Innovation in Software

About 3 years ago a prospective client came to Vagueware and said he wanted to build an online dating site. Not a bad business decision given that the niche is now closing in on $1 billion in revenues per year, and with more than 20 million paying customers visiting a dating site every month.

However, where there’s money, there’s competition. My client asked me to go around all the sites I could find with different models and evaluate them. He paid for the accounts and some of my time, I gave him a report.

I actually got a girlfriend for a while out of that experience. If you’re ever offered a similar gig and you’re single, take it! I still don’t know if I was meant to declare her on my  taxes…

Anyway, a few conversations over the last few months have prompted me to re-think my analysis of the sector at the time. Not least, one of my ex-colleagues is behind the scenes at Smeet Me which allows for singles (or couples) who know each other in real life to flirt anonymously in order to see if there is chemistry there.

It’s a really interesting take on online dating. Typically if you like somebody in real life, you already know something about them but you just don’t know whether to risk asking them out – something smeetme could potentially help offset.

The games are quite simple tasks designed to promote the flirtatiousness of the situation: you set a series of challenges such as making a video or audio clip, providing an extract of a favourite poem or book, pointing to a video online that makes you laugh, take a quiz, etc. And as the recipient completes each stage they get a reward: a picture or video, an invitation to an event or even a gift.

The same underlying engine could be used by marketeers for viral ad campaigns where you want to promote interactivity, but I love the idea that they decided to try it with the dating scene first. The ability to print out unique codes onto business cards and hand them out in clubs could allow for it to go viral, quite quickly.

This all assumes of course, you’ve met somebody and have the ability to ask them to play your game. However, how do you go about meeting people in the first place if you’re a social pariah?

Traditionally online dating has had the flaw people may be lying about who they are or what they are. Sites that have basic profile information – in my analysis – were ultimately going to lead to a lot of resentment because they made it so easy for people to misrepresent themselves. These sites make up the bulk of online dating sites, including many of the branded sites that are almost certainly being driven by WhiteLabelDating.com or one of their competitors.

There are however a couple of sites that did things a little differently, and made it virtually impossible to pretend to be something you aren’t.

The first is OK Cupid, which is 100% free but does take some time to get into. To be frank, give yourself an hour or two to build up a profile in there. The wonderful thing is though, the simple mathematics of how it works means it becomes uncannily good at matching people up. I spent several months hanging out with a girl from “OKC” (as its fans like to call it), and within half an hour of our first meeting it was obvious that our sense of humour clicked, our values were similar, and that we were two people who liked each other.

For me, on finding OKC and evaluating it, it was game over.  I told my client to give up unless he was going to reinvent it. The only flaw in the model is that right now it’s way too US-centric.

Since then though, a few other models have sprung up, with perhaps the most interesting being eHarmony and their “personality profiling” system. It seems rather over-burdening to go through dozens of questions, but the result is relatively accurate from what I’ve seen. It suggested I, for example, normally take care of other people, am curious, “sometimes steady, sometimes responsive”, flexible and sometimes outgoing and reserved at other times. Quite vague stuff really, but it’s not how many people would perceive me unless they’d known me for a while.

One other notable site in the “traditional” market is My Single Friend which is heavily promoted as being owned by Sarah Beeney who has spent much of the last decade convincing people to risk their entire savings on property development. Hmmm.

The great thing about MSF is that because its friends who are providing the review, you know the person you’re seeing probably isn’t a stalker and slasher. Sure, they could have created a free webmail account and written their own review, but in 99% of cases you’ll spot that a mile off. The only downside is if you asked me to write up a review of you on there, would I really point out you seem to belch an awful lot, and quite frankly you get a bit over-whelming after a couple of drinks? Probably not. It’s all upside, but at least it’s honest and perceived upside there.

The rest of the sites out there, to be honest, should be given a bit of a wide berth. Yes, there are exceptions. I know people who have found somebody on other sites, but they seem few and far between given the number of people paying to use them. As we say in geek circles, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), but good luck with whoever you go with.

And seriously, if there is somebody you like out there in real life, think about setting up a game in Smeet Me and trying it out – there are a couple of games in there that aren’t too challenging, and right now it’s quirky and fresh enough that people will think you’re interesting and on the cutting edge of online stuff.

Well, actually, that’s a little premature, but it’s hit news wires and is shaping up to being an interesting story:

According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

Well, that’s surprising and rather intriguing. More so given it’s not the only acquisition that they’re after according to EuroInvestor:

GGF has entered into an agreement to acquire the shares in Peerialism AB. Peerialism AB is a software technology company with its origin in KTH Royal Institute of Technology and SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science and which presently is owned by the employees. The owners as well as the employees will continue to work for the company. Peerialism develops solutions for data distribution and distributed storage based on new p2p- technology. The access to the technology is secured by the acquisition. The consideration amounts to in aggregate MSEK 100 [$13 million] consisting of at least MSEK 50 [$6.5 million] in cash and up to the equivalent of MSEK 50 in newly issued shares in GGF (according to valuation during a period of ten days after the announcement). The share part of the purchase price should not exceed five percent of the total number of shares in GGF after the transaction. In addition GGF has undertaken to make initial investments of MSEK 25 [$3.25 million] in the acquired business.

There is however, a catch. Isn’t there always?

Completion of the acquisitions are primarily subject to GGF obtaining financing for the acquisition, that any necessary resolutions are adopted by a General Meeting of GGF, and that GGF and the Board of Directors consider that the acquired assets can be used in a legally and appropriate way. GGF intends to issue new shares in order to obtain the necessary financing for the acquisition. The acquisition is deemed to be completed in August 2009.

Well, what does it all mean? Quite simply that The Pirate Bay, is no longer going to be quite so Pirate-y. In fact, so worried are some people that TPB had to respond to make sure people calmed down a little:

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.

The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets – quite the opposite. Now we’re fueling up for going into the next gear. TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It’s win-win-win.

The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don’t worry – be happy!

In the final mix then, here are what seems to be the takeaway points:

1. GGF is buying up two new properties through issuing new shares. It’s not a given this will work, but they’re confident
2. If the finance is available they are going to take the technology from Peerialism AB that has some “new” P2P technology in its kit bag and ramp it up commercially
3. They’re also going to buy one of the most visited web sites on the planet and promise to “compensate rights holders” which it doesn’t at the moment
4. The Pirate Bay guys insist this isn’t in any way going to interfere with the site built on the premise that rights holders can go to hell
5. TPB insist in fact this is the start of a socialist utopia and will allow them to persue their political ambitions in the name of the users
6. The Pirate Bay users are already calling foul and looking to abandon them and go and create a new site somewhere else

I can’t see this working for GGF. They’ve walked into a political quagmire in the hope that there is some revenue in it. It seems the gambit they are taking is that Peerialism’s PeerTV product is going to fly when combined with TPB’s user base. However, it has several drawbacks including the need for a P2P CDN to be scattered across the globe at broadband operator’s expense (for which GGF is promising to compensate them), and for the TPB users to give up their insatiable desire to burn material to disc (perhaps to sell down the pub for £5 a DVD), and avoid incurring any charges or being interrupted with advertising. Doesn’t seem plausible to me.

This suggests then that the TPB users who already are screaming the words “betrayal” and “capitalists” from the roof tops in response, are going to move on somewhere else. This is a perfect example of how an innovative change in technology can produce the possibility of a new business model that the users do not want, but the investors don’t care and will plug on regardless.

However, it does create a new business model, with a new user base, that technologically and commercially is interesting. Watch this space.

Whilst I’ve worked in data centres before – and am all too familiar with how hot, noisy, industrial and dangerous they can be – I sometimes forget how the software industry I now work in has an industrial footprint in those rooms. It’s easy to think of my business as being ‘clean’, because the dirt is so well hidden.

Plans for Google’s new data centre in Dalles, as the blueprints published by Harper’s shows, should remind us just how industrial our business really is.

Combined with the annotation by Ginger Strand, we get a picture of how big this data centre is. Three buildings of over 68,000 square foot each and electricity consumption equivalent to that needed to power 82,000 homes, a third of which will be used just to keep the building temperature at a reasonable level.

Thanks to its location much of the energy used every day will be supplied via hydroelectric power, however its very existence has caused other technology firms to up their data centre spending, and it’s unlikely all of that capacity will be run on renewable power. And besides, every watt of clean energy powering a server is a watt not powering a domestic home.

It’s also worth remembering this isn’t “the” Google data centre. It’s “a” Google data centre.

For years now they have been pushing racks into peering sites and DCs around the globe as well as smaller facilities of their own – an estimated million servers are out there running Google sites, and there are more data centres planned by Google and their competitors over the next four years. Already data centres consume more power in the United States than the army of some 100-million-plus American monster-sized televisions. As the magazine itself says, the Web “is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.”

Better virtualisation of servers is going to help, but there’s a limit to how much you can virtualise. Is the time now right for us to get smarter again about how we use clock cycles? Is the efficiency-first stance of programming we’ve consigned to the era of the 8-bit machine now going to become fashionable again?

Maybe though, we could do a little to educate the public to make use of this vast industry a little more efficiently. Does the quest for the top 100 current hot trends at Google really suggest that we’re using this power wisely?

Via RoughType

We sometimes take for granted the knowledge we have of how the Internet works. We know that an image in a search result might be linked to a site that has nothing to do with the image. We know that just because a reader of a blog comments on a post and links to a picture, it doesn’t mean the blog owner has endorsed or in any way taken ‘control’ of that picture.

We know this.

Some people though, aren’t quite as smart as us. They think that you have more control over how Google sees you than you do. They think that if you link to a picture you are ‘trying to take it over’. They don’t understand hypertext, they don’t understand indexing algorithms and they certainly don’t understand how this all applies in terms of copyright. Don’t believe me?

TechCrunch is currently dealing with perhaps the most technically inept man on Earth representing a photographer in an argument over online copyright and image distribution.

The problem is that he has a little knowledge – pictures can drive traffic, and that drives revenue – but not enough knowledge to understand what TechCrunch’s role is in this instance.

Even worse, he’s decided to act in a way I would consider unethical by phoning advertisers and threatening to name them in a lawsuit explaining he “just wanted to let [them] know”, in that I’m-doing-you-a-favour-don’t-look-at-me-like-I’m-a-leech kind of way.

This makes me come to the following conclusions:

1. If I ever need to hire a photographer, I’m never going to hire Beth Boldt as she clearly hires idiots to represent her legally (although he doesn’t appear to be a lawyer), and I really don’t want to deal with idiots working on her behalf
2. If you’re ever going to threaten to sue somebody, maybe you shouldn’t threaten Mike Arrington who is, you know, a lawyer, and knows what he’s doing… (top tip Mike learned at law school: use spell check before hitting ‘send’).
3. All of us have a responsibility to make sure the people acting on our behalf – personally, or within our companies – understand the issues as they really are.

If you’re working in a corporate environment in the UK, you should make sure at least some of your directors or somebody over at legal checks out Out-Law.com once in a while, and if you’re freelancing or a SME, its RSS feed should be part of your morning coffee ritual.

Whilst some may ask what could you do with infinite bandwidth, others are actually trying to get there. Internet2 – a research project that is surprisingly low-profile outside of those directly involved – has recently reached 100Gbps and there are, as ever, plans to go faster.

We’re at an odd period in the history of the Internet when it comes to bandwidth. We’re at speeds fast enough to provision most people’s textual and audio requirements just fine, and a few years away from being able to provide enough space for everybody’s HD video requirements. The question is, what next? What uses can we put higher speeds to? We’re quickly reaching the point where we can send data around between nodes faster than the nodes can do something useful with the data.

Once we’re at the point where data can consistently be transferred quicker than it can be processed – either by a computer or a human – we’re at a new point in the history of the network. Suddenly the big powerful boxes stitched together with string become mere silos for the data. And we, the users, reach a point where there is true saturation. At what point will the capacity for data transfer outreach the collective human capacity for making use of it?