Author: Randy Stewart

Darfur Wall

There were a lot of good speakers and 5 minute presentations at last night’s Ignite Seattle, but one that stuck with me in particular was Jonah Burke’s Darfur Wall project.

From O’Reilly Radar:

Jonah Burke left Microsoft to found the The Darfur Wall with his father and brother a couple of weeks ago. If you’re not aware Darfur is in a crisis. The Burkes have created a novel website for collecting money. There are 400,000 subdued numbers on the site; each time a dollar is donated a new number is lit. All of the monies go to Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and others. In just 21 days, they have raised $5052 from 445 donors. Buying a number is fast and easy; consider it. (Blog).

When I look for donations to make during the holiday season, I always try to look for both local and global causes. In some ways, this accomplishes both. Helping someone locally who is trying to affect change globally seems like a perfect mix.

Jonah – I didn’t get to meet you last night, but I really appreciate the work you are doing to help this troubled region.

Contribute

DirecTV Dish Network Downloads Features Satellite Radio Satellite Television Video

Ditching Cable has launched!!

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date November 28, 2006
1 Comment on Ditching Cable has launched!!

In the last few months, I’ve become more and more disgruntled with my cable service. The cost is high and I simply don’t watch enough television to justify the price. The video quality is poor and the DVR makes me not want to watch television. The selection of video on demand and movies on the “movie” channels are so poor that we also subscribe to Netflix to supplement our entertainment “needs.”

I looked hard at our television viewing habits and realized that most of the tv programming we watch is freely available over the air. There are some exceptions but by and large our “regularly scheduled programming” comes from the big networks. The value proposition is just not there.

While we do receive HD signals from our provider and that provider is increasing the amount of HD channels on the network, by and large, HD content comes from the major networks. Standard definition, or SD content is so compressed, legitimate download sources are starting to look better.

Crappy picture, lack of selection and high costs leave me with two options.

I could sit and complain about it.
Or, I could ditch cable.

Given all that, we decided to ditch cable and launch this blog to tell you about it.

If you’d like to know more about my little experiment, head on over to Ditching Cable, where I’ll be showing folks how easy it is to get rid of your cable subscription. It’s a little raw right now, but I’ll be spending some of my time fixing it up in the next few weeks.

Features Games Social Media

My Jellyfish addiction

So, I’ve thought a lot about how gaming mechanisms can make sites more fun to use and my friends at Jellyfish.com have made a very addictive experience.

Jellyfish is yet another comparison shopping site, like Shopping.com, Epinions, NexTag, Yahoo! Shopping, Froogle, yadda, yadda, but they have a few twists up their sleeve. First, they incorporate cash back on most, if not all purchases made through the site. While most of the time, these are small percentages, they do add up.

The far more interesting feature, however, is Smack Shopping. Essentially, Smack Shopping is Woot! meets reverse eBay. Every day at 11 am EST, Smack Shopping offers up a limited quantity of a product, like an iPod or Zune. As time progresses, the price of the product decreases until they sell out.

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Naturally, some products sell more quickly than others, but so far many products have sold for almost 1/2 off their retail price. So, why don’t people wait longer for the value to go to zero? Theoretically, users could wait it out and get products for free. Fortunately for Jellyfish, most products have a value to people that is a lot higher than zero.

This is classic prisoner’s dilemma, which Wikipedia defines as “a type of non-zero-sum game in which two players can “cooperate” with or “defect” (i.e. betray) the other player.” This is frequently used by policeman to get one criminal to rat out their partner. If no one says anything, both prisoners could walk free. If they both talk, they both go to prison. In Jellyfish’s case, there are more players than products, so it certainly takes advantage of people’s inherent self interest.

The first hit is free

Ultimately, as a bargain shopper, I’m completely addicted. In theory, the more people that go to the site, the less likely products will be heavily discounted. So get out there folks and do your holiday shopping Smack-style :-).

Make my addiction go away.

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Conferences

MindCamp 3.0

Image by chadum

I’ve got a crazy week this week, but I wanted to say a few things about MindCamp 3.0 this weekend.

First off, Andru, Stuart and the rest of the gang – Thanks for putting on such a fine unconference. This was my first unconference and to quickly organize chaos so well was really impressive. The high level of interactivity of the conference and the quality and caliber of the folks that I met made the conference stand out from any I’ve been to in the past.

A few specific mentions

Coffee hacks by Jack Bell (pictured) was spectacular. I can’t wait to roast my own beans. Now, to figure out what the heck that single serve coffee device was… anyone, anyone?

The guys from Menuism are looking for ways to build their community and lots of good suggestions came their way.

My session on using gaming mechanics to make sites fun brought a bigger crowd than I expected. Got lots of great feedback on what folks considered fun. Thanks everyone for making my first time talking about this to a group enjoyable.

I met some fun, young Microsofties, whose business cards I didn’t get. If you’re reading this, gimme a shout some time. Sorry to slag Vista so much…

Elizabeth Grigg has a nice summary of various sessions.
Karen Anderson has a great post about general impressions of MindCamp.

More later

General

Farecast price prediction guarantees

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date November 13, 2006
2 Comments on Farecast price prediction guarantees

I was talking this weekend at MindCamp about products needing to be remarkable to make headway in a crowded market. Remarkable in the literal sense of the word, like Seth Godin’s Purple Cow.

Farecast, the flight price prediction engine, announced today that they are testing a new insurance product called Fare Guard. The idea is that you lock in a price for a flight for one week (for a fee) and if the price goes up, Farecast pays you the difference.

Farecast is an interesting product. I love data and trends like the next guy. A lot of what Farecast is modeling is stuff that I’d read in Peter Greenburg’s Travel Detective book, although most of his advice was anecdotal. Farecast took that advice and backed it up with tons of data.

With Fare Guard, Farecast becomes a remarkable product. For Farecast to put their money where their mouth is adds a lot of validity behind their claim of prediction accuracy. Additionally, they are creating a new revenue streams by adding this insurance option.

Even if few people take them up on the offer of insurance, Farecast seems more reliable than ever. Now, if we could just talk Yahoo! Maps and Zillow into doing this, that would be truly remarkable.

Read

[via TechCrunch]

Geek Fun Gossip

Nick Douglas leaving Valleywag

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date November 13, 2006

valleywag logo.jpg

Oh, man, say it isn’t so….

Ever since I left San Francisco a year ago, Valleywag has kept me up to date with all of the Silicon Valley gossip in the bitchiest way possible.

Nick… you will be missed.

Read

[via Techmeme]

Features Social Media

Boxbe – make spammers pay

Spam. This is the cost of doing business on the internet, right? Free and easy communication with friends, co-workers, partners, etc, but the cost of this ease is that it is easy (and close to free) for anyone to send you email.

I dunno about you, but I got better stuff to do than spend my time cleaning out my inbox. Yahoo! and Google seem to do a decent job of removing spam before I get it (I’m not sure that .Mac has any filtering at all). Apple Mail does a good job of removing what Google and Yahoo! don’t. But on occasion, a friend asks me why I didn’t respond to them and I discover that my spam filtering has been a bit over zealous.

Enter Boxbe, a new warrior in the battle on spam. Boxbe’s premise is that your time is worth money and you can set how much that time is worth. Boxbe gives you a free forwarding email address that you can post anywhere on the net. It stops spam dead because if the sender isn’t in your address book, they don’t get to email you.

That is, unless they pay.

And there is the beauty, my friends. How much is worth to you to be spammed? Personally, my inbox is worth about $2.00. If you want to spam me, I’ll take your $2.00. If you send me relevant stuff, like a sale on hard drives, maybe I won’t take your money.

In any case, the service went public yesterday. No beta, no Web 2.0 tom-foolery, just up and running. I signed up for the service today and will let you know how well it works later this week.

Oh yeah, spammers, come and get it:

randy@boxbe.com

Links
Liz Gannes on GigaOm is reporting on Boxbe
Boxbe.com

[In the interest of full disclosure, one of the founders, Thede Loder, is an old friend of mine from a million years ago. We’ve talked about this service a lot and I hope it is everything he has spent so much time working on. He hasn’t paid me to talk about the service, I just really believe in what he is doing.]

Geek Fun

Flash Earth… Beautiful, just beautiful

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date November 8, 2006

I might be the last guy looking at this site, but man, Flash Earth is great. Admittedly, I’m a map nerd, but this great mashup rolls all the big services into one.

With one click of a button you can go to the same view on all the different services.

Don’t like the Google Maps’ view?
flash earth4.jpg

Try the Microsoft VE view.
flash earth3.jpg

I had never looked at the NASA maps before… They are updated daily, which is why you can’t see most of the Pacific Northwest today.

Flash Earth

[via Google Operating System]

Links Microsoft

Zune! Zune! Zune!

Ok, I’m not that excited, but it does seem to be shaping up to be a decent player.

Zune Interface Walkthrough Video
Our pals over at Engadget have been getting down with their new video software. Gotta say the interface looks pretty nice. They’ve definitely taken a page out of some of the best 10 ft interface world.

First Full Zune Review
Gizmodo’s got their take on the Zune.

Zune Insider Blog
Want a behind the scenes look at the Zune from the development team? Zune Insider give some insight into their process.

Technorati

Yahoo

Yahoo! launches a magazine? Yahoo! Food launched today

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date November 2, 2006

Yahoo! Food launched today and it looks like a magazine. Or at least, an online magazine. I’m not really sure where the content stops and the advertising begins.

yahoo food.jpg

What is truly weird about the food home page is the complete lack of Yahoo! branding. If there is one thing that was beaten into me at Yahoo! is that the brand (and all of the network effects that come with it) is everything. Of course, with a picture of the brand queen, Martha Stewart on the home page, maybe they figured
they couldn’t compete.

[Note:Â Looks like the site may have been broken yesterday when it launched yesterday.Â The page has Y! branding at the top today]

Where are the people?

The other strange thing here is that there doesn’t seem to be any community aspects of the site. While you can rate recipes that are on the site, there is no way to add recipes of your own or to even collect and share favorites on the site. While the food crowd and the del.icio.us crowd may not mix well, keeping and sharing recipes is a natural application here.

Taking it out a bit further, I think they missed another opportunity for user created content by not incorporating other forms of social media. While they incorporated video from Martha Stewart, they didn’t look within their own stable of sites. Yahoo! Video lists 48,000 videos when you do a search on the word “food.” Even if 99% of those videos are noise, 480 of those videos are good.

Finally

My first reaction was “Wow… this is huge departure for Yahoo!” Back in my day at the company, the product people designed the websites… that’s why they looked so bad. But they worked… and we liked it, and so did the public. I know that since then, they’ve hired some fancy designers and have spent a lot of time improving usability and design, but this is a major change even for Yahoo!

Nice design Yahoo!, now let’s hope you iterate this into something more fun and useful.