Dudu Mimran Blog

2010 The Decade of Content Discovery

The last decade, 2000-2009, flourished with new content creation tools: blogging, tweets, videos, personal pages/profiles and many others. One thing that did not catch the speed of innovation on the content creation side is content discovery tools.

We are still mainly using Google's interface of search results to find stuff interesting. There were few tryouts for visualizing things differently but none of them prevailed. The feeling of something missing always happens to me when I try to look for some info on the web - If I dive shallow on Google then it seems like it is a topic never being discussed before but once you persist (and waste some good time on the way) things start to pop up.

The problem of content discovery lies on physical limitations of people's perception combined with the set of tools available today. Search results or category based navigation are only effective when they work on small datasets. Once the dataset grows beyond some limit they just don't help. You can see it while looking for an app on iPhone app store or when you try to catch up with tweets or news/feeds.

I propose to focus this new decade on Content Discovery:) Enough with new data, give me something to use what already exist since I do not care for more that is not "accessible" to me.

Why We Should Release Gilad Shalit

Many people in Israel nowadays think of our captive solider Gilad Shalit especially in light of recent discussions on potential prisoner exchange deal with Hamas. Everyone usually have their own take on the topic with many many pros and cons. Our cabinet of ministers, 7 at number including our prime minister have set down to decide on a response to the requests from Hamas and I am pretty sure it was not easy seat.

To describe the conflict of the decision as I see it here is my rationale and opinion on the deal which of course is not neutral of emotions (what can I do I am a real human being). I'll try to address all the concerns I have heard from other Israelis until now:

In general I have several perspectives and I will state them in a descending order of importance (sorry for the cruel rationality)

1. I feel for Gilad. Although I do not know him personally, he looks like many other young Israelis and I really hate to see him suffer this way. He is very young, his family is very sympathetic and patient; in terms of human suffering and specifically suffering of an Israeli it is definitely wrong.
2. I think there is a a moral issue here as an Israeli and as a nation built on a strong army. Our best man and women sacrifice their best years, their health and sometime their lives for making sure the rest of the Israelis stay well in this hostile area. For their contribution they deserve to know that when they will be caught they will get the best efforts to save them. I think that the level of sacrifice a person is willing to take on himself is correlated directly to the price a collective  is willing pay in case of a needed rescue. If Israel will stop its so called "jewish" behavior for giving aways many arab prisoners for few Israelis then something will be lost and that would be the special level of morale Israelis have.
3. We should have found out where he is located and should have tried to rescue him in a military operation. He is a solider left in the battlefield and the math of risk incurred in such a rescue operation is not relevant now as it is not relevant during battle time.
4. I think that Hamas knows how to play this captive solider card pretty well and they are doing a good job at making sure it hurts us every day again and again. I think the gain they would get from keeping him on their side and keep on torturing us on the media will be higher for them then releasing him for many prisoners.
5. I am not really against releasing the Palestinians prisoners in general. I know there are few who have committed notable crimes against Israel and Israelis; where the decision to release them is not easy but in general the idea that our tax payers money is giving them worm clothes and food sounds to me like a bad idea. Sadly I can say that anyway, sometime we will have a new operation or war and we can always take some new ones.
6. As for the Israelis that lost family members due to the terrorist acts of few of the prisoners that are going to be released my opinion is pretty simple: living people are worth more then revenge and revenge won't bring back the dead. I am pretty sure that for them this conflict is the worse since I am convinced that they care for Gilad not less then others but the personal pain is big.
7. As for the Israelis who have become strategic masterminds on what would be the right "cost" per captive now I have got one thing to say: calm down! There are living people here on stake and the whole price tag and its future effect is not something that even the head of state cannot solve easily. We have paid not a long time ago a huge price tag for a civilian who was kidnapped and is thought of as notorious by some of the Israelis and now when we have chance to rescue a live soldier it is not the time to become wise merchants. Let the deal settle down, start a national debate on it, go on demonstration, do whatever you need but not on the back of one captive solider.
8. There is a going assumption that goes "If we give them now 1000 prisoners they will try to kidnap more soldiers". Well, I think it is quite OK to assume that they do whatever they can to kidnap more soliders already NOW. Gilad Shalit has given Hamas more air time on national and worldwide news channels then almost anything else they did so I guess it is worth to them already.
9. The western world (where Israel is part of it) does not play by the same rules of the game or sometimes not even in the same game as Hamas do. For example when they have got on Israeli prisoner they treat him like a captive and they put him for more 1200 days under the ground with no daylight while on the other hand we allow family visits and I heard some even get complementary high school classes. I do not regret the fact that I am more civilized but I am aware that sometime when I lose the game for Hamas such as in the case of a captive solider I need to pay the price in full.
10. One of the most annoying things I heard was "Gilad could have resisted more to the capturers or in other words it is his fault" - I can only say that I am not sure I would have done better then him so I am pretty envy of the true "heros" who say this.

I guess there are more but at least these are the main that come to my mind.

Dudu

Tweet the word on Gilad Shalit

I had to do something about it. I somehow feel for Gilad like he is a little brother of mine and his situation is unbearable for me but could not do anything about it. Then I decided to start a website that will help spreading the word on Gilad in hope it might change something. I got the kind help of Doron Breuer the designer and we launched the site this week.

The main idea behind the site Free Gilad Shalit is to show updated information on him, including pictures, tweets and related headlines. Every one who follows the twitter account GiladShalitFr can get updates of the headlines as well as a daily counter of captivity.

So spread the word and start following Gilad Shalit on Twitter.

UPDATE:

We've got two widgets for website owners, a captive counter and a twitter badge. You can see them in my blog right side live.

Gilad Shalit Twitter Website

Hi All,

I am working on a new website that is aimed at increasing the awareness to Gilad Shalit on Twitter. Please check it out and let me know if you see some problems. The url is http://giladshalit.fr

Dudu

My first days on Twitter

I had my twitter account for quite a while but never really twitted. I guess I was part of the million accounts out there, just idle. I did not find a time to blog so automatically I considered tweeting as something I won't have time for it also. Last week I started tweeting and it is very nice. I enjoy it. Same as blogging but faster, shorter and more in sync with the so many things that happen and go through your head during the day.

I was two weeks ago on a #140conf, which is Jeff Pulver's twitter and social media conference which was great (And I think is the reason I got curious enough on twitter to start tweeting). The first topic on the conf was the human needs being satisfied by Tweeting and the main theory was of loneliness and how Tweeter breaks it. I have to admit that as a new twitter with less then a 100 followers I still get lonely:) and I understand why the presenters who have more then a quarter of million followers do not feel this way.

Anyway, for now twitter is for me a way to clear up my mind of thoughts and ideas I would never pursue further and would like to garbage collect (sorry for the geeky term). A way to help someone, especially someone with a technical question on a topic I know something about, everyone are welcome to try, helping quickly with no strings attached. A way to pass time on my laptop when work is done and the only thing left is reading stuff on the web, which can be quite tiring after a while. It is a way to bookmark stuff (I have a private account for it:). A way to not feel out of social networks, since I am not a "good" user most of the time. A way to eavesdrop on others' talks, something considered not polite in the real world but most welcome on twitter. A way to write stuff without proof reading as I do now for this post.

For now I enjoy it.

Easily develop cool UI in native client applications

For a long time I was contemplating on the best strategy for client application development, mobile clients or desktop client applications. The problem with native client application development is usually the difficulty of building the UI and applying changes to it over time. Since I did both web development and client development I am accustomed in the web area for the ease of UI creation as well as applying changes to it. In web development all you have to do is have a good designer create something very cool for you, turn it into XHTML/CSS/JS and you have got your UI ready. If you have changes then just modify the HTML/CSS and you are done. For native clients it is a whole different story. Although UI frameworks and libraries have evolved greatly over time still programming the UI in a structural or object oriented 3rd generation language is slow and cumbersome needless to say about changes. And I have to add that it never comes out so lovely as web based designs.

Adobe Air have introduced a new programming pattern with their ability to make a web application behave as a native client application while all the UI hassle is taken away. Basically they provide a window frame and inside of it you have a special web browser (I guess webkit) and within the web view you can have all your beautiful web stuff while integration to the logic and general native application capabilities is easy. This development pattern can be applied to many other development frameworks including QT which has an embedded webkit capabilities, Android Java, Windows Mobile IE view and others.

The idea is to have all your UI in local resource files (for high response times) of course based on web standards - XHTML/CSS/JS - and to connect the browser events to your core logic. Most of the platforms allow you to expose logic into the browser via Javascript functions. This approach can provide the best of two worlds, highly responsive UI with all native application capabilities while keeping an easy way to create and modify the UI look and feel.

Another cool thing you get with this approach is ease of platform porting where the UI is already compatible with other platforms since it is based on Web standards.

Wikipedia for Patents?

Recently I have been dealing a lot with patents and I have to say this is not easy! Patents although claimed to be written in english are most of the time just cryptic. It is almost impossible to an effective patent search and even when you get results, just decrypting what is written there is an impossible task. In the field of information retrieval patents I guess are considered something very difficult to crack and I heard of many companies trying to solve the puzzle in different ways, I even heard Thomson have a company that take every new patent and apply to it a new descriptive metadata so it can be retrieved at least. I also heard the same company charges 400$ an hour to use their search engine!!

The only way I can see the information retrieval problem solved is by adding crowds wisdom to the patents base the same way wikipedia works. A web application that would allow you to annotate and add comments/discussions to patents would have been very helpful. I know it might not be the favorite subject for most of the people to annotate patents but I have to admit that I would personally contribute the things I learned from cryptic patents I had to read and understand for greater good. There might be some issue with privacy here but anonymity can solve this or even some rewarding marketplace can do some good job here as well.

Does anyone know of such a product?

Machine Operated Web Applications

Software applications have two main perspectives the external perspective where interfaces to the external world are defined and consumed and the internal perspective where an internal structure enables and supports the external interface. Let me elaborate on this:

The internal perspective shows the building blocks and layers within the application allowing specific data flow and processing. To further simply things let's take an example from the real world and that is a real building block. We can describe it in a technical and physical description that will detail the concrete, foundations, electricity tunnels, air conditioning and others. The external perspective of the building is the apartments look and feel, available services for tenants, views from the windows, painting color, type of cupboard handles in the kitchen and others. In general all the things that people experience when they interface with the building. So if we go back to the software story then the external perspective is the application UI, data feeds, APIs and other entities external parties come in touch with.

Twitter with their approach in their API have created something special which can be the basis for a new development paradigm on the web and that would be MOA - Machine Operated Applications. As a background Twitter provide one unified external interface, which is their API and their website UI seems to be built mostly on this API (I might be exaggerating here and they have capabilities in their UI not available in the API but the major functions are also available in the API). The same API that is available for others to consume and operate. The API is split ed into two parts: the first part is a general services API which includes search and other user agnostic services which is very similar to other services other companies provide in their APIs. The second part is the more important one and that is the user driven API where all data and actions available on Twitter's web application for a specific user are available via the API itself. This model allowed the huge surge in amount of applications built on twitter at no time, a developer community that many companies would die for while twitter did it in a snap.

To describe the model I see for twitter in a visual way:

[ Twitter infrastructure ] - Internal perspective which is hidden
[ Twitter API ] - Unified external perspective for the product
[ [ Twitter UI ] or [3rd party applications]] - API consumers and operators having equal rights to the external interface (3rd party apps are limited in the number of queries per hour but it is not too serious if you consider that the limitation is per user and not global)

So how all this long and tiring story relates to MOA - machine operated applications? Well once an application can be fully operated and consumed via a formal API (Which is Application Programmable Interface) then robots can use it too. And I do not mean today's web robots who harvest data , aggregate data and do some kind of analysis. I am talking about Robots that would work autonomously on behalf of real users or companies and will use the product in a meaningful way. For example, I can imagine a robot that will be my social network expander and it will use data from different areas to understand my interest and current network and will expand it automatically by following new people on twitter. Following someone is a meaningful action in the virtual and real world and once a bot will be smart enough to do so then things will change. Twitter with their API approach allow this evolution.

A note: the split of perspectives is similar to the way strategy in companies can be viewed where a company has the internal perspective of operational capability and the external perspective which is the market share, brand recognition, distribution channels and more.

On a lookout for mobile testing company

Does anyone knows of a mobile testing company? I am interested in outsourcing mobile application testing with special focus on device compatibility. Anyone?

VCs Wisdom

Everyone expect VCs to have some exotic point of view on markets and industries though rationally there is no basis for it. I would expect VCs to provide insight into the market since they are a hub of ideas and entrepreneurs but somehow things got mixed up.