Month: November 2008

Some people look at Google with disdain, they worry about privacy or they worry about market domination or other such things.

I’m a Google fan. I use their products all the time. And I applaud them for taking big bets like Android as well as their approach to deploying smaller, incremental apps from Google Labs and other product teams.

But don’t get me wrong. Google has left many areas open for innovation by other companies. The list is long and attractive.

I think social search is one of those areas.

For example if I do a Google search on ‘LeBron James’, the first result I’m going to see is the Wikipedia entry for LJ.

That’s helpful if I wanted to see his bio.

But that doesn’t tell me what my friends think about LeBron James or what people are thinking & talking about right now and in the moment.

Twitter Search provides something different. Twitter Search is a real time social search experience that shows you what the millions of Twitter users are talking about right now. If you do a Twitter Search on LeBron James you will see things like tweet.

I love that.

Another example is OneRiot. OneRiot (formerly known as Me.dium) launched their social search product yesterday. While Twitter Search tells you what people are talking about right now, OneRiot will show you where people are surfing online right now (results are based on the current popularity among their 2million user base). So a LeBron James search will show this result.

I’m quite biased of course. We are investors in both Twitter and OneRiot.

But I encourage you to check out these search engines even if you aren’t a Twitter or OneRiot user.

And let me know what you think.

I’ve got three kids.

Lauren and I have a sort of a ritual on the kids birthdays

After they goto bed, we take a look at older photos of the kids and see how much and how fast they’ve grown.

We also look at home videos of the kids from years gone by.

It’s a great feeling. I love watching these videos

But home videos have a long way to go.

Capturing video was always hard. But the equipment is getting better, cheaper and less complicated. The new FlipHD looks promising. That’s a good sign of things to come. Editing is easy with tools like iMovie but still very time consuming. 

And getting that video on your big screen isn’t easy…yet. Import HD video from a camcorder on your home server and try to stream it on your big screen. How do you do that?

Well you could buy a MacMini and use FrontRow. Or you could use AppleTV.

But you gotta make sure you transcode your home videos to a format that Apple supports. I do that in our family but it’s a hassle to say the least and I’m sure a show stopper for most people.

We need something that can handle any video format you wanna throw at your big screen.

We need a better way to do sentimental streaming.

Because that content is way better than anything Hulu has to offer.

There are reports today that Blockbuster wants to launch a new set top box. I guess the idea is to offer a competitor to the Netflix/Roku box.

Blockbuster is thinking about it all wrong. They are paying attention to the Roku/hardware part of the puzzle. Instead they should be paying attention to Netflix offering their content on multiple platforms like Macs, Windows, Roku and TiVo.

But a new box? That doesn’t seem like the answer.

We continue to see new hardware for consumers wanting a better experience on the big screen. But locking the device to a particular serivce or closed network doesn’t make any sense to me. So I guess I really don’t understand these new set tops.

That’s like your browser only working with a few websites. Can you imagine an ESPN PC for example? It just wouldn’t work.

We need the exact opposite of these things. We need something open.

Open to all hardware, content, open source and web services.