Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

In what I'm sure will be oft quoted, Joe Kraus, one of the founders of Excite, has started a blog about entrepreneurship. The reason I feel the need to quote him is related to a comment about a very highly placed person at Microsoft vehemently indicating that search was not a business.

That was back in 1995, and I was working for a search company at the time. We were making money on ads through web site, but we also sold enterprise search technology. Search was a business then. Yahoo was new, as was Excite, but Alta Vista didn't exist yet. Companies were building portals - web starting points - that organized the information for the users in the ways they were expected to want to use it.

Then search and portals fell out of favor as a business, probably because it wasn't driving lots of revenue and companies couldn't succeed based on ad revenue alone. Then of course the internet bubble burst, and lots of consolidation happened.

But about that time Google appeared with spectacular search technology and the ability to find the answers. Google even became a verb, and provided many users with the definitive way to find things on the web. So search became a business again, as did search engine optimization, as marketers tried to find ways to make search engines treat them better. Even Microsoft now feels the need to do substantial search research.

So search, the business that wasn't now drives a lot of revenue, and Google, the company that brought it back, has really changed the way people interact with the web. In fact, it is probably easier to find a site I liked by using Google, rather that setting a bookmark. Search, for many, is the first point of entry when they are looking for information.

Yet Eric Brill, a senior Microsoft researcher said that the search business may fall apart as search gets better at finding things, forcing advertising revenue to decrease. He also suggested that it will get cheaper and cheaper to build a search engine, to the point where the technology is commoditized. It is surprising though that, given the resources Microsoft is throwing at search, they have yet to get it right.

Comments like this assume that one type of search, keyword for example, is suitable. However there may be many more types of search, such as context or latent semantic analysis, that prove to be useful in some combination with keywords. Other suggestions have included combining search with social networks to enhance the searches based on what my friends are searching for.

Search is still in its infancy, and there will certainly be numerous ways in the future for us to find what we need.

CalTech is doing a study using MRIs to look at brains to see how they respond to everything products to people. Called neuromarketing, it attempts to reveal how emotions react to stimuli such as advertising.

If the science turns out to be real, then is could allow marketers to design ads that directly stimulate emotions such as pleasure or fear. And eventually I can foresee portable scanners in places like car dealerships and model home sales offices to see just how much you really want that car or house. Luckily I can also foresee a market for scanner jamming devices which indicate the equivalent of a poker face.

Sometimes technology concerns me deeply. I'd like to keep my thoughts to myself for a little while longer thanks.

According to Search Engine Lowdown, David Scacco of Google says that 28% of Google searches are for a "product name", 9% are for a "brand name" and 5% are searches for a "company name". "Brand" keywords also have a 8x higher ROI than generic keywords. So nearly half the time people are searching for the name of something, as opposed to generic concept type searches.

This probably applies a great deal more to mature, well known products like BMW automobiles, or Oracle database software. However, if the user is looking for the solution to a business problem they have, I would think them more likely to grasp at some simple word combinations to try to find what they are looking for. Where users would now search for iPod (the brand), a couple of years ago they might have searched for "MP3 player".

I wonder if Google tries to draw any conclusions from repetitive multiple word searches as to what people are searching for. It might be an interesting clue to future technology and perhaps culture.

David Weinberger is blogging the Bellhead Nethead conference, and posted this panel discussion about the Universal Service fee and whether it should be required of VoIP phones as well. The goal of the Universal Service fee was to provide access to advanced telecommunications services to all consumers at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas.

One of the participants comments that "One reason we're 15th in broadband adoption is that our dialup rates (isp and phone service) are so cheap." I beg to differ. I lived in a small rural town about 35 minutes outside of Boston where neither the phone company or cable companies felt there was sufficient revenue to be generated from broadband access. A small provider filled the gap at an initial cost of $500, and $60 per month, versus the more reasonable $40 per month in urban areas. That eventually changed when AT&T sold its cable division.

I'm in the process of moving to VoIP myself, but that is for home use. The truth is that I use my mobile phone far more than my home phone, and that is the number I give to people. I just forward the phone if need be. And throughout Europe, the penetration of cell phones is far higher. I expect that in the future my kids won't even have home phones, which will alter the economics of local phone service as we know it.

Everyone seems to think that Google is going to introduce a web browser, possibly called Gbrowser. While I am sure that they would do an excellent job, I question the wisdom of yet another web browser (YAWB).

I use Firefox, and I often encounter web sites (like Weightwatcher.com that I mentioned recently), that design their sites for one browser. Others are just not able to their sites with multiple browsers, and the introduction of more browser idiosyncracies will just complicate the problem.

I understand Google's desire to expand their grasp of the desktop, but perhaps they could do that by striking and agreement with an existing browser like Firefox or Opera, and minimize the pain for net users everywhere.

Intel has a pretty cool idea for a virtual assistant for mobile users that they call Persona. Their research paper uses a travel example to contend that reformatting data and user interfaces for mobile/PDA access still makes it difficult for the user to deal with.

Instead they suggest the concept of a virtual assistant that can assess the complex information and reduce it to a few simple choices on the part of the user. For example, rather that forcing the user to check schedules on their PDA, change car rentals and hotels, and inform colleagues, Persona can instead prompt the user with just a few flight options, dealing with everything else in the background.

In fact, as site like Expedia or Travelocity has the capability to do a lot of this already, and would merely need to be exposed as a service for mobile network operators, perhaps through the Open Service Access (OSA)/Parlay specification. Imagine reducing your travel headaches to a simple one screen selection on your mobile handset.

As if spam wasn't enough, no we need to worry about spit - spam over internet telephony. It seems that unscrupulous companies could send 1000 messages per minute over VoIP.

I haven't got my Vonage phone yet so I'm not sure how they would deal with that. I would like to suggest that they log all of my incoming voice mails and allow me to filter out or automatically delete numbers I don't recognize. It would also be useful to create rules for numbers that I want to block. This kind of filter would be very useful on my non-VoIP phone as well. It would be nice if my local exchange carrier provided some of those services as well.

It seems that all of the spam providers save up their messages and send them to me on the weekend. They are primarily pornographic in nature, with a few mortgage and viagra ads thrown in for good measure. All of the messages indicate clearly that they are in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act, but the porn certainly isn't as it does not identify itself with the text "Sexually Explicit" in the subject line.

I still use Microsoft Outlook for email. I love Thunderbird, but still find the integrated mail/contacts/calendar/tasks/journal in Outlook quite useful. Yet when I tried to create a rule to automatically delete the messages I realized that Outlook is completely inadequate when it comes to defining the rules. A good deal of the spam comes from different ids within the same domain, so I set out to block the domain. Unfortunately, Outlook does not provide a method to select a domain name. It claims to be able to check for specific words in the sender's address, but when I tried it failed to recognize the domain.

So I'm stuck manually deleting my email spam for now until I find a better way.

In Electronic Recruiting News, John Sumser says:

Candidates should be treated like people. Seems simple enough.

I live in a small high technology community about an hour west of Toronto, Canada. Since moving here two years ago I have had occasion to deal with several companies in the area or all sizes, for both consulting engagements and full time work. I have met and interviewed at these companies up to the CEO level, and usually through several meetings. Yet not a single one of these companies have ever bothered to contact me regarding the status or my contract or recruitment. Even if I just wasn't the right candidate, a simple phone call to let me know that I was being eliminated would seem to be common courtesy. This was the case even in companies where I had been referred by an employee, and no feedback was given to them either. In some cases I was able to get a status by being proactive, in another case a contract offer was withdrawn - a fact of which I was informed by email two days after I had contacted the company about it.

Contrast that with what happened to me this past week. On Monday I send a cold call email to a company called Redknee, a provider of network-based mobile applications in Toronto. On Tuesday their Human Resources department contacted me, telling me they would like to speak to me regarding a position they had available. After a very pleasant and forthcoming phone screen interview on Wednesday, I received a call asking if I could come for a few hours next Wednesday to meet with their executives. Their recruiting process was quick, efficient, informative, I was treated extremely well and the staff clearly shared not only the good, but also the bad and what they were doing to correct it. I also cold called a staff member and got a very similar analysis.

The upshot of all of this is that I've only dealt with the Human Resources department at Redknee, but I feel that if they treat potential candidates this well, then they must treat customers even better. The company seems to have a pervasive good attitude toward the people it deals with. Whether I end up working there or not, I would feel comfortable recommending the company to others.

Conversely, with the companies that did not feel the need to treat candidates with even the most basic courtesy, I cannot help but wonder whether or not the attitude is a reflection of how the company deals with its customers. How a company treats both existing and potential employees says a great deal about the culture of that company.

To those of you who have dealt with Redknee, I would love to hear your comments.

I'm the kind of guy that likes to use the smallest laptop possible to work on, so I guess that size matters with computing, and small is good. If you long for the days of compact efficient software, rather than the bloated products so prevalent today, then you should take a look at tinyapps.org.

It's bad enough that I would be committing a federal crime in Canada if I dare to subscribe to DIRECTV. Today the provincial goverment in Ontario rushed through legislation to stop a U.S.-based for profit health care company from doing business in Canada, regardless of whether Canadians want it or not.

By law, Canadians are forbidden from paying for services that are covered by medicare, regardless of the government's ability to provide those services. It is also illegal to pay to get an earlier spot in the waiting line.

Perhaps it's just me, but if someone wants to pay for a service that they could get for free, then why not let them. This should take some strain off of the publicly funded system. The long term worry is that eventually service providers would gravitate to where the money is, but that is unlikely given that the doctor/clinic/hospital system is publicly funded and controlled. Of course to protect health care the government has set up a snitch line so that people can let them know when somebody is doing something wrong. That way we can pit people against each other.

At any rate, in a country that claims to provide personal freedom, why is my right to make choices being taken away little by little? The argument for DIRECTV being illegal is that it might detrimentally affect Canadian culture; in Canada every televison channel must be approved by the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC). They can also stop a television or radio station from broadcasting if they don't like the content. With health care it is the protection of that great Canadian legacy - socialized medicine.

We need to eliminate some of the bureaucracy and restore the right to make our own choices.

Over at the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization, my friend David Weinberger laments the destruction of the internet by the entertainment cartel, who with Congress are going to lock up all content in the United States. He thanks G-d for Canada to the north, but the government here clearly sides with big entertainment so it may not always be so.

There is certainly a problem in so far as the media industries seem not to have a clue about what their customers want, and being intent on taking the concept of copyright far beyond anything ever intended. The sad thing about that is that there will likely never be any derivative works. Think for a second about the world without Mickey Mouse or Walt Disney. Mickey's first movie was Steamboat Wille, a parody of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr. Under pending law, Steamboat Willie would have been a violation of copyright unless Disney had ante'd up the cash to pay royalties. Parodies would no longer exist. No Airplane, Hardware Wars, Thumb Wars, Spy Hard, or Scary Movie 1, 2 or 3. Probably no Weird Al Yankovic either.

Maybe this battle is lost. Maybe there will be a chill over existing content. If so we will have lost the ability to use a chunk of history. However, movements like Creative Commons make me believe that there is still some sanity left in the world. Some people realize that the only way to propagate culture and history is to share it, albeit in a reasonable way. There needs to be some way that artists can be compensated for their work. As in my earlier post though, record companies should not be able to treat something like online music sales as a reason to charge double royalties.

There must be at least one smart person at a media company who realizes that some people still want physical items like CDs, while many others love the ability to have more transient media, which they would be happy to pay for once, and then be able to use it on various playback mechanisms. If perhaps the item could be treated like a unique physical item that moves from place to place. People are basically honest, but I believe that they expect the entertainment industry to give them what they want in the way of technological access to media. Yet the media companies just seem more intent upon giving less and less. They are unfortunately fighting a technology fight that they can't win, and fueling all of the ways to subvert digital rights management (DRM). It would be so much easier to be proactive.

Then again, if I were a company that made my money from the distribution of physical media, I would be pretty concerned too. However, as David points out, they seem to have a lot of marketing value. Perhaps they could concentrate on that. Maybe ask the customer what they really want. And listen.

I'm trying to be healthy so the other day I went to WeightWatchers.com for some recipes that were good for me. When I went to the site using Mozilla Firefox I encountered the following:

please upgrade your browser
You're just a few steps away from enjoying the exciting features on our site, including our online Journal, Weight Tracker, and Community Recipe Swap.

To access these features, your browser must be set up to work with some of the special coding on our tools and pages. Below is a step-by-step guide to configuring your browser so it's compatible with our site.

I do occasionally encounter this so I switched, albeit grudgingly, to Internet Explorer 6.0. I was greeted with the same message. I quickly dashed off a note to Tech Support at WeightWatchers.com including the following information:

I am using Internet Explorer 6.0.2600.0000.xpclient.010817-1148 and Mozilla Firefox 1.0PR.

We are sorry to report that the browsers below are incompatible with our website.

I.E. 4.x on PC and MAC
I.E. 5.0 on MAC
Netscape 4.75 and 6.2 on PC and MAC
Safari 1.0 on MAC
Opera (Avant)
Compuserve
Cell Phone and PDA Browsers
Any Version of Mozilla browsers including Firefox and Camino

We recommend that you either switch or upgrade your browser to:

I.E 6.0 and up on PC (including AOL)
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.asp

Netscape 7.0 and up on PC and MAC
http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/download.jsp

Safari 1.1 and up on MAC
http://www.apple.com/safari

Since you obviously did not read my mail, I will point out again that I am using IE 6.0 and your site did not work.

At this time, we currently support Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Safari browsers. We understand your desire to use Mozilla and other browsers to view our website and we understand that there are ways to configure these browsers which will allow you to do so. However, results may be erratic when using our site with a non-supported browser. Please be aware that we cannot support browsers that are still in the beta phase.

I went back to the site again with IE and just for fun copied the working page link from IE and pasted it into Firefox. It worked just fine. Unfortunately rather that let me decide that for myself they had decided to deny me the opportunity to use their page in my choice of browser. I guess the customer isn't always right.

I've decided that I can probably find other ways to stay healthy. Perhaps another health conscious site would like to have me as a customer?

According to The Independent, record companies take a substantial cut of royalties from online music. This is making the online sale of music unprofitable for many sites, and will force some out of business.

According to the article, US figures show that iTunes gets 4 cents from each 99 cent track sale, music publishers get about 8 cents, while "mechanical copyright" holders - generally the record labels - take 62 cents or more. Copyright owners have doubled their share of royalties, even though most manufacturing costs have been eliminated.

This should embarrass the record companies. Instead of trying to encourage legal downoading of music, they see it as yet another cash cow, where they can make twice as much as they did before, without the bother of manufacturing or distribution costs.

It is unfortunate that there is currently no model for artist direct music sales, eliminating the record companies from equation. This would also create a new market for music marketing companies which could do the PR job that the record companies are now doing for much less money.

As for finding new talent, I'm not so sure that the record companies are all that great at that anyway. Perhaps we are reaching the point where word of mouth (or blog or web) is more efficient.

Siemens is developing a phone that can determine if you have bad breath.

Now if someone could just develop a phone that tells me if I've accessorized correctly.

An item from Marginal Revolution talks about a person in Canada, Bill Binfet, who needs a knee replacement and has offered to buy an earlier spot from someone ahead of him in the queue. The government of course says it is unethical for a doctor to do this, but Binfet doesn't want the doctor to do it; he wants to buy the spot from the person who has it.

The Canadian health care system is a mess. There is single tier health care, and by law you cannot pay for private service, unless of course you are a politician or hockey player. So there are tremendously long waiting lines for things like MRIs. Not everyone has a family physician, and waiting times in emergency rooms cam run up to 9 hours. Many claim that health care is free as Canada has socialized medicine, but many things are not covered and must be paid out of pocket. And recently the province of Ontario instituted a health care premium of up to $900 annually, in addition to a Fair Share Health Levy paid along with provincial income taxes.

Even if you are able to pay for service, and wish to do so, you cannot. And it may indeed be unethical to let someone buy their position in the queue, but is it reasonable that a person's treatment depends entirely on when they got in line? Is there any objective way to assess who needs treatment more?

A friend of mine is in the hospital awaiting cardiac bypass surgery, which he is getting quite fast I must point out. However, he is still in a waiting line, albeit short, and he must go to a hospital an hour from home to get the surgery. He just happened to go into hospital with chest pains. If someone has a massive heart attack today, they will be behind him in the queue. Is that reasonable?

It isn't clear to me how to allocate these scarce resources, but until a way is found to do so, health care in Canada continues to deteriorate.

Seth Godin expounds on Number 10 in his list of Lies to protect the status quo, suggesting that:

"In a world where things are viral, you're more likely to succeed with passive networking (strangers recommending you) than the old school active kind"

When you are starting something, which I am also currently going through, you have to find a way to infect people so that the virus catches hold and spreads. To be successful, you still have to infect a "sneezer", to use Seth's vernacular. A sneezer is a person so well connected that when he or she sneezes, everyone catches a cold, so to speak. And the message, or virus itself, has to be a sticky one. That means that it still depends on who you know, or how closely you are connected to a sneezer.

Audi of America is the first AlwaysOn Media Partner to launch its own Keiretsu on the AlwaysOn (AO) network. Currently appearing as mostly an advertising site, it will be interesting to see how much community actually develops.

I've been a very happy A6 owner for a couple of years now, so I think it's a pretty cool idea.

It may seem odd, but Chamberlain Group sued Skylink Technologies under the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging that Skylink's universal garage door opener remote illegally accessed the software in the Chamberlain openers. In what is described as a landmark decision regarding technological innovation and interoperability, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals said it was okay to sell garage door remotes that worked with any brand of garage door.

Having owned several garage door openers over the years, I used the same Skylink remote with most of them, saving me the hassle of buying new remotes for each house. I'm not sure who would have foreseen the DMCA being used to prevent me from doing this, but it certainly would have been detrimental for me. I guess we're extremely lucky that none of the home audio/video vendors saw fit to sue the makers of universal remotes, which I also use in abundance.

This seems quite a stretch for copyright law, which seems only to stifle competition and customer choice. It is not clear whether of not Chamberlain was willing to license the technology.

Apparently the internet has will has experienced the equivalent of a population explosion, with the number of online users surpassing one billion by 2005. And Intel predicts the end of the World Wide Web.

In just a few short years we seems to have replicated all of the faults of the world onto the internet. We have overpopulation, viruses, internet terrorism, the desire for control and who knows what else. The internet is a phonemonal tool for communication, as proven by the blogosphere. It is a spectacular way to share information, available to all people equally.

Let's hope that it can stay that way.

Lately I have found myself looking for a career opportunity (ok, a job), and I am astounded at how poorly high technology firms recruit new employees. They seem to assume that employees will flock to them and they need do nothing more than post an opening on a job board. Most do not acknowledge resume submissions in any way whatsoever. Given the current job market they can get away with it, but that will not always be the case.

I currently live in Waterloo, Canada, a small community of high technology companies, mostly spun off from the University of Waterloo. There is a ready supply of cheap labor in graduating students, which these companies avail themselves of. It becomes a bit more difficult when hiring more senior folks - though they recruit in similar fashion. They post a job on a board. You fill out a complex profile that requires you to re-enter everything that is already carefully crafted in your resume. Then you wait. Even the tried and true method of networking doesn't help much.

I've got a fair bit of specific domain expertise in different areas but I've been told by at least one local company that "we can hire a student to do the same job for much less". Of course the student would have no real world experience but that did not seem to be a concern.

I found out yesterday from the local technology advocacy organization, Communitech, that there are apparently 1,000 job openings in my town (population 102,300) and the HR people just can't find people to fill them. Yet I know many folks who can't find a position. One person suggested that it was not lack of candidates, but lack of inexpensive candidates, something that I have seen personally. Regardless of that, it seems that there ought to be a way to get these people together.

And if you're looking for somebody with Marketing, Product Management, Business Development, Sales, and Development background, with success in opening new vertical markets, please feel free to contact me...

I was reading the book Leaders by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus and it occurred to me. Where have all the leaders gone?

It seems that all of the great leaders I can think of are no longer with us. There are some people in the world who exhibit that sort of quality, but there are few who provide the kind of inspiration that a JFK, Churchill, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King might invoke. There are precious few company CEOs that I might include on that list as well.

Are we just devoid of leadership, or am I expecting too much? Can anyone suggest a leader that inspires people on that scale? I think that the world is in need of leadership - not politics or management - but vision and and the ability to unite us in a common goal, for a common good.

I had difficulty naming even a few real leaders. Give it a try.

I've commented on Firefox several times now. I've used it very happily for over a year and it just keeps improving. And no, nobody is paying me to say this. I've also noticed that lots of folks I talk to are using it as well, and I'm converting more than a few too.

Even still, I was surprised when my Dad told me the other day that he used Firefox as well. He is in his 70s - though he doesn't look it (in case he's reading this) - so I guess I didn't expect him to be using alternative software. But he is.

So if you haven't tried it, but you have recently felt the need to "take back the web", you can click in the upper corner of this page to get your very own copy of Firefox. I believe in promoting the software that I use. And tell your friends; you'll be doing them a favor.

When I was a kid I used to record songs from my transistor radio. This did not seem to be a problem, and nobody complained that I was breaking the law. It was personal use - fair use I suppose - and I wasn't selling them.

Fast forward to 2004, and people recording from digital satellite radio. Suddenly this is a copyright infringement problem. According to this article in the Washington Post (free registration required), indicates that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is now concerned about recording of digital radio broadcasts. They have even suggested the use of a digital broadcast flag to the FCC so that they can limit what my recording equipment can do.

So what changed? Is it the fact that copying is easier? That the quality is better? Or that I might not buy the CD?

I am not pirating music. I merely want to do as I have always done - record the occasional song from the radio. What is different now?