Why Not? by Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres

every entrepreneur and inventor should read this book.   it is short, quick, and filled with items to make you think … literally.   the book really helps you think through problems and come up with unobvious solutions.   i highly recommend it.

I met Barry Nalebuff at a Renaissance Weekend a few years ago and have just now gotten around to reading Why Not.   that is definitely my loss.  i should have read it earlier.   especially since i loved Co-opetition, Nalebuff’s first book.   

summation: read this book.   it is a goodie.

Meebo is growing incredibly fast. I mentioned them in October when they were first starting.

i heard that yesterday they had over 300,000 logins … in one day! during that day they sent almost 9 million messages (implying almost 18 million carried). wow.

this is from a site that hasn’t yet done anything to market itself and has no viral component (yet). what does this mean? it means that Meebo has a compelling product that people really love. i mean really love.

rumor is that Meebo‘s traffic is growing at over 10%/week. if that’s true then Meebo should reach a hundred million messages carried in about 19 weeks (which would be May 31). will they do it? stay tuned and let’s check back then….

(full disclosure: i am a Meebo investor)

This is really neat.   Mike Arrington pointed me to Retrievr — you draw something in the Retrievr sketch pad and then is searches something similar.

Mike explains:

Retrievr has a Flash sketch pad built into the site. Draw something – anything – and it will fetch Flickr images that are similar.

try it … very impressive.  we’re getting closer and closer to fast image recognition technology which will totally change the way we process and search pictures, photos, videos, etc.   

This is an interesting job: looking for a CEO of a consumer Internet start-up.

job is worth checking out …

My favorite story about new technology is about my mom. And yes, she’s a Luddite.

Just a few years ago, my mom was far away from the technology revolution. Though living in cosmopolitan new york, she still had many old-school sensibilities. I remember growing up when she needed help using the microwave. Or that she hated watching TV … partly because there is nothing good on TV but also because she did not know how to change the channel or control the volume.

My mom’s an artist and I guess it was her good fortune that both her sons became computer engineers.

My mom’s very smart and an entrepreneur … and she quickly realized the power of the internet. It could potentially save her hours of time. In the past, if she wanted to draw a dolphin, she’d go to the library to get a book on dolphins. But now, one can easily go to the Internet and get pictures. But my mom didn’t know how to use a computer so she’d rely on friends to print out pictures for her.

Then one day my mom got a cell phone and her world slowly started to change. She realized she could even make calls in the car. Both my brother and I had been trying to get her to get a mobile phone for a long time (with the repeated promises of telling her we’d call more often if she got one). But it wasn’t until she got one that she really realized the power of mobility.

Getting a computer was a bit harder.

Though she had a computer and internet connection in the house for a long time, my mother stayed away from the computer — completely scared of it. But after her sons nagged her for years, my mother finally decided to put her toe in the water and become a user. That was about a year ago.

I remember her first phone call to me:

“Auren … why aren’t the keys in alphabetical order?”

Good question! I realized that not only was she unfamiliar with the keyboard … she did not even know how to use a typewriter. She is an artist who likes to make things with her hands.

After explaining the history of QWERTY keyboards and the like, my mother finally settled into hunt and peck mode and me her first email. Success. Today she emails me all the time (realizing it is a much better medium to get a hold of me then the phone). And she’ll probably be the first one to emailing me about this blog post.

So a year ago (in 2004), my mother finally entered the 1980s.

Then, this summer (about 9 months later), my mom calls me … on Skype. That’s right, she skyped me. Some of her friends in Europe and her sister (who lives overseas) told my mom about it. Free is a great motivator.

So, no, my mom is still not a technology genius. But she is now a heavy user of mobile phones, email, and Skype and has moved decades in just a few short years.

Even in the scary world of technology, you can tech old dogs new tricks.

Dave Pell is on to something good again … he started Rollyo, a neat build-your-own search engine that sits on top of Yahoo search.

i made a Rollyo search where people can search all sites that pertain to Summation:
http://rollyo.com/auren/summation/

you’ve maybe already seen this … Manish Shah from karmaOne forwarding it to me:

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

it is brilliant. you help the machines do work (in this case, determining what photos best represents a particular storefront and address) and Amazon will pay you a few cents every time your page is viewed.

i spent some time on it and matched 14 photos with address in San Mateo and i’ve made $0.39. given it took me about 20 minutes, that’s about $1.17/hr … much better then the wages in many developing countries. i can potentially see hundreds of people in these countries logging on the MTurk and making money in the future.

thanks Manish for passing this on…

Companies like Browster (see Browster jobs) and Senopy are changing the way we browse and navigate the web through the browser.

some people see the death of the browser as imminent but i think the browser will live for a long time … and these companies show how it is being extended.

when you navigate using Browster you can see a preview of what following a link will be like by simply putting your mouse over the link. at Senopy, a web site operator can do the same thing with linked advertising. (and thanks Saar Gur from Adteractive for pointing out the link between these two companies to me).

in fact, previewing web pages before actually viewing them (and utilizing more contextual information like help menus) is going to make the web browsing experience increasingly rich. and a lot of things are becoming increasingly easy to do with AJAX. (we’ve been testing a few of these things out at the karmaOne project and it is pretty cool).

Check out Don’t Click It — Bree Humphries sent the link to me. a very cool site exploring what happens if you can navigate by direction and a mouse … but not by actually clicking on things. it turns out it works surprisingly well.

ok … IBM hasn’t bought Sun … yet. But it will.

my brother Jonathan Hoffman is my source for all new cool things tech. when he was in college at Carnegie Mellon, he was the first person to tell me about Napster. throughout his stint programming at CMU, he gave me the scoop on all the new developments.

when he graduated college in 2002, i thought i might have to adopt a new brother in college because i was under the impression that Jonathan only knew about all the cool things because he was a student. boy was i wrong. i continue to get a steady stream of cool sites from him to this day.

One site he sent me last month is Ning. This is another site combining mash-ups, tagging, etc (like Frappr, Trulia, etc.) to do something useful. i love how people are taking some data and a few plug-ins from places like Google and building cool tools.

thanks Jonathan!

wow. check out this hosted Karaoke service (salesforce.com for karaoke):
kSolo

Saar Gur told me about this site … really amazing what they put together. another great Internet business.