October 2011
10 posts
On Groupon
Since the Groupon IPO is coming up, I thought I’d muse a bit on them. I have purchased 7 daily deals since the model started. Here’s the details:
* 3 LivingSocial deals (Whole Foods, Amazon, and Upper Crust… all three places I already shop regularly and my purchases were not incremental to the stores).
* 2 Jetsetter deals (New hotels I had not been before, in places I travel...
When Steve Met Bill →
controlaltadam:
“Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
Great analogy. Over the years, Xerox lost a lot more than just “the TV” from its Palo Alto home. I wonder if they had homeowners...
1 tag
“Turn down a big VC firm.
Randomly pick a super large VC firm, hit the about...”
– Stumbled upon this 6 year old post from Rick Segal. From an end-of-year post full of advice for entrepreneurs. Made me spit up my coffee.
Onward to 2006 - The Post Money Value
Kaggle and Crowdsourced Competitions
I’m fascinated by Kaggle, a web service that provides competitions with prize bounties for crowdsourced to data prediction problems. They power the Heritage Health Prize, which is attempting to find the best model to predict which patients will be diagnosed with new medical conditions in the coming year. Beyond that one famous competition, there’s many more competitions listed on...
ELIZA
I love all the references Siri makes to her friend “Eliza.” Here’s one, but I’ve seen more.
ELIZA is actually Siri’s mother, if a relationship were to be established. It was the beginning of Natural Language Processing (NLP) bots, and it was the first time human users felt like they were communicating with a machine that really emulated human conversation and...
4 tags
She & Him →
parislemon:
Peter Kafka’s “Occam’s Razor” thought as to why the Siri voice is female and not male: because it would remind people too much of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Cute. But wrong.
Actually, the voice varies from country to country. The UK version, for example, uses a man’s voice. I know this because I’m in England and got a demo of the feature here.
Also awesome: Siri didn’t...
New OHours
I’m running a set of OHours this friday morning. If you’re working on a startup, a student tinkering with projects on the side, interested in working at a startup, or thinking about leaving your job to pursue your own idea, then I hope to make these OHours a good use of your time. Sign up here.
