial impact from the debt crisis and the Wall Street shakeup, has been largely overlooked. Nearly 3,000 equity research professionals have already been directly impacted. « Read the rest of this entry »

Investment Research: Continued Shift

September 10th, 2008 § 1 Comment

Ongoing market turmoil and the intensifying financial crunch have accelerated ongoing shift within the investment research industry. This morning Credit Suisse and the Gerson Lehrman Group announced a strategic partnership that will 1) give Credit Suisse analysts access to GLG consultants; 2) give GLG clients access to Credit Suisse analysts; 3) give GLG access to Credit Suisse distribution channels.

« Read the rest of this entry »

LinkedIn quietly launches Research Network and DirectAds…let the monetization begin.

June 30th, 2008 § 8 Comments

LinkedIn DirectAds
LinkedIn has quietly launched a beta version of a dynamic CPM text advertising platform called LinkedIn DirectAds. No formal announcement of the launch was made on the LinkedIn blog or elsewhere. According to the DIrectAds FAQ, advertisers will be able to dynamically target ads by age, gender, geography, educational institution, industry, and seniority. Minimum order size for an advertisement is $25, with the minimum number of impressions dependant on the targeting audience chosen by the advertiser. The rate that you pay for a CPM (1000 impressions) changes as you add or remove targeting options from your ad. Apparently the product will give click-through rates to advertisers, but billing will be based on CPM. In a unique twist, ads will also include the advertisers name and a link to their LinkedIn profile in hopes of “increasing transparency and visibility into the advertiser.” Much like the Facebook SocialAds platform, advertisers must have a profile on the network to launch an ad, although LinkedIn says they are limiting advertisers by completeness of profile, number of connections, date of profile creation and a number of other factors. I was unable to access the platform through my profile.

The DirectAds platform will bring LinkedIn closer to Facebook’s Social Ads technology, with these two leaving Bebo, MySpace, Plaxo, Friendster and the rest of the social networking world behind for now. I hope to be able to try the LinkedIn platform soon and give a head-to-head comparison. LinkedIn will continue to extract a premium on their advertising, as it seems they will be setting the price per CPM internally. A true market (e.g. Overture/pre-Panama Yahoo) or partial market (e.g. Google quality score) influence on price would likely result in prices lower than they would like, and they are clearly avoiding a CPC model for a reason since they are measuring CTR anyways. I think this slow transfer is very smart on their end especially considering their pre-IPO status, but as an advertiser I wish they would switch to a free market faster. Their ad margins will likely be lower than what they were getting with their rate card (although perhaps not), but the volume of advertisements will definitely spike upwards as you no longer have to go through a traditional advertising salesperson process to launch a targeted ad on their network.

LinkedIn Research Network
Additionally, on Thursday of last week LinkedIn quietly launched the LinkedIn Research Network, a product the company first mentioned back in February. No formal announcement of the actual launch was made on the LinkedIn blog or anywhere else, but the Research Network product page is live and linked to from the Premium Product footer, along with job, corporate, and upgrade links. Also linked is a 2 page product summary PDF. The product page outlines what is essentially a premium version of InMail (pdf). A Research Network subscriber can send send 20 InMails at once, and no monthly or daily limits are mentioned. Previously, LinkedIn BusinessPlus subscribers had the most InMail access and were limited to 10 InMails per month, so this is a dramatic increase in potential InMail volume. In the past advertisers could send targeted InMail blasts through LinkedIn’s advertising platform at $1 – $5 per recipient.

The LinkedIn Research Network is an attempt to move into the expert network industry and will be sold primarily to hedge, private equity and venture funds. According to a recent Integrity Research Associates report, there are roughly 25 expert networks in existence today. Aside from my company KnowledgeBid, every other expert network service operates on a subscription model. LinkedIn is likely gunning for the fat subscription fees that players like the Gerson Lehrman Group are pulling from investors (+$50k for access to one industry vertical of experts for 6 months), but the product they have launched is far more like the resume search/direct email services offered by Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder, Dice, etc. than an expert network. Perhaps down the road LinkedIn will try to facilitate the actual expert matching, but this iteration of the product just enables subscribers to send a large volume of cold emails to potential consultants. Additionally, the product page makes no mention of facilitating consultant payment and the only compliance functionality mentioned is a “research history”. Legal compliance is arguably the largest issue faced by expert networks today, and something that expert network users have come to expert from service providers. It’s possible that LinkedIn is intentionally not involving themselves with payment of experts in an attempt to remove themselves from the chain of liability if their service were to be used to facilitate insider trading or the like.

Congrats to LinkedIn on the product launches. I’m glad to see them competing with Facebook on the advertising technology side of things (let’s see an API guys!) and will certainly be keeping tabs on these products as they mature.

Import Genius + the value of information

June 17th, 2008 § Leave a Comment

ImportGenius is an innovating new company organizing the extremely valuable and historically unorganized world of import records. One of the first hedge fund managers I spoke to when researching KnowledgeBid mentioned that he liked to talk to shipping container brokers about utilization rates and import/export trends. I’m sure ImportGenius will have no problem finding customers in the investment community. TechCrunch coverage here (yes, Mac fanboys will like it too). Yet another company taking a unique approach to accessing information value. Good luck!

620,000,000 profiles

May 6th, 2008 § 2 Comments

I’ve recently been doing some analysis focusing on the growth rates of major social networks and resume databases (I’m saving major blogging platforms for another day, although I’m guessing there are ~400M blogs out there). For the purposes of this analysis I calculated the user profile CAGR for each major social network and resume database, assuming 1M profiles in the launch year and ending with the best estimate of user profiles today (May 2008).

The results show that there are nearly 620,000,000 robust user profiles among these services today, a figure that has grown at a 64% CAGR since ’95. Orkut has grown at the highest CAGR (231%) while MySpace claims the largest raw number of profiles (173M). The chart below nicely illustrates the social networking explosion staring in ’03, underlined by the steady growth of resume databases starting in the mid 90s. The exponentially higher growth rates of social networks can be attributed to the viral features that have come to define them. Traditional resume databases are useful but are generally non-viral so they continue to grow steadily. This analysis does not take into account spam and fake profiles and the chart massively simplifies the growth trends by retrospectively applying each company’s CAGR.

Facebook: Reach and Saturation by Country, Part II

April 28th, 2008 § 2 Comments

Updated here.

Roughly six months ago I posted some information that I dug out of Facebook’s then just launched Facebook Flyer Pro advertising platform. I’ve been poking around with Facebook again the last few days and recent talk about Facebook’s valuation inspired me to update my report. Facebook has improved their advertising platform, now just called Facebook Ads, and while ad creation is still manual, they offer CPC payment and social features on top of the incredible targeting they had with Flyer Pro. They still also display the number of users that an ad will target, so messing around with the UI can give you some interesting information about Facebook’s user base. Here I’ve added current data to the spreadsheet I started six months ago. In short, Facebook has added ~28 million users in the last 6 months, growing at an average 140% in the countries where they released data six months ago and today. 70% of their growth was in North America and Europe. I updated population figures so that saturation percentages would be accurate.

Updated saturation leaderboard:
Canada: 28.22%
Norway: 24.04%
UK: 16.88%
Australia: 13.30%
Sweden: 12.20%
Denmark: 10.73%

Trailing 6 month growth leaders:
Turkey: 875%
Israel: 393%
Colombia: 393%
France 294%
Malaysia: 255%
Switzerland: 199%

Investment Research + Massive Industry Shift

April 18th, 2008 § 3 Comments

I had the opportunity to present KnowledgeBid at the Investorside Alternative Research conference in New York last week (conference agenda), attended by an interesting mix of independent alternative investment research providers and buy-side folks. The investment research industry has undergone massive change in the last 10 years, much of which is a result of the information technology explosion, Regulation FD, and unbundled commissions. The dominant groups at the conference last week primarily fell into three categories: 1) expert networks, 2) data mining, and 3) research management. Very few, if any, new players are producing traditional research reports with buy/sell recommendations or general industry analysis. Even fewer are associated with particular trading desks, something that never would have been seen 10 years ago. The recent explosion of the alternative research space has in large part been at the expense of traditional sell side research.

Alternative Investment Research Market Size

The sell side and other large financial service players are now actively partnering with, investing, and acquiring alternative research operations. There has been an explosion of activity in the space in the last six months, part of a larger trend that has been emerging since Reg FD was passed eight years ago. I’ve aggregated major announcements and milestones below (let me know if I missed anything interesting).

Efficiency through Google alerts

March 26th, 2008 § 2 Comments

One of the reasons my posting has slowed over the last month or so is because I have drastically cut down on my news consumption and a good amount of my posting was derivative of the random stuff I read on the web. I still check my Netvibes page every day or two, but in the past I spent at least an hour a day staying current on various tech, econ, VC, law and entrepreneur blogs and news sources. A major factor in my slimmed down news diet has been thanks to Google alerts. I’ve set up alerts for a variety of keywords that I’m interested in monitoring (my company name, competitive company names, friends’ company names, my name, etc.) and get emails from Google alerts when new material is on the web that includes those keywords. I didn’t realize it at the time, but a big driver behind my news consumption was the fear that I would “miss something” relevant to my life. Google Alerts is far more efficient in monitoring the web that I could ever be, and now I can spend my time on more important things without worry that I may be out of the loop.

LinkedIn Research Network…LinkedIn Experts Part II

February 8th, 2008 § 2 Comments

This week, LinkedIn announced the future launch (apparently you can do that) of the LinkedIn Research Network. Product manager Mike Gamson spoke about the service earlier this week to eWeek and at the Money:Tech conference currently being held in NYC. O’Reilly reported on it as well. The LinkedIn Research Network, if it is ever actually launched, will actually be the relaunch of the failed low-tech LinkedIn Experts service (screenshot), which was little publicized and went dead several months ago. The service charged users $500 for a 1 hour conversation with LinkedIn network members, of which LinkedIn retained $250. LinkedIn seems to have dropped the pay-per-conversation model with the new LinkedIn Research Network, which, according to reports, will be yet another expert network subscription service. The tough thing for LinkedIn is that fact that any sort of “connection” service beyond the standard LinkedIn profile messaging services is an acceptance on LinkedIn’s part that the standard services they offer don’t actually work. For a company that has been gearing up for an IPO for the last year and scrambling to catch up with Facebook’s API and user growth, this seems like a strange time to start cannibalize their existing revenue streams and launch a project that is likely draw the attention of the SEC…they should ask Gerson Lehrman about that. Additionally, LinkedIn’s 18 million users are all accessible to any other LinkedIn user, along with KnowledgeBid and anyone else looking to source specialized expertise…and so are all of Facebook’s 50 million users, let alone everyone else you can find with a simple Google search. For these reasons we at KnowledgeBid concluded long ago that the expert network subscription model is dead. We build expert network management software that allows researchers to quickly and easily grow and manage their own proprietary expert networks with no subscription fees.

NYSE Panel on Expert Networks

January 10th, 2008 § Leave a Comment

The morning the New York Stock Exchange hosted a panel entitled “Expert Networks: Issues and Opportunities for Public Companies”. The session was moderated by Keith Ackerman, who is Global Head of Next Generation Research at Thomson Financial. On the panel were Howard Dicker, Partner at Weil, Gotshal; Jonathan Glick, Director of Research Operations at the Gerson Lehrman Group; Michael Lynch, Managing Director, Global Commission Management at Merrill Lynch; and Michael Mayhew, Chairman & Co-CEO at Integrity Research. The video of the panel can be found here. The group had a very interesting discussion focusing on the trends within the expert network space.  I’ve posted my thoughts on the discussion over on the KnowledgeBid Blog.

Integrity Research: The Future of the Investment Research Industry

January 7th, 2008 § Leave a Comment

The folks at Integrity Research Associates recently published an interesting forecast for the investment research industry. Integrity provides syndicated research and consulting services to the investment community. In short, the Integrity is forecasting a continued decline in “traditional” investment research consumption from investment banks and research analysts, coupled with a continued increase in demand for alternative research services, like expert networks. Integrity cites Regulation FD, soft dollar codification, and continuing technological innovation as the major drivers in the revolution. These trends are in large part what inspired me to start building KnowledgeBid over year ago. The full report can be viewed here.

Changing Client Demand
A decade ago, buy-side investors relied on detailed fundamental company analysis produced by sell-side investment banks and brokerage firms. However, in the past few years, Regulation Fair Disclosure and Sarbanes Oxley have effectively reduced the value of investment bank research as sell-side analysts have less and less access to company management. The reduction of this confidential information in sell-side research has prompted many buy-side investors to bring a great deal of their analytical needs in-house. In turn, this has changed the type of research that buy-side investors have found most valuable.

Today, most institutional investors value access to experts, company management, various sources of proprietary data including channel checks and custom market research, profitable trading ideas, and new and innovative analytical techniques. In addition, many buy-side investors (particularly hedge funds) value information that is not widely distributed to other investors.

This change in buy-side research tastes has had a negative impact on traditional fundamental company research – including that of most sell-side firms and many alternative (independent) research providers. At the same time, it has stimulated the growth of new types of research providers, including expert networks such as Gerson Lehrman, channel checking firms such as Off the Record Research and web-oriented research providers such as Connotate, Kapow and First Rain. It is the new, innovative types of research which are growing the fastest, increasing the demand for alternative research overall.

The Integrity Forecast
These developments lead us to conclude that the research industry will experience a significant amount of “barbelling” in the coming years as bulge bracket investment banks lose some share of the research market, second and third tier sell-side firms suffer deep losses of research revenue, and a number of alternative research providers experience increased demand for their services.

Our forecast indicates that sell-side research revenues will fall close to 18% from $4.9 billion in 2006 to $4.0 billion in 2011. This decline is consistent with a survey done this past summer by financial services consulting firm Greenwich Associates, which revealed that almost 20% of the buy-side analysts expect their firms to either “reduce” or “significantly reduce” their use of sell-side research in the coming year.

Integrity expects that alternative research providers will gain at the expense of the sell-side, growing from $1.81 billion in 2006 to $2.47 billion by 2011, thereby increasing their share of the market from a 14.5% in 2006 to 19.8% in 2011. However, we do not expect all boats to rise with this tide. The most innovative research providers should experience the best growth, while traditional fundamental research providers could actually decline over this period. This forecast is consistent with the recent Greenwich Associates survey which showed that 39% of buy-side analysts expect their firms to increase their use of independent or alternative research in the next 12 months.

Finally, the team at Integrity Research anticipates that buy-side institutions will increase their spending on their internal research capabilities by 28.8% over the next few years from $5.8 billion in 2006 to $7.4 billion in 2011 as they continue to rely less and less on sell-side research and they rely more on their own research capabilities.

Facebook: Reach and Saturation by Country

October 18th, 2007 § 14 Comments

Updated here.

Facebook’s recently launched Flyer Pro advertising platform offers a phenomenal, albeit manual, mechanism for targeting advertisements on Facebook.  It also shows some interesting statistics about Facebook’s reach. I ran some quick numbers to see which countries were most saturated with Facebook’s +48M users. The winners:

Canada: 22.12%
Norway: 18.68%
UK: 10.58%
Sweden: 9.09%
Australia: 6.64%
United States: 6.57%

picture-2.png

b-side

September 12th, 2007 § Leave a Comment

I’ve learned a bit about a very interesting company called b-side over the past few weeks. They’re focusing on, as their tag line describes, “the other side of film”. B-side brings their technology to film festivals around the globe to help poll audiences and create valuable hard data about films. They also are an independent distributor of films – their technology allows them to identify the best films in festivals which they sign to distribution deals. Their site is slick – users can watch previews and purchase full length films, as well as create user accounts and get recommendations. The 43 films currently available through the site are presumably the films that b-side has signed. I just watched “Before the Music Dies” and highly recommend it. They also have the cult hit “Four Eyed Monsters” and lesser known titles like “Phone Sex Grandma“.

B-side may be a hit for their investors through site sales alone, but the data that they can pull from festivals could be extremely valuable if they are able to identify and purchase the rights to the next Napoleon Dynamite, or sell information to those who are interested in doing so. B-side is a great example of a company that has identified an information inefficiency that can be exploited to the benefit of everyday folks (via movie downloads on the site that they wouldn’t otherwise get) and big money players (interested in sniping the next low cost blockbuster). Definitely check them out.

b-side logo

Corporate branding: The Bloomberg B-Unit

August 3rd, 2007 § Leave a Comment

I’ve written a little about corporate branding in the past, but I recently stumbled upon a real gem. The Bloomberg B-Unit.

The BLOOMBERG B-UNIT™ is a state-of-the-art biometric security device that provides BLOOMBERG ANYWHERE™ subscribers with enhanced identity protection and gives access to the BLOOMBERG PROFESSIONAL service.

How awesome is that. A state-of-the-art biometric security device to see commodity prices? What about logins and passwords? Or if you want to get really crazy, digital tokens? This thing is pure branding, and I’m sure it works. Give a B-Unit to a commodities trader and he’ll instantly think more highly of the info he accesses with it.

Bloomberg B-Unit

Bloomberg is not new to the corporate branding game, and in some ways they may have even fallen prey to being too progressive with corporate branding…if such a thing is possible. Bloomberg terminals have rocked the colored keyboard since the company’s founding in the early ’80s. They’ve stuck with it, and to this day Bloomberg keyboards are lit up like Christmas trees. Meanwhile in 2007, no one else on the planet needs a colored keyboard except your kid cousin that is learning to play their new synthesizer. Not even the craziest ninja programmers need colored keys to keep their heads straight. But bond traders? They need a colored keyboards “to save time”. I’m sure the colored keyboard was the coolest thing since sliced bread when it hit the market in ’82…and the cutting edge bond traders that started using them back then still want the colored keys today. And get this…some of the keyboards even have thumbprint sensors too:

The BLOOMBERG® keyboard conserves desk space while providing extra functionality and it empowers the user with time-saving, customized keys. The integrated sensor utilizing biometric technology provides an added level of security.

Of course at the end of the day, the Bloomberg hardware and UI may look ridiculous, but they’re still able to charge $1,500 a month per user.  However, that’s a huge pricetag to be paying for data.  If I were Bloomberg I would ditch the colored keyboard, grab as many of those fat fees as you can, and keep on the lookout for competition moving in on your turf.

My picks: The best content on the web

July 19th, 2007 § 5 Comments

My buddy Will recently asked me what feeds I subscribe too, so I thought I would post what I pulled together for him here in case anyone else is looking for the good stuff. I subscribe to tons more feeds, but these are the ones I find myself consistently reading. I’ve found myself helping people set up NetVibes accounts recently, and this is generally what I put together, with each header being a separate tab within the same account. I’ve linked to the sites when possible and included the feed addresses below them. If you want to subscribe to one, copy the feed address and paste it into your aggregator (“Add content” >> “Add feed” in NetVibes). I’ve included feeds from my sites because I read that stuff too.

Tech/VC News
Venture Beat

http://venturebeat.com/?feed=rss2

Barron’s Tech Trader Daily
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/feed/
TechCrunch

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch

ValleyWag

http://www.valleywag.com/index.xml

The Alarm Clock

http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/atom.xml

Digg.com: Technology

http://www.digg.com/rss/containertechnology.xml

Analyst’s Edge: Venture Capital News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-VentureCapitalFirmNews

Entrepreneurs
Marc Andressen: Ning

http://blog.pmarca.com/atom.xml

Roger Ehrenberg: Monitor110

http://www.informationarbitrage.com/atom.xml

Keith Schacht: JobCoin/Freshwaterventure

http://www.chicagobeta.com/feed/

Noah Kagan: Mint.com

http://feeds.feedburner.com/okdork/tZRC

Steve Newcomb: Powerset

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SteveNewcombBlog

VC Blogs
Jeremy Liew: Lightspeed Venture Partners

http://feeds.feedburner.com/lightspeedblog

Ask the VC (Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson: Mobius Venture Capital/Foundry Group)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/askthevc

Venture Hacks

http://feeds.venturehacks.com/venturehacks

Econ
The Big Picture: Barry Rithholtz

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/index.rdf

Freakonomics Blog: Levitt & Dubner

http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/feed/

Private Equity/M&A
NYTimes: Dealbook

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?feed=rss2

Seeking Alpha: M&A

http://usmarket.seekingalpha.com/by/type/mergers-acquisitions/feed

Analyst’s Edge: Private Equity News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-PrivateEquityFirmNews

Hedge Funds/Public Equities
Infectious Greed: Paul Kedrosky

http://paul.kedrosky.com/index.rdf

Wall Street Folly

http://wallstfolly.typepad.com/wallstfolly/atom.xml

Controlled Greed: John Bethel

http://www.controlledgreed.com/atom.xml

Analyst’s Edge: Hedge Fund News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-HedgeFundNews


Traditional News
WSJ

http://feeds.wsjonline.com/wsj/xml/rss/3_7011.xml

Economist
http://www.economist.com/rss/printedition/economist_printedition.xml
NYTimes
http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml

Legal
WSJ: Law Blog

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/feed/

Above The Law

http://www.abovethelaw.com/index.xml


Sports
Townie News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/fitzy

Boston.com Red Sox (no direct link because of their stupid registration crap)

http://syndication.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/red_sox_rss/?mode=rss_10

Boston.com Patriots (no direct link because of their stupid registration crap)

http://syndication.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/patriots_rss?mode=rss_10

ESPN

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news

Enjoy! Also, let me know if you think I missed anything…

Filtering RSS feeds

July 16th, 2007 § 5 Comments

My friend Jason asked me recently if there was a way to filter RSS feeds for keywords or phrases. I hadn’t really thought about it, but with the +150 feeds I have coming into my NetVibes account (a number which has gone up since we launched Analyst’s Edge) I was interested to learn if something good was out there.

The first products I found were Feed Rinse and Feedshake. Both look nice and gooey – web 2.0 colors and round corners. The problem doesn’t seem that difficult (rss feeds + filter words/phrases = new rss feed) when I saw that Electric Pulp (the same guys that charged Guy Kawasaki +$12,000 for Truemors) runs Feed Rinse, I figured they would have an easy, clear solution.

I was wrong. Feed Rinse is not good. I spent 30 minutes trying figure out what difference is between filtering a feed and filtering a channel and whether they support boolean searching type stuff. When I finally thought I had something configured, I went to create a new “rinsed” feed and discovered that they create OPML files, not new feeds….OK shouldn’t be a problem…I can import OPML files into my NetVibes account. But not Feed Rinse files. After 10 more minutes I found the feeds were importing into random pages and weren’t filtering for the keywords I specified. Granted, this may have been NetVibes’ fault, but either way, it didn’t work.

On to Feedshake. On it’s surface, Feedshake is less snazzy than Feed Rinse, but I was optimistic when I started configuring the feeds to be filtered. The process was more straightforward than Feed Rinse and there was no confusion between channel or feed filters. Plus, Feedshake produced new feeds for me to subscribe to, which I liked…until I tried to subscribe to the feeds and found they were broken.

This sent me back to the drawing board. I figured since Netvibes makes a business of handing feeds, they might have a feed customization/filtering feature. Turns out they do, but it doesn’t create new feeds – the NetVibes search feature filters feeds you have subscribed to for specific keywords. This solves the problem – I’ll now subscribe to all of the feeds that I want to filter in one tab and then run filters on the tab daily. I’ll be running the same filters every day (“hedge fund”, “private equity”, etc.) which will get repetitive, so a feature that created a new feed would be a bit better, but at least I know this works and I don’t have to worry about anything other than NetVibes going down. Note that to use this feature, you need to go to “Settings” within your NetVibes account and select “Display search area”.

It’s surprising that there isn’t a functioning, easy to use solution for what seems to be a straightforward problem, although it’s not surprising that NetVibes has the best fix.

News feed access somewhere above Iowa

June 19th, 2007 § Leave a Comment

I’ve posted a bit in the past about Netvibes, the RSS aggregator that I use to catch and organize all of the web content I consume. My Netvibes page currently catches feeds from ~125 different sites and organizes them into 11 different tabbed categories which, when I’m online, constantly refresh themselves. This allows me to monitor the content of all of these sites from one web location and vastly increases the amount of information that I can consume. This is a good thing and a bad thing. Good because I can stay up to speed on things I’m interested in very easily. Bad because I’m interested in a lot of things. The sites that I subscribe to regularly produce new content – probably an average of 4 items per day. Across 125 sites, that’s ~500 new things to read a day. If I read all of that everyday, I would get very little accomplished. Accordingly I’ve gotten pretty good at scanning my Netvibes pages throughout the day and catching the gems, although I definitely need to get better at limiting the number of times I scan my feeds though, as it is tough to avoid getting sidetracked.

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the back row of an airplane somewhere over Iowa reading through my feeds. I’m not connected to the internet (I’m going to post this later today), but I let my Netvibes pages refresh this morning before I went to the airport and kept the browser window open afterwards. My pages collected all the content from my sites and now I can read through the new stuff from my feeds. Netvibes collects the full content of an item for the first three items in a feed. For stories #4 and on, the only thing you can read without a web connection is the headline and the first few sentences. So this means right now I have access to the full content for the first three items of each feed in my account…roughly 375 articles. Pretty cool stuff considering I’m 34,000 feet above Iowa. I’ve included some screenshots below to illustrate.

Page view of my Entrepreneur Blog Netvibes tabbed page – the first three stories in each feed are readable off line.

Full story from Marc Andreessen’s blog captured by Netvibes – readable off line.

Albourne Village

June 7th, 2007 § Leave a Comment

Albourne Village, a site run by hedge fund advisor Albourne Partners, is a pseudo social network for hedge and private equity fund managers. They say the site has 47,544 users and has been around for ~7 years. From the looks of the site, they haven’t changed it since it was first built. It’s truly bizarre. Based on a “village” layout, different virtual buildings have different functions:

Like most villages, Albourne has a helpful map for visitors to use to navigate the winding streets and alleyways. With the aid of this map visitors can virtually walk along Albourne’s picturesque streets and explore the different style quarters. For those in a hurry or who haven’t found their bearings yet, the map provides direct routes to the principal locations of the Village. Many visitors tend to make a bee-line for the “old market square”, notable for its historic Town Hall and its impressive Library, before popping into the Bridge Inn for a quick pint and a friendly gossip with the local residents.

Users earn “apples” for submitting stories and posting on the message board – every user gets 500 when they sign up. There are currently 25,417,426 Apples in circulation. It is so difficult to navigate around the site that it is almost not worth investigating, but the service does product a very high quality weekly email newsletter aggregating news stories submitted by users. The message board also seems to get a lot of traffic, but it is almost impossible to read. The value of nearly 50,000 investment professional membership is huge, and the fact that the site gets any traffic at all with the current interface shows that users are getting real value from the system. The thought of hedge fund managers earning virtual apples they can cash in at the village pub is hilarious though. Albourne: if you want a site makeover, let me know. I know a guy.

If you had $1,800 for every terabyte…

May 10th, 2007 § Leave a Comment

If you had $1,800 for every terabyte of data in existence, you would have roughly 1.4 trillion dollars, which is the approximate total amount of hedge fund capital. If you had $1,800 for every terabyte organized by Google, you could buy a nice apartment in San Francisco.

Hedge fund dollars
$1,400,000,000,000
Terabytes of data in existence
750,000,000 (and this – growth rate)

Terabytes of data organized by Google
500
Terabytes of storage capacity on the GLOW System
200

Google Trends

March 7th, 2007 § Leave a Comment

One of my favorite Google applications to mess around with is Google Trends. The service allows users to see search volume for different queries over time, and allows for comparison. Some interesting ones:

Blue: LinkedIn
Red: Plaxo

Blue: “Yahoo Answers“
Red: “Google Answers“

Blue: Harvard
Red: Stanford

Blue: Linux
Green: PHP
Orange: MySQL
Red: Apache

Those Google guys have some cool data.

Hans Rosling on global health & wealth

March 7th, 2007 § Leave a Comment

TED 2008 sold out out before 2007 even happened . Admission = $6,000. Luckily, some of the TED presentations end up online. I found this video of Hans Rosling speaking on global health & wealth through the Valleywag post and tracked this an embeddable version down in YouTube. Very interesting data and very cool software that I am going to have to spend some time with.

« Older Entries

Where Am I?

You are currently browsing the information category at robwebb2k.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.