Quick links

What has caught my attention lately:

• The coming bandwidth explosion, by 2015, a zetabyte per year, "the equivalent of all movies ever made crossing IP networks every four minutes" ([1])


• Googlers (including gurus Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng) train "perhaps one of the largest known networks to date" on 1000 machines for three days, shows it is possible to learn to detect faces without ever labeling any of the data as a face, which has crazy cool implications for how the brain works ([1])


• John Dvorak says, "Windows 8 looks to me to be an unmitigated disaster".  Long-time Microsoft reporter Todd Bishop writes, "Microsoft [uses] 'fast and fluid' to describe Windows 8, but two other words keep popping to my mind: New Coke." A former Palm executive says, "To me, it feels like Microsoft is in a quiet panic. When Apple says the era of the PC has ended, I think Microsoft may believe it even more than Apple does." ([1] [2] [3])


• "Make everyone a manager" aka "why there are no bosses" ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5])


• Usability study shows people ignore social annotations when searching (e.g. one of your friends clicked or liked a web page that is in your search results) and, in the rare cases when searchers pay attention to them, people don't find them useful. Pretty serious implications for Facebook's partnership with Bing and Google's increasingly annoying habit of slopping Google+ all over Google web search. ([1]) 


• Prefetching entire web pages has issues, but a lot of the benefit can be gained just with DNS prefetching and TCP preconnecting.   "If we guess right, the DNS and TCP handshake may complete before we even hit enter."  Lots of clever ideas in Google Chrome, including this one. ([1])


• Chatbot for Facebook and Twitter that basically does Let Me Google That For You, very funny, but also surprisingly effective ([1])


• Retention, morale, productivity, and recruiting have long been wastelands of opinion over data, but here is a very welcome initiative to change that spearheaded by Google. By the way, I love that Google doesn't have Human Resources, they have "People Ops". ([1])


• The time has come to optimize code for energy consumed. Don't miss the table showing how many joules it takes to render the home pages of some popular websites. ([1])


• At least for ambiguous queries like [pizza], Google no longer emphasizes search results, not a bad idea, but quite a change for them ([1])


• Google is now crawling and executing most Javascript on the Web. This has been talked about for years, but first I've heard of it being done routinely at massive scale. ([1])


• For shopping search results, it matters what products you show next to each other.  In particular, people often buy in the middle of the price range, so the mix of prices on the products you show can change what product people buy. ([1])


• Is Google's mission now organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful (but only if you pay to be included)? ([1])


• Clever idea here, using playlists (or wishlists or any kind of publicly available list) for recommendations. ([1])


• A WWW 2012 paper that both quotes Xkcd and contains the sentence "this is quite a sweet ass-abstract for a scientific paper, dude!" in the introduction. Fun paper as well, but I think it's notable for that alone. ([1])


• Remarkable ability to automatically stabilize the camera in YouTube videos. Make sure to look at the two videos. ([1])


• Can't wait for us to have full wall displays controlled by voice and gesture, these are another step closer ([1] [2])


• Udacity and Coursera are getting more explicit about their business model, which appears to be sourcing programmers nicely pre-screened for coding ability to companies. ([1] [2])


• On flipped classrooms: "A control class that received a lecture from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and an experimental section where students worked with graduate assistants to solve physics problems. Test scores for the experimental group (non-lecture) was nearly double that of the control section (41% to 74%)." ([1])


• Love that robot swarms are practical and starting to be used. Want to see this for space and undersea probes too. ([1])


• A big step toward computers that accept error as normal, yielding large gains in efficiency and performance ([1])


• Talk about geniuses at Facebook ignores the big problem that no one -- not Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, or any of the newspapers -- knows how to solve this problem of making advertising relevant, effective, and lucrative without immediate purchase intent, despite years of work by thousands of brilliant people ([1] [2])


• "The buy, driven entirely by Zuckerberg, was made because Facebook’s CEO was petrified of Instagram becoming a Twitter-owned property. Zuckerberg, we’re told, lives in perpetual anxiety, preoccupied by the fear of Facebook losing its place ... That fear served as the catalyst behind his decision to buy Instagram." ([1] [2])


• Fascinating (but long) talk by Googler Steve Seitz on "the next generation of Google Maps". Also a great survey of work (older work and work currently at Google) using crowdsourced photos to build 3D walkthroughs of cities and interiors for photo tourism. Relevant for Apple launching their own maps, but also amazing and fun, can't wait to see more of this launched. ([1])


• The decline of TV has been greatly exaggerated ([1])


• Ubiquitous Wi-Fi might be back, this time with cell phone-like handoff between hotspots, could be a real game changer ([1])


• One of the better articles on this: "5 Things You Should Know Before Working at a Start-Up" ([1])


• "The average VC fund returns less money to investors than they invested in the first place." ([1] [2])


• Truly random (and fast) number generators by looking at quantum vacuum, possibly soon small and cheap enough to be put on a motherboard. Sounds trivial, I know, but insufficiently random numbers cause security and performance problems, so this really is a pretty useful idea. ([1])


• "Geek" has really changed meaning in the last decade, now almost admired. ([1])

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The game Stick Portal

I want to share more of the ideas I've been exploring. First, let me start with this, an early version of a game I'm calling Stick Portal. Click on the image to play:

It's entirely written in Coffescript using HTML5 canvas. Just need a browser to play, works pretty well on mobile devices (add it to your home screen and it'll even go full screen and behave like a free app).

The idea is to create a simplified puzzle game with a level editor where kids could share levels they created. The current version has ten levels that are the tutorials to teach players how to play the game. I've just started on the level editor that will, eventually, allow people to create their own levels easily and share them with others.

The motivation for this came from seeing what Valve did with Portal 2. Portal 2 had a level editor called Hammer that was amazing but incredibly hard to use. Kids were using Hammer to create puzzles for each other that they could play in Portal 2 -- which is great exposure to CAD-like modeling tools and a nice spatial reasoning workout -- but it was really painful. Valve just launched a much easier-to-use editor for Portal 2 that is truly fantastic, highly recommend it.

Stick Portal is free to play, open source (MIT license), and the code is available on GitHub. The source might be useful to people working on similar games as it contains examples of ways to use the Box2Djs physics engine, handling touch and multi-touch (and accelerometer) on mobile devices, how to make your web page look like an app, plenty of examples of working with HTML5 Canvas, crazy things like a way to automatically resize the canvas when the browser window changes or a device rotates, and a lot of other goodies. Won't claim it's the most beautiful code ever, but it is well commented and was fun to write. I hope it is useful.

I plan to keep working on this and extend it to include an editor, but I've been sitting on this long enough so, in the spirit of launch early and often, I'm putting it out now. Please let me know what you think in the comments, and I'd love it if you'd drop me a note if your kids like the game or if the examples in the source turn out to be useful to you.

Update: A couple people have told me they have gotten stuck not being able to guess the controls in the tutorial. It's AWSD or arrow keys for movement and mouse button and mouse movement for the portal gun. On mobile, it's hold down your finger to run toward your finger and hold down above you to jump, tap to aim and fire the portal gun, and second finger (multi-touch) to move the portal gun without firing (like to maneuver a held box).

I also should have said more explicitly that one very cool thing is that the game doesn't use Flash, it's just HTML5. So, it works on all modern browsers without a plug-in, which is neat-o. Also interesting is that it is a fairly complicated HTML5 game running smoothly in the browser on PCs and mobile, almost looking like a native app, but not a native app.

Finally, let me add that I did this game mostly to learn about making games fun. That's a surprisingly hard thing to do. If you're interested in that topic too, nothing like trying to do it yourself, but I'd also recommend the books "A Theory of Fun Game Design" and "The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses". And, if you find Stick Portal fun or don't find it fun, please let me know!

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More quick links

More of what has caught my attention recently:

• $1B for Instagram was silly and caused by fear ([1] [2] [3] [4]), but it is impressive the scale Instagram built with just three engineers ([5] [6])
  
  
• Felix Salmon at Reuters writes that Twitter is under revenue pressure and will start doing things that make the site much less pleasant to use. I'd say Facebook is under similar pressure. Both likely will do increasingly aggressive attempts to sell their users to advertisers and may face a backlash. ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Google has millions of machines ([1] [2] [3]), so many that "a performance improvement of even 1% can results in millions of dollars saved", which explains why they spend so much time on the details, like how threads run on cores and estimating disk space needed ([4] [5])
  
  
• Great recent talk by Googler Jeff Dean on problems due to hitting occasional latency in large scale distributed systems, some surprising and useful advice here. ([1] [2])
  
  
• While 89% of ad clicks are incremental (visit wouldn't have happened without the ad), only 50% of ad clicks on the top ad are incremental. Is that due to ads on navigational queries? And does Google effectively force companies to buy those ads (so competitors don't get them) even though the ads are not very effective? ([1])
  
  
• "In this two-part blog post, we will open the doors of one of the most valued Netflix assets: our recommendation system." ([1])
  
  
• "Yahoo's Chief Product Officer Blake Irving resigns" over disagreements on strategy, in particular he was "concerned about the massive engineering and research talent exodus of late, especially in Yahoo's vaunted Labs arm." ([1] [2])
  
  
• The field of astronomy appears to be going through a major shift to large scale analysis of truly massive data sets ([1] [2])
  
  
• Amazing to me that Walmart has taken this long to ramp up online against Amazon. Amazon even has been called the "Walmart of the Web"; you going to take that, Walmart? ([1])
  
  
• A clever analysis deduces that Amazon has 450k machines in AWS. ([1] [2])
  
  
• A video out of Microsoft Research shows how different interacting with a tablet would feel if touch response times could be made faster. Very compelling. ([1])
  
  
• Other work out of Microsoft Research demos a Kinect-like gesture interface built using what is essentially echolocation via a laptop's built-in microphone and speaker, no other hardware required. (video [1] and CHI 2012 paper [2])

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Quick links

What has caught my attention lately:

• Videos showing Windows 8 is horribly painful for most people, looks likely to be another Windows Vista-like flop. Really worth watching the videos or trying it yourself (videos [1] [2], try it [1] [2])
  
  
• "38% of the ads are never in view to a user" and another 12% "of the ads are in view for less than 0.5 seconds" ([1])
  
  
• "Many more ads" are coming on Facebook, "a lot more advertising ... [on] Facebook's traditionally clean interface." Could this mean Facebook is having revenue trouble already? ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Not only is the iPhone over half of Apple's revenue, it is more than 70% of their profits. Apple really is a mobile phone manufacturer with a few other businesses attached. ([1])
  
  
• Coming soon, a "voice-activated assistant that remembers everything you say ... systems that are more conversational, that have the ability to ask more sophisticated followup questions and adapt to the individual ... [with] short-term and long-term memory." ([1])
  
  
• "Microsoft tries to find pockets of unrealized revenue and then figures out what to make. Apple is just the opposite: It thinks of great products, then sells them." ([1])
  
  
• "The best way to get the most out of engineers is to surround them with other great engineers." ([1])
  
  
• "It’s positively de-motivating to work for a company where your job is just to shut up and take orders. In tech startup land, we all understand instinctively that we have to hire super smart people, but we forget that we then have to organize the workforce so that those people can use their brains." ([1])
  
  
• Programmers want to learn new skills and technology while working in a team of people they respect, and over 90% of programmers said they are willing to take a lower paying job to get that. ([1])
  
  
• Netflix's streaming catalog continues to deteriorate, is now down to only 853 good movies, of which only 155 were released within the last five years ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• "This class is about setting you on the path to developing good taste as a programmer" (free, from Udacity, taught by Googler and AI guru Peter Norvig, starts Apr 16) ([1])
  
  
• Could this be the business model for Udacity? Offer free classes online, then send companies candidates pre-screened for machine learning programming ability? ([1] [2])
  
  
• If my blog is any indication, the only RSS feeder still being used is Google Reader. Are all others dead now? ([1])
  
  
• Huge and wide open opportunity in personalized advertising for online news. Amazes me Yahoo and Amazon haven't gone after this, and that Google hasn't done a better job going after it. ([1])
  
  
• Paper with fascinating statistics on Groupon and other daily deal sites. Most dramatic, it costs restaurants half a star in their Yelp rating if they offer Groupon deals. ([1])

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Ad targeting at Yahoo

A remarkably detailed paper, "Web-Scale User Modeling for Targeting" (PDF), will be presented at WWW 2012 that gives many insights into how Yahoo does personalized advertising.

In summary, the researchers describe a system used in production at Yahoo that does daily builds of large user profiles. Each profile contains tens of thousands of features that summarize the interests of each user from the web pages they have viewed, searches they made, and ads they have viewed, clicked on, and converted (bought something) on. They explain how important it is to use conversions, not just ad clicks, to train the system. They measure the importance of using recent history (what you did in the last couple days), of using fine-grained data (detailed categories and even some specific pages and queries), of using large profiles, and of including data about ad views (which is a huge and low quality data source since there are multiple ad views per page view), and find all those significantly help performance.

Some excerpts from the paper:

We present the experiences from building a web-scale user modeling platform for optimizing display advertising targeting at Yahoo .... Our work ... [looks] into understanding the effect of different user activities on prediction, [gives] insights about the temporal aspect of user behavior (recency vs. long-term trends), and [explores] different variants (user representation and target label) through large offline and online experiments .... We deployed our platform to production and achieved a [large] boost in online metrics, such as eCPA, compared to the old system.

Our objective is to refine the targeting constraints using the past behavior of the users ... [so] we can improve the number of conversions per ad impression without greatly increasing the number of impressions.

User profiles are aggregated logs from different systems/products (e.g. user logs of Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, etc.) .... We consider several different events ... [including] pages visited .. the category of the page ... searches issued, clicks on search links, clicks on search advertising links ... [and] the category of the search query ... [and] views and clicks on ads ... [and] the ad category ... from an existing hierarchical ad categorizer.

Our results show [a] large performance loss incurred in favoring long-term history over short-term history. This is obvious as the recent history clearly communicates with a high probability the current interest of the user ... Although recent history is more important than older history, we still need to include older history to get the most complete idea about the user.

Results show ... many of our raw features are completely non-discriminative. However, a small percentage of these features are actually important ... [For example, just] ... dropping all raw ad views ... [or if] we drop all raw features and only keep categorical features ... [causes] dropping [of] the weighted AUC measure by 3.69% and 4.26%, respectively ... In production ... we apply a coarse feature selection through mutual information, then we apply a rigorous feature selection through l₁ regularization.

Very interesting. A couple things I am left wondering:

First, they found recent history is very effective, yet only update the profiles daily. Wouldn't their results on the value of recent behavior (which others found too) suggest that there would be benefit from hourly or, even better, real-time updates of the profiles (perhaps with a second memory-based, unreliable, and partial coverage system supplementing the data in the more complete and more accurate older profiles)? That would allow the system to adapt immediately when someone, for example, starts looking at information for a vacation to Hawaii and show relevant offers immediately instead of only being able to do it the next day when it is usually too late. Unfortunately, I suspect we're not going to see really big gains in relevance and usefulness of ads without real-time updates to profiles of fine-grained interests; results that show that data only 24 hours old is better than data a week old may only be a tease of the gains to be seen with data only seconds old.

Second, they find that features based on individual search queries and pages viewed ("raw features") usually have no value, but occasionally have enough value that it is important to include some. Wouldn't that suggest that the categorization scheme for pages viewed, searches made, and ads need to be more fine-grained (e.g. not just the category "pants", but the category "men's boot cut jeans")? Or, better, perhaps more fine-grained while also correctly cross correlated (interest in "men's boot cut jeans" not only shows in the data a weak interest in all pants, but also maybe has been shown to indicate a fairly strong interest in "men's flannel shirts")?

If you are interested in this paper, you might also want to look at another recent paper out of Yahoo Research, "Learning to Target: What Works for Behavioral Advertising" (ACM), which is referenced multiple times by this paper and describes the features used in the user profile in a bit more detail, as well as the results of some other experiments.

Please see also my 2007 post, "What to advertise when there is no commercial intent?"

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More quick links

More of what has caught my attention lately:

• Laptops with Kinect sensors are coming. Worth paying attention to, gesturing in air to issue commands, a very different UX could be built on top of this ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Each streaming subscriber is worth only $2.40 in profit each quarter to Netflix, compared to $17.32 for each DVD subscriber. The old business was very lucrative. The new business kind of sucks." ([1])
  
  
• "You're not going to get content owners to license ... for less than what they get from the cable companies ... [if you will] use that cheap content to destroy the cable companies' business model." ([1])
  
  
• "Federal officials approached Google with evidence of its employees' wrongdoing ... Google agreed to pay $500 million to ... ward off criminal charges against the company." ([1])
  
  
• Google is spending nearly $1B every quarter buying new servers and data centers. That buys a lot of machines. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Education startups are suddenly very, very hot. ([1] [2] [3] [4])
  
  
• "Tiny directional antennas at the top of each rack ... send and receive data. A central controller monitors traffic patterns, finds network bottlenecks, configures the antennas and turns on the wireless links when more bandwidth is required ... The design sped up traffic by at least 45 percent." ([1])
  
  
• "Wimpy cores are fine, but if you go down to the wimpiest range, your gains really have to be enormous if you want to consider all the aggravation -- and the hit to their productivity -- that your software engineers face." ([1])
  
  
• A Facebook engineer explains why is actually the right thing for Facebook to produce buggy code ([1])
  
  
• "How sex, bombs, and burgers shaped our world" ([1])
  
  
• "There is a monolithic view that this generation of technology I.P.O.'s is completely broken." ([1])
  
  
• Just three engineers built and run Instagram, which has 14 million users, 150 million photos, several terabytes of data, and hundreds of machines. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Startup founders "say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it." ([1])
  
  
• Two 17-year-olds used a weather balloon to send a little Lego astronaut and a video camera 15 miles into the stratosphere. Very fun. ([1])

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Quick links

Some of what has caught my attention recently:

• Security guru Bruce Schneier predicts "smart phones are going to become the primary platform of attack for cybercriminals" soon ([1])
  
  
• If, next, Amazon does a smartphone, I hope it is WiFi-based, like Steve Jobs originally wanted to do with the iPhone ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• iPhone owners love Siri despite its flaws ([1])
  
  
• Valve, makers of Steam, talks about their pricing experiments: "Without making announcements, we varied the price ... pricing was perfectly elastic ... Then we did this different experiment where we did a sale ... a highly promoted event ... a 75 percent price reduction ... gross revenue [should] remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40 ... completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation." [[1]]
  
  
• An idea whose time has come, profiling code based not on the execution time required, but the power consumed ([1])
  
  
• Grumpy about work and dreaming about doing a startup? Some food for thought for those romanticizing startup life. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Yahoo discovers toolbar data (the urls people click on and browse to) helps a lot for web crawling ([1])
  
  
• Google Personalized Search adds explanations. Explanations not only add credibility to recommendations, but also make people more accepting of recommendations they don't like. ([1])
  
  
• "Until now, many education studies have been based on populations of a few dozen students. Online technology can capture every click: what students watched more than once, where they paused, what mistakes they made ... [massive] data ... for understanding the learning process and figuring out which strategies really serve students best." ([1])
  
  
• Andrew Ng's machine learning class at Stanford was excellent; I highly recommend it. If you missed it the first time, it is being offered again (for free again) next quarter. ([1])
  
  
• Microsoft giving up on its version of Hadoop? Surprising. ([1])
  
  
• The NYT did a fun experiment crowdsourcing predictions. The results are worth a look. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Web browsers (Firefox and Chrome) will be a gaming platform soon ([1] [2])
  

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