Assonances

Last october Bear Stearns published a very good report on the dynamics of entertainement. They’ve just updated it and its mostly focus on monetizing the Video UGC. You can download the new report from Chris Anderson’s blog (and should read his sum up of it). There incumbent analysis is very good.

Here is an extract from the cover:

“PARADOX OF CHOICE” SHIFTS VALUE TO MIDDLE OF SUPPLY CHAIN.
Increased video content supply could lead to lower user satisfaction, given
cognitive dissonance due to regret, confusion, etc. Therefore, we submit that new
aggregation vehicles will emerge to solve this conundrum, as search engines did
in the text-based Web, which is where the vast majority of value accrued.

CONTENT ISN’T KING, GREAT CONTENT IS. The problem with the “content is
king” axiom is that no one company has proven capable of consistently creating
only great content, as evidenced by fluctuations in TV ratings, box office per film,
etc. In addition, while entertainment firms are focused on “digital,” this revenue
stream will likely remain small relative to overall sales for the foreseeable future.
The risk is that, as with newspaper companies, strong digital revenues do not
offset decelerating growth in core revenue streams.

written by leafar

Joost won an award at thenextweb in Amsterdam, no one from the
company was there to take the award, so I took charge of it. It has made a very pleasant trip in Amsterdam (take a look at the slideshow) and now he is back to its right proprietary (le joost propriétaire). In the hands of Eric Clemenceau (European Sales Director)

Joost is very impressive company, the pitch was perfect, the way they present their EPIC future is so brilliant. They will succed. Their vision of advertising is the new revolution. If you work in advertising you should apply (the european team is 3 people only at the moment). They are a real possible Google of video, they have the power, they have the car they will have the girl (as a car ads used to say //  [Bob] you should apply).

A lot of people from the media landscape at this great presentation
(thanks HEC Media) and many of them are already scared by this new possible monster and they are able to say it at loud ;-)

To convince Media they have a pretty simple pitch. Our guys have done Kazaa ! That’s what you can call weapon of mass dissuasion… pretty efficient.

I had a feeling of Steve Jobs … the iDay is larger than we think. People are also queuing for joost (20k a day)

Dealer is the new Portal*

And since i am at it … the next web is also Kevin Rose. Pownce is killer because it’s exactly my core value for twitter (read the first comment)…. Dispatching and pownce will bring it to the next level.  I’m in like with you is for Like minded people. I also need to mention Mahalo as well as Lijit (just raised) for the People Inside (joost has it too)!

The next web is here !! What I want from media / What I want from my friends. How i want to live …

The iDay is … a cleaner Dealer who knows what I want

–> Give me a shoot quick !!

* and U.[lik]
is clearly gonna be part of it. A personnalized dealer* is always better ;-) Especially when you can deal everything you like !!

Pour les Français il faut lire ou relire dans la solitude des champs de coton immédiatement [lvanproosdij] i have one copy for you

written by leafar

Joshua Porter wrote a great post on circles of relationship a few days ago. It has generated many great responses and a new post that summarize all these contributions. Since it’s a subject we have been working on with my partner, i would like to share a very concrete approach of it : U.[lik]

First let’s have a look at the circles evolution from Ben Schneiderman (via Joshua) to People like us from Alex Mather:

The Schneiderman representation is clearly a pure social approach.

Alex Mather one is a pure Social Network approach mainly focus on the 18-30 years old group. According to him there are two main points that organize the circles:

1. Self, Friends, and “Those Like Us” are in a protected area.
2. Friends and even “Those Like Us” are more important than Family!!!

–> I agree at 100% !

The next step is from Sarah Cooper (Visual designer at yahoo) who introduces the idea of Collaborative Micro-Filtering. She has designed a quick demo of what it should look like. She also tries to build the specs for such a service.

The whole idea is to be able to get the right recommendation by using the right people for each different subject.
Her mom & danna for clothing & Joel, jim and rashid for movies. –> Again I agree @ 100%.

That’s exactly these kinds of ideas that we have been working on over the last 2 years.

Continue reading »

written by leafar

Implicite recommendation have a lot of advantages … mainly it’s effortless !
But  it alsa have many problems. The list is quite long but it could be sum up with "making mistakes".
That’s something user would not accept especially if it’s a mistake that a five year old boy wouldn’t have made. It’s a bit like, in the old days, altavista not finding its own website when asked.

This is just an example from Duke about amazon.com. I told you a few days ago that he is making a huge digging on the recommendation. Take a look at the comment on flickr from where the photo is originated.

written by leafar

This guy is mad … but he has great slides and examples. "Carve nature at its joints. [...] butchering an animal is a brilliant metaphore [...] Good butcher knows where the natural places to divide the world up are."

–> David Weinberger

written by leafar

And Greg linden sums up it right :

By learning from people’s past behavior, Google can disambiguate their
intent. Different people will see different information based on their
needs and preferences. Like the good friend that sends you links that
might interest you, Google will adapt to you and help you find what you
need.

Even for advertising, personalization can be helpful,
targeted efforts to help you find products and services you might
actually like rather than spamming mass audiences with annoying and
irrelevant crap. As Eric said back in Oct 2005, "Advertising should be interesting, relevant and useful to users."
See also my Nov 2005 post, "Is personalized advertising evil?".

written by leafar

I’ve reading Paul Lamere’s blog, Duke Listens!, for the last couple of months. It’s the smartest blog for who is interested by recommendation ((It used to be Greg Linden (who still has some great insights) but since he has retired from hard core development of findory … he has slowed down)).

Lately, it’s one of the blog from which I open the largest number of pages from my reader (I just screen articles in it and open the page so i can bookmark it - painful process!-). Paul Lamere is a researcher @ Sun. He works on the next generation of Intelligent Music Machine (And I am happy I don’t fight in the same league as him). His blog is full of insights, reviews and academic news.

Today a great piece about ilike. Ilike is a plug-in for music recommendation (Paul call them remoras !!). I don’t like ilike (they have a name too close from yours ;-)) so i did not gave them a lot of my time. Paul did. And here are his findings :

Last year I tried out iLike to see how well it worked.  I didn’t like their ’similar artists’  recommendations too much.  I figured it was a cold-start problem.  Since they were a new site, they didn’t have enough data to make good recommendations.  I tried iLike again this morning to see how well they improved after having 6 months of data.  I was surprised to learn that I was getting the exact same  recommendations as I got back in October.  It is as if they have not updated their similarity data since they have launched.  Some of these recommendations are horrendous.
Read the rest of the story

THANKS, that’s precious feedback & insights.

written by leafar

2006 was the year people benchmarked Pandora vs Last.fm
Something that will be impossible this year. Pandora will shut out non-US user tonight !
It’s very sad, but it will force a market regulation since pandora will need to act & lobby to find a solution (global or local …  pandora will therefore open the trail for followers, that’s the only good side effect).   

Pandora operates under Section 114 of the DMCA, which gives them a clear process for paying rights holders in the U.S. There is no international equivalent of the DMCA, and so to operate legally in other countries, Pandora must sign deals with rights holders directly. That means separate deals with labels and publishers for each song, an extremely difficult and time consuming task.
The full news is avalable on techcrunch

written by leafar

From John Battelle’s Blog: 

From a source who is in a position to know, news that Google’s DoubleClick competitor will be … free for all to use. Like Analytics.
Think about that for a moment. How did Microsoft kill Netscape? Yup,
made the browser free. How will Google try to own the entire ad serving
biz? Make it free. Why would they do this? Because the most valuable
thing in the world of advertising is not the commodity , it’s the
information the commodity will provide.

Providing a scaled ad serving solution? Free.
Knowing the margins of every media and marketing company in the world? Priceless.

written by leafar

La nouvelle est tombée hier dans la nuit. Netflix offre 1M$ à celui qui améliorera son système de recommandation de 10%. Voir mon post précedent qui couvre l’annonce de Netflix.
Depuis j’ai eu le temps de décanter et de réflechir au pourquoi du comment… voici donc une petite analyse de la proposition du Netflix Prize.

Le problème des recommandations est complexe et une mauvaise proposition est très disqualificatrice. Netflix a plusieurs problèmes de recommandation dont voici un example :

“I liked Finding Nemo
and was deluged with Disney” Source: Hackingnetflix

Update: à lire absolument le post de Chris Anderson qui pose de bonnes questions et donne le lien vers une présentation de Jim Bennett qui est très intéressante.
Cette note a été fortement retouchée pour corriger les erreurs dues à la fatigue nocturne.

Continue reading »

written by leafar