TechCrunch Real-time Stream Event

A few days back (yes, I am a little behind on the blogging...) I had an opportunity to attend the TechCrunch Real-time Stream conference in Redwood City. The theme was the real-time web. And as usual, I volunteered my way in to avoid paying the $99 student price. This conference was spawned due the increasing popularity of many real-time web applications that are taking over our lives, namely Twitter among other things. I personally am not a huge Twitter fan, but it is gaining a huge following lately, with all the media attention in Iran, etc...


The real-time web does not revolve solely around Twitter however. Many startups are jumping at this opportunity to providing real-time data. Real-time search has attracted a whole slew of companies trying to dominate this niche. There are also a lot of startups like NetVibes and Seesmic which are trying to congregate all the real-time data from all the different social networks and showcase it in easy-to-use application. Over the course of the conference I would estimate hearing about 100 startup names, and those only represent the prominent ones in Silicon Valley. Who knows how many have actually entered this space. Ron Conway, a prominent venture capitalist who has been known to have invested in Google, PayPal, and other big successes has estimated the entire real-time web market to be worth about $5 billion.

My views: Unlike many, I do see a monetization opportunity here. However, I also see room for only a few prominent players, Twitter being one of them. Two reasons: First reason is that right now, I think real-time is vastly over-hyped with hundreds of startups in this space. This is going to produce a lot of clutter on the web, which I cannot imagine users handling. This in turn is going to reduce the hype and need of having real-time instant updates all the time, leaving room for only a few players to monetize this space sufficiently to stay in business.

Second reason is intellectual property. There is virtually no IP in this concept. I can see there being one in real-time search but that will converge with traditional search algorithms, which Google is leading. In other domains, the winners are going to be decided because of aggressive marketing, viral-ness of the software, and UI design. Users are not going to be switching between applications doing the same thing as that will be a hassle, so whoever gets them first will win.

All-in-all, I'm not too excited about this space, though I will be keeping tabs on how things progress.

Semantic Technology Conference 2009

Over the last two days, I spent my time at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009 in San Jose, CA. I was fortunate to be in the area and managed to get a free exhibit pass AND managed to get my manager to allow me to skip work. It was a fantastic opportunity to learn more about the emerging Semantic Web, network with the key visionaries in the area, and finally provide an answer to myself to a question that hasn't been clear lately: What value does the Semantic Web and related technologies provide to the end user in the short term and long term? I will try to provide a simple answer for now (as it is easy to get lost in the technical jargon out there): The world is becoming increasingly data-driven and your data is adding to this transformation. The Semantic Web is about making your data more valuable as this transformation to an information driven environment takes place. There it is. Simple.

I will be blogging more about my findings and thoughts in this area as time allows.

MIT/Stanford Venture Lab - Mobile Computing Event

Today, I tagged along with a good friend of mine at work to an event at Stanford University sponsored by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab. We had just found about the event that very day and were disappointed to see it was sold out. But we went anyways and realized we could "volunteer" our way in. We signed up as volunteers and had access to a huge dinner and an event with valuable information and fantastic people! Our job was simply to collect and recycle all the plastic name tags at the end of the event. Not a bad deal.

It was related to the future of mobile computing from applications, mobile operating systems, hardware needs, and venture capital outlooks and business models -- http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=275. It was a great opportunity to network with developers, VCs, and some big corporate representatives including VP of Developer Marketing at Palm and Blackberry Director of Developer Relations at RIM. And not to mention the free food :)

I am looking forward to future VLAB events this summer!

I saw Ray Kurzweil live today!

So, a friend of mine, Chris Luna, told me today that he had an extra ticket to go see Ray Kurzweil live at Coolidge Corner, Boston. Kurzweil was going to give a sneak peek of his new and upcoming film, The Transcended Man, and also discuss a movie he is producing, The Singularity Is Near, based of his best-seller book with the same name. I grabbed this opportunity in a heartbeat! I have been a fan since I read The Singularity is Near back in high school. At the event, in addition to learning about his movie productions, I learned about several of his theories regarding what the future holds for mankind. His predictions for the future exponential trend of all information-based technologies and what kinds of amazing avenues these trends can lead to can seem farfetched at first. But if you actually look at his models, his track-record, it all surprisingly fits. His presentation is uploaded on the web at his website, KurzweilAI.net. I didn't get a chance to note down the exact URL though I wish that I did in retrospect. It was an amazing evening - the future is going to be very very exciting.

IPTV and Consumer-Controlled Advertising

Recently, I came across a video where I saw Vint Cerf, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, talk about the future of IPTV and consumer-controlled advertising. I was intrigued to learn what he had to say.



Essentially, the whole idea of consumers initiating the entire advertising experience and the technology automatically being there to facilitate consumer's curiosity about a product they see is something new. Today, we are bombarded with links, banners, and all sorts of ads that don't really apply to our lives. We have habitually learned to ignore them, so even when they MIGHT help us find what we are looking for, we subconsciously choose to ignore them based on past experience. So the first step is to make ads seem as either relevant or not-clutter in the eyes of consumers. Product placement achieves this by embedding the ads INTO what we consider "important" and as a result, the ads were no longer seen as mere clutter. This way, we don't simply ignore them. Cerf's insights go one step further: in addition to us not ignoring them, we will also see these product placement ads as reliable entry points into the consumer shopping realm. We will be able to take our initial reactions of "Oh that laptop is nice..." or "Cool mp3 player" to the next level by seeing the specs, price ranges, and customer reviews, etc... simply with a press of a button (or touch to the screen!) And the best part is WE will initiate the entire process, and in the future, technology will be set in place to facilitate this.

With technologies like TIVO and consumers simply fast-forwarding through ads in online videos, product placement is becoming more and more popular. Fusing this concept with the seamless touch-screen based human-computer interaction could completely change the way consumers interact with advertising.

Connecting Mind and Machine

I was browsing through the web today, and came across this fascinating article by Forbes.

[Link to article]

I genuinely believe this is the next big advancement in human computer interaction, impacting our day-to-day lives at a very large scale. As we immerse our lives with technology each day, there is a constantly growing need to make all the clutter more manageable and easier to use!

As a prospective for an Electrical Engr/Computer Sci and Brain/Cognitive Sci major combination at MIT, seeing this kind of exciting research being done in this area really inspires me to learn as much as I can about the field.