Since the second Istanbul NEG meeting and some of the posts on your blog, I
thought about what you said in terms of investing in media and related sectors,
and so I wanted to ask, or shall I say, put forward a proposal on investing
(time, money, talent, skills etc) in areas related to data-mining and knowledge
management. Information/news in todays world go hand-in-hand together with the
ability to search those digital files, because if you cannot get the information
you want the moment you need/want it, the info becomes junk or useless. And ONLY
the search utility itself is useless unless you know the subject matter
beforehand (i.e. if you never heard about nanotech or biotech it is pretty
unlikely for you to search "nano engineered photovoltaic coating" or 
"anti-tumor biotherapeutics drugs"). Search engines are only helpful when you
know the subject matter. You cannot search what you don’t know. Also, the
dilemma of "how do you know what you don’t know?" issue is generally best
addressed when you have trusted entities to feed you with quality and
filtered news/information like media, schools, libraries, peers or the "wisdom
of crowds" (DIGG or NOOLUYO is a good step in that direction) which
we talked about in our first meeting.

 

   
Anyway, no one needs to be reminded of the importance (and succe$$) of Google or
Yahoo, and there are a gazillion news articles and web sites dedicated to search
engines, data mining, deep web etc, heck even the US gov is on a similar path ("albeit
on security concerns, probably using apps like this, this, this, or this ) sometimes
imitating corporations use of similar tech (such as this or that) , but what
I wanted to emphasize is that there is just too much data or information out
there and we poor humans don’t have the resources or more importantly the time
to read or go through all that important information.

Even Bill Gates expressed
his frustration at this information overload problem when talking at their
annual meeting of CEOs, adding that "businesses need
to do more to help their employees sort through an ever-growing flood of
information that threatens to become a drain on productivity".

 

Ditto Accenture Chief Executive, William D. Green on his August 28
interview
at The New York Times when he said "Technology has done a great job at providing
data. People install these large enterprise resource planning systems that
generate a lot of pretty charts. The reports come out. But we have data overload
and information underload. What information management, business analytics and
business intelligence are all about is, how do you take all that and put in it
in a format that helps people make decisions? We think this is going to be a
$27-billion-a-year market in four or five years. We just invested $100 million
in our information management capability."

 

   
And lastly, as this and
this
article points out about Deep Web, not everything is indexed by major search
engines:

 

"Google may have already
indexed 8 billion webpages, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Many more
pages are hidden behind corporate firewalls or in databases waiting to be
indexed. By some estimates, this so-called dark Web is 500 times bigger than the
World Wide Web as we know it. Unlike the public Internet, however, it can’t be
retrieved by the usual Web crawlers. Instead, the information must be fed into
search engines’ mammoth databases using special retrieval techniques."

    So there
you go Cem, here I presented with you with some ideas to think about on Media
and Search, so if you want to invest in anyone of them, don’t forget the other
half, they are highly correlated ("IAC/InterActiveCorp. buys Ask Jeeves for $1.85 billion."). As for me, I don’t have any single solution, but, Web 2.0 (The
Hype and the Hullabaloo of Web 2.0) could be helpful for what I believe will
be one of our biggest problems of the 21st century, namely information overload
and the limited time span people have to get higher signal to noise
ratio.

The bigger the
problem, the bigger there’s a chance to build successful and profitable
companies.

And I hope some
smart Turkish entrepreneurs/investors are working on these
issues.

What are your
thoughts/ideas/comments?

Richard Skentra of Topix (via Torsten Jacobi) has a good post about the proliferation in the News2.0 area.

Read more

I have been reading the reports on Auren Hoffman‘s Connector Showcase in San Francisco, and I am very jealous that I live about 8K miles away.  The list of companies that presented represents some of the most interesting as of late. 

Auren’s Showcase is an ideal model for our modest Istanbul NEG.

I (and many others) wrote about AOL and Yahoo’s announcement regarding the enhanced emailer whitelist and the use of Goodmail last week, and now it seems like there has been a misunderstanding, and that the enhanced whitelist will remain in effect.  From my perspective, this mitigates the issue to a point, but does not resolve it.

I still have a problem with AOL, if it charges me for a mailbox, and makes me subject to spam, just because a spammer thinks I am worth the fraction of a penny to reach.  I have much less of a problem if Google displays ads on the side, without cluttering my inbox.

The second method, if anything, should be the ONLY way I should be marketed to.

Is NBC really planning to distribute content via its own set-top box?  It’s being reported via Reuters, and really nowhere else, so I don’t know if this is accurate.  If it is, I think it’s idiotic that NBC is doing deals with HW/SW companies like Aeon Digital.  Why lock itself up?  With its brand strength, all that NBC needs to do is:

1. Digitize its content
2. Make it findable
3. Set the rules on how it gets paid

Why are they risking all kinds of potential trouble by alliances like these?  If Aeon wants to feature NBC content, it can agree to pay NBC and get the syndicated content. No need to complicate things.

  LOGO2.0_2 
  Originally uploaded by Stabilo Boss.

Most readers of this blog are following the Web2.0 phenomenon so you have probably seen this by now.

I have written about microchunks before.  It’s a term I have adopted from Fred Wilson.

Today, Fred posts about the size of these microchunks, bringing to debate, if, as the song (on iTunes) is replacing the album format, the ring tone will replace the song.

I disagree with Fred because I don’t think a ring-tone is a microchunk of the song.  The song is art at an atomic level.  You can not take a part of a song, a note, etc., and treat it as art.  I think a ring tone is a piece of content, in and of itself, related to the song. It is not the same relationship that an SNL skit on Youtube has with the full show on TV.

Fred goes on to wonder, "How is it that a five second sample of a song is worth $1.99 and the
entire song is worth $0.99?  How is it that these five second samples
are getting more and more popular as the sales of the songs themselves
stagnate and may actually be in decline?"

The answer is that songs and ringtones address very different consumption needs.  Songs are about entertainment.  People listen to and enjoy them.  Ringtones are about personalization.  They are a means of expression.

(Let me start this with a disclosure:  I do not like AOL.  I don’t like their walls, which they finally took down recently, and nickel-and-dime attitudes.)

NY Times reported Sunday that Yahoo and AOL are planning to roll out a paid email service that will charge emailers to send email to their members and be assured of delivery.

I think that’s bullshit.  So far, I have tolerated Yahoo’s occasional filtering errors that resulted in legitimate email that I’m expecting to fall into the spam folder.  Mostly, I thought, that Yahoo’s making an honest effort to identify spam, and it was human (or in this case, of Bayesian filter) nature to err.

Now they are selling a bypass to that filter to anyone who’s willing to pay to get to me.

First, I pay AOL and Yahoo to provide me with the service.  In the case of AOL, it’s dollars, and in the case of Yahoo, it’s my attention to the ads.  That’s our deal.  If they will further pimp out my attention, then I deserve to get most of that money (BTW, this is where Root Markets will come into play, eventually).  Tom Evslin makes a strong argument for this point.

Second, this is a dangerous nod to spam, as long as spammers are willing to spend money.  Brad Feld and Matt Blumberg (who’s another player in the email business) addresses this point effectively in their posts on the topic.

One interesting idea that has developed in the virtual discussion surrounding this issue is that this points to the eventual success of RSS.  Steve Gillmor states:

"Who do you trust? My bet: those who shift the profit from the Spam Flag to the [users]-in-charge. "  Read: RSS

I thought it was interesting that on the heels of this news came first the scoop, and then the announcement that Fred Wilson’s USV made a catch up investment in Feedburner, an ambitious RSS player, after they had apparently passed on the Series A round a few months ago.

UPDATE: Seth Godin disagrees with me (and other linked to in this post).