231 karma · joined September 30, 2012
Nerds have their own weaknesses
1. What people share on Facebook <> what people really want to buy\consume\order
People are trying to look nice on Facebook. Facebook has to come up with some non-trivial statistics. What those guy who liked SF Giants and Obama is willing to buy. This requires 'Hunch-like' insights. And we know that Hunch business model was not a big success. Google's exercise is much easier, becuase Google knows what user's looking for, privacy of search request helps a lot. This could be fixed in only one way - through introduction of search engine within Facebook. Facebook could acquire Blekko or hire bunch of people from Google\Bing.
2. Site owners will get higher CPM with Google than Facebook. And will prefer using Google ads in most cases, not Facebook ad.
This will happen for the same reason as N1, Google has higher advertising relevancy and offered price than Facebook. Facebook will be sucessful at niche sites only - like Zynga, junk sites that are blocked by Google, etc. This could work for brand advertising, with pay-per-view model.
Problems started before launch of IPhone 5 when it became obvious that IPhone maps are not good - market did not like this Apple vs. Google war. Then there was not very successful launch Ipad mini - it was way too expensive to become killer-product. Apple fired few top managers becaus of this drawback - also not a good sign. Finally, Microsoft 'cope' Apple format for retail stores and launched Windows 8 with more revolutional design then Apple products have.
I was personally disappointed with absence of NFC chip in IPhone 5. Apple mossed good opportunity to enter NFC payments market, while Android is already there.
Apple is loosing their edge.
Problem is that not many investors have sellection skill and experience that YC or some other industry leaders have. That's why investors prefer to follow, 'lemming role' is safer and psychologically more comfortable. Difficult to fing reason to be the first investor in the pool.
What would help for everybody in ecosystem - more transparency in YCombinator selection process. Min Scoretable - team score, market score, product score, stage. Startups could opt-out from public scoretable while applying.
This will become point of reference for other investors and crowdfunding platforms and valuable feedback for entrepreneurs. YC as industry leader could bring this public good to the table.
little imperfections make this life interesting
- Feeling (happy, sad, depressed, etc.)
- Age (in ten year increments - 20s, 30s, etc.)
- Gender (male or female)
- Weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy, or snowy)
- Location (country, state, and/or city)
- Date (year, month, and/or day)
We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling".
Once a sentence containing "I feel" or "I am feeling" is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.
Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified "feelings". This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs. The full list of valid feelings, along with the total count of each feeling, and the color assigned to each feeling, is here.
If a valid feeling is found, the sentence is said to represent one person who feels that way.
If an image is found in the post, the image is saved along with the sentence, and the image is said to represent one person who feels the feeling expressed in the sentence.
Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post's author. Given the author's username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user's profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog's owner. Given the country, state, and city, we can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.
This process is repeated automatically every ten minutes, generally identifying and saving between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day.
I coded on Pascal myself when I was of the winners of Ukranian computer science olympiad.
These are results of the last International Olympiad in Informatics (2012, Italy):
1. China - 4 gold out of 4 - total score 1847
2. Russia - 4 gold out of 4 - total score 1765
3. USA - 3 gold and 1 bronze - total score 1637
I understand why USSR did that. Government sponsored education. Number of places in best universities was very limited, it was nation's genome and capital. People who supposed to develop new weapons and economy. Soviet government did not trust Jewish people - as we see from the history, Jewish people were often the first who left the country in case of problems. It was hard to imagine that they will become Soviet patriots. That's why USSR came up with artificial barriers in order to give more places in universities to more potentionally patriotic students. USSR wanted to save its intelligent capital investment and feel more save.
The problem was the rude way how artificial barrier was created by USSR. Instead of organizing super-complex writing exams for Jewish people, or making ideological interviews they tried to eliminate them with fake oral exams.
See below how US handles the same issue with asian students (reposted from user continuations).
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04.... "Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans."
In Russia a minority like Jews are asked special questions in admission tests to make it harder for them to get in, while in America a minority like Asians are hit with a penalty of 450 points in SAT to make it harder (15 times harder) for them to get in. There's no difference.