Video on Customer Development Process by Steve Blank

Fantastic talk given by Steve Blank from Startup Lessons Learned conference on the need to create an "entrepreneur school," to help one understand the process of keeping the lights on and finding initial customers, instead of conventional business school, which assumes you have already attained the state of large company.

Now the problem is, you can get a piece of advice telling you anything you want to hear. The problem I believe today, is not a lack of information, but a lack of a framework to take that information and to turn it into something that's actionable for you.

Link to video

Facebook's revenue breakdown

From an article over at Silicon Alley Insider:

Where did 2009's $500 million come from? Self-service ads, which appear on the right side of the screen on Facebook, accounted for about $250 million to $300 million.

The rest is split amongst engagement ads, a deal with Microsoft, and virtual goods.

So what's all this OAuth business, then?

Here's a good overview of OAuth over at Hueniverse. Choice quote:

There are many reasons why one should not share their private credentials. Giving your email account password to a social network site so they can look up your friends is the same thing as going to dinner and giving your ATM card and PIN code to the waiter when it’s time to pay.

SS12 Event at USC

This past weekend I had the pleasure of being a mentor for a team competing in the USC SS12 competition. SS12 is a weekend long coding event, organized around the theme of software aiding the disabled. There were 8 teams working on 8 projects (a few teams working on different instances of the same project) working against teams at UCLA.

This competition highlights the very interesting use of AI for aiding the disabled. All of the projects basically come down to using AI to stand in for a missing sense:

-Helping the color-blind see color. -Bridge between the deaf and the non (through a sign-language reading system) -Reading for the blind - My team's project

Reading currency, in particular. - here's an example of someone *else's* currency reader in action doing pretty much what ours (mostly) did. Here's the idea: someone who is visually impaired has difficulty telling what denomination US currency they're holding. The reason for this is that in the US, unlike other nations, all bill denominations are the same size. So, our task was to create something for your phone, which, when pointed at a bill, pronounces what denomination you're holding (see video for the idea in action).

We did this using the Scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm. SIFT did the following for us: given an unidentified image, its key features are identified, and compared with the key features of images of US bills we have on file. The reference bill that returns the highest number of matched key features is returned as having highest likelihood of matching. Even if the image is rotated, crumpled, or otherwise messed with, SIFT is able to extract the essential elements that make that image unique.

Interestingly, we got the currency recognition working straight away, and spent the rest of the time struggling with the Android API.

Interview with Jason Fried at BigThink

On security issues with cloud computing:

You give your credit card to a waiter at a restaurant and they go in the back room with it. They could be running copies! If you buy something at Amazon, it's pretty damn safe, way safer than giving your credit card to somebody who you don't know, and them going away with it. I mean, think about what that's all about. And we're comfortable with that because we're used to it, but it's not safer than buying something online.

Full interview here

AI for assisting the disabled: Phone app snaps image, turns to speech

Here's an article on software developed by Ray Kurzweil for the mobile phone which snaps a picture of text, deciphers the text, and produces audible speech:

On how far his technology has come:

Kurzweil released his first reading machine, developed in partnership with the National Federation for the Blind, in 1976; on the day it was unveiled, TV anchor Walter Cronkite used its speech synthesizer as he signed off the air. The device could scan printed pages, decipher the letters, and speak the words aloud. It was about the size of a washing machine and cost $50,000. Stevie Wonder bought the first production model, Kurzweil recalls.

Lab generates 3D model of city from public Flickr images

A collaboration between Univ. of Washington, Cornell, and Microsoft has created a system that searches public photos of cities, and uses that data to extract a 3d model of that city.

Our experimental results demonstrate that it is now possible to reconstruct cities consisting of 150K images in less than a day on a cluster with 500 compute cores

Link to paper here.

Link to fancy videos here.

Comic on User Interface design

...and report form Microsoft's last MIX conference

User experience (UX) is more than just visual design, information architecture, interaction design (what most experience design folks used to call it), UI development. There's a fifth role: User Research (it puts the U in UX!)

Check it here.

From Jason

New Nevermore album in January

OMG clips from new Nevermore album Page contains clips of Warrel Dane breathlessly telling us about the new album and then playing audio of the album into a microphone.

Warrel Dane has a delightful speaking voice.

StartupSchool 2009 streaming video

StartupSchool 2009 event starts in about an hour right here: Speaker list:

• Chris Anderson
• Paul Buchheit
• Jason Fried
• Paul Graham
• Tony Hsieh
• Mitchell Kapor
• Greg McAdoo
• Biz Stone
• Mark Pincus
• Evan Williams
• Mark Zuckerberg