Adobe, Yahoo Testing PDF Ad Service

PDF has been an appealing format due to its ability to preserve the look and feel of a document, while providing it to others in an easily accessible way. The free Adobe Reader became a fixture on computer desktops as adoption of PDF increased.

Yahoo has managed to score a significant win by beating ad competitors like Google and Microsoft to the opportunity to mine the PDF space for advertising revenue. Adobe and Yahoo announced the new program for delivering dynamic contextual ads in PDFs this morning.

The opt-in program pulls ads from Yahoo’s network to place in a panel next to the PDF content. Each time the PDF is opened, the ads will be refreshed to keep timely and relevant ones in place.

Publishers gain the ability to track their ad performance in the PDFs. Yahoo Publisher Network senior VP Todd Teresi called this a "previously untapped opportunity" for advertisers to gain exposure, and publishers to derive revenue from these documents.

The program picked up some big name participants for this initial beta. CondeNast’s Wired, IDG InfoWorld, and Reed Elsevier were among those named in a statement from Adobe.

To participate, publishers register and then upload their PDFs so the ad functionality can be enabled for the document. After that has been completed, the publisher distributes the PDF as usual.

InfoWorld’s participation is of particular interest. The long-time trade journal scrapped its print magazine in opting for an online-only, ad-supported presence. If profitable, we expect to see other print publishers express interest in trying out the program.

Another interesting possibility comes to mind with the PDF advertising. The hot Amazon Kindle electronic book reader has the capability to pick up PDF content, a feature Amazon currently lists as being experimental in its ability to convert them for readability.

If Amazon works out PDF conversions, the EVDO network supporting wireless content delivery to Kindle could work as a conduit for the PDF ad program too. Since Amazon has its own interest in delivering ads, there could be issues with this idea, however.

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Yahoo Missing That Vision Thing

One detail has been mentioned, that being Yahoo’s horde of executives, over 300 people bearing the title of vice-president or higher. Kara Swisher noted the highlight of the day, where Jobs addressed the crowd.

Tim O’Reilly has followed up on that, in noting a difference he sees between Yahoo and Google:

Yahoo! is a great company, but I don’t think they embrace their greatness, or even know what it is. Steve Jobs knows what matters to him. Larry and Sergey and Eric know what matters to them. I don’t get the same feeling of innate conviction that I get from Apple and Google, where the company is a reflection of who its leaders are, what they value, and how they think.

Now, I’m not saying that’s it’s an easy task to build a huge company that stays true to the vision of its founders. There are very few companies that can really pull that off.

O’Reilly then brings up a name that one really doesn’t hear all that much when it comes to Yahoo’s daily affairs. That would be David Filo, the other co-founder of Yahoo.

Yahoo’s execs may have felt better about what Jerry Yang and Sue Decker want to accomplish, but whether or not they feel the vision and believe it is another matter. In a day where they wanted to bring a sense of vision back to the upper ranks, and have it filter down the company, we have to wonder if Filo has a place in helping with this.

If Yahoo is missing vision, maybe it’s because they are missing one of the visionaries who got things going. We would be interested in what Filo could bring to the equation. The question is, does Filo want to do that?

The Twitter herd debated platforms, has herds do when chosing to migrate.  Suddenly the story was Twitter vs. Jaiku and Jaiku team dealt with digesting a big chocolate Easter Bunny.

Let me provide some context first.  I was exposed to Jaiku at Aula in Helsinki last June.  From my notes:

Jyri Engeström and Mika Raento on social peripheral vision.  Phones are designed with the assumption that you know who you want to call before you do.  You need to process social signals before using the device.  Jaiku, their startup is looking to augment basic functions of a phone by pasting onto it what is happening on the internet.  If you can’t find anyone in your contact book, you can search a directory made of everyone’s contacts. Calendars let you share future events to let you plan together.  The demo shows very rich profiles based on phone usage (automatic data) and more social signals (more manual) — which provides a different form of Presence.  In usage, people still call regardless of presence, but when someone doesn’t answer, you leverage the presence to understand why. Integrated IM is more convenient than SMS, and includes group messaging.

Since then, Twittr came on the scene and Jakiu’s web interface got a major upgrade.  It’s important to understand the significant differences between the two services, their design thinking and strengths.  Joi Ito:

Looks like a bunch of people are trying out Jaiku after "tasting" co-presence with Twitter. To me, Jaiku, which existed before Twitter, is a bunch of Helsinki mobile jocks getting into the Web 2.0 of it all whereas Twitter is the Web 2.0 crowd "getting" co-presence…

Jaiku comes from a "presence" background allowing bluetooth proximity, phone idle time, ringer mode and other things to trigger state changes – the messaging came later. Twitter, on the other hand, is primarily messaging, which as we all know, is just a flexible and manual vector for presence information.

To understand where Jaiku is coming from, I encourage you to read this interview with co-founder Jyri Engeström and his post on social peripheral vision (the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues).

  Twitter on paper 
  Originally uploaded by jack dorsey.

In digging around for some of the thinking behind Twitter, I found Jack Dorsey’s napkin design for Twitter:

from a note circa Jan 2006.

casual awareness.
"what are you up to?"

multiple entry point to set status
- web
- email
- phone
- sms
- im

multiple ways to "subscribe" to status
- web
- email
- phone
- sms
- im

3 aspects
- set status
- timeline (collaborative)
- configuration

The interesting thing is that I found it on Jack’s Jaiku page where he had included his Flickr stream as part of his presence.  For a long time I’ve wanted the Xfire for social software, and today Jaiku provides this kind of persistent presence.

Jaiku lets you incorporate feeds from your blog, bookmarks, photos, location — and Twitter if that is where you prefer to post status.  Every post of any kind becomes an object for conversation, through comments.  This works easily in the web UI, but it also works in the Nokia mobile client because presence isn’t overwhelming. Presence is something you can glance at, not an SMS interruption. 

Unfortunately today this requires a Nokia phone, but they are working on a Java version that also specifically supports commenting (kind of like Radar.net, more on that later).  People coming from Twitter won’t expect the ability to add their attention breadcrumbs to their attention stream (developers will) and will probably expect something they can adopt on their mobile easily.  In the US, this is a significant barrier (Sidenote: fuck you Cingular.  Making me change calling plans to switch SIM cards from my Blackberry and claiming the handset wont work because you don’t sell it even though it runs the same software is an easy way to lose me as a customer, as if I had alternatives.).  Jaiku isn’t ready to Tip the Tuna until their next mobile client comes out. 

But until then I’d expect a lot of people to use the web version as an attention pool.  Posting to Jaiku via Twitter is a no-brainer and I’d hope you can do the opposite without loops and dupes soon.  Rafe asked the right question:           Is it possible Twitter and Jaiku will end up sharing users, instead of hoarding them like the IM services did early on? I responded: systems of record are being replaced by systems of discovery. 

In other words, in the first web I would worry about which service I would commit my social network, presence and persistence to.  But services are increasingly making data discoverable and discovering data from other services.  We used to worry about transporting our FOAF relationships, but then I think we realized that each tool is different and being able compose a different social network was a virtue (not just because of faceted identity, but that different tools need different filters and the social network is the filter).

UPDATE: This post was written in haste before going out for Easter.  Jaiku released their API and developer site.  I forgot to highlight Marko Ahtisaari’s why I use Jaiku:

1. Silent sociality – checking up on what my friends are up to when convenient, and posting my own state knowing that I won’t be disturbing others (unless they have explicitly asked to be alerted).

2. Small-group sociality – Jaiku is not about celebrity. I’m interested in sharing state with a small group I’m nearly always in contact with, what Mimi Ito has called full-time intimate community.

3. Mobile sociality – Jaiku was designed with the mobile "living phonebook" interface in mind. SMS alerts crowding the inbox of one of the few working personal and functional communication channels is not my idea of improving communication. I use the SMS-in posting to Jaiku when I’m using my Nokia 8800 and with my N70 I use the Jaiku phonebook.

4. Background sociality – Jaiku allows me to integrate other online identities and feeds (including delicious, flickr and any RSS) into my single jaiku presence feed. This is done in a way that doesn’t confuse these background posts with my explicit state messages.

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There’s plenty of things not to do, so read’em all!

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• Copying, Mimicking, Duplication by Paper Bull
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I began to sketch that out in my SearchInsider column today (more details about the caffeine episode are in it) , but quickly found that I was at the end of my editorial limit and there were a lot of pieces of the vision that I wasn’t able to draw together.  So I promised to put a post on this blog going into a little more detail.

The ironic thing about this vision was that although I’d never seen it fully described before, as I thought about it I realized a lot of the pieces to make this happen are already in development.  So obviously, somewhere out there, somebody also seen the same vision, or at least pieces of it.  The other thing that struck me was: it all made sense as a logical extension of how I interacted with computers today.  Obviously there’s a lot of technology being developed but if you take each of those vectors and follow it forward into the future, they all seem to converge into a similar picture.

Actually, the most commonly referenced rendering of the future that I’ve seen is the world that Spielberg imagined in his movie Minority Report.  Although anchored in pop culture, the way that Spielberg arrived at his vision is interesting to note. He took the original short story by Philip K. Dick and fleshed it out by assembling a group of futurists, including philosophers, scientists and artists, and putting them together in a think tank.  Together they came up with a vision of the future that was both chilling and intriguing.

I mention Minority Report because there are certain aspects of what I saw the future to be that seem to mirror what Spielberg came up with for his future.  So, let me flesh out the individual components and provides links to technology currently under development that seem to point this way.

The Cloud

First of all, what will the web become?  There’s been a lot of talk about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web envisioned by Tim Berners Lee.  Seth Godin had a particularly interesting post (referenced in my column) that he called the Web4.  All these visions of the Web’s future share common elements. In Godin’s version, "Web4 is about making connections, about serendipity and about the network taking initiative". This Web knows what we’re doing, knows what we have to do in the future, knows where we are at any given time, knows what we want and works as our personal assistant to tie all those pieces together and make our lives easier.  More than that, it connects us a new ways, creating the ad hoc communities that I talked about in my earlier post, Brain Numbing Ideas on Friday afternoon.

For the sake of this post, I’m calling my version of the new Web "the Cloud", borrowing some language from Microsoft. For me the Cloud is all about universal access, functionality, connection and information.  The Cloud becomes the repository where we put all our information, both that which we want to make publicly accessible and that which we want to keep private.  Initially this will cause some concern, as we wrestle with the change of thinking required to understand that physical ownership of data does not always equal security of that same data.  We’ll have to gain a sense of comfort that data stored in online repositories can still remain private. 

Another challenge will be understanding where we, ourselves, draw the line between the data we choose to make publicly accessible and the data we want to keep for our own personal use.  There will be inevitable mistakes of an embarrassing nature as we learn where to put up our own firewalls.  But the fascinating part about the Cloud is that it completely frees us physically. We can take all the data we need to keep our lives on track, stored in the Cloud, and have it accessible to us anywhere we are. What’s more, everyone else is doing the same thing.  So within the Cloud, we’ll be able to find anything that anyone chooses to share with us. This could include the music they create, the stories they write, or on a more practical level, what our favorite store currently has in stock, or what our favorite restaurant has on for it’s special tonight.  Flight schedules, user manuals, technical documentation, travel journals…the list is endless.  And it all resides in the Cloud, accessible to us if we choose.

The other really interesting aspect of the Cloud is the functionality it can offer as we begin to build true applications into the web, through Web 2.0 technology. We start to imagine a world where any functionality we could wish for is available when we need it, and where we can buy access as required.  The Cloud becomes a rich source of all the functionality we could ever want.  Some of that functionality we use daily, to create our own schedules, to communicate, to connect with others and to manage our finances.  Some of that functionality we may use once or twice in a lifetime.  It really doesn’t matter because it’s always there for us when we need it.

The functionality of the Cloud is already under development.  The two most notable examples can be found in Microsoft’s new Office Live Suite and in the collection of applications that Google is assembling.  Although both are early in their development cycles, one can already see where they could go in the future.

The final noteworthy aspect of the Cloud is that it will create the basic foundation for all communication in the future.  Our entertainment options will be delivered through the Cloud.  We will communicate with each other through the Cloud, either by talking, writing or seeing each other.  We will access all our information through the Cloud.

For the Cloud to work, it has to be ubiquitous.  This represents possibly the single greatest challenge at the current time.  The Cloud is already being built, but our ability to access the Cloud still depends on the speed of our connection and the fact is right now, our wireless infrastructure doesn’t allow for a robust enough connection to really leverage what the Cloud has to offer.  But universal wireless access is currently being rolled out in more and more locations, so the day is drawing near when access will cease to be a problem.

So, when the Cloud exists, the next question is how do we access it?  Let’s start with the two access points that are most common today: home and at work.

The Home Box

The Home Box becomes the nerve center of our home.  It acts as a control point for all the functionality and communication we need when we’re not at work.  The Home Box consists of a central unit, which doubles as our main entertainment center, and a number of "smart pods" located throughout the home, each connected to a touch screen.

So, what would the Home Box do?  Well first of all, it would inform and entertain us.  The pipeline that funnels our entertainment options to us would be directly connected to the Cloud.  We would choose what we want to see, so the idea of channels becomes obsolete.  All entertainment options exist in the Cloud and we pick and choose what we want, when we want. 

Also, the Home Box makes each one of those entertainment options totally interactive.  We can engage with the programming and shape it as we see fit.  We can manipulate the content to match our preferences.  The Home Box can watch four or five sporting events and assemble a customized highlight reel based on what we want to see.  The Home Box can scan the Cloud for new works by artists, whether they be visual artists, music artists or video artists, notifies us when new content is ready for us to enjoy.  If we have an interest that suddenly develops in one particular area, for instance a location that we want to visit on an upcoming vacation, the Home Box assembles all the information that exists, sorted by our preferences, and brings it back to us.  And at any time, while watching a video about a particular destination, we can tag items of interest within the video for further reference.  As soon as they’re tagged, a background application can start compiling information on whatever we indicated we were interested in.  Advertising, in this manifestation, becomes totally interwoven into the experience.  We indicate when we’re interested in something and the connection to the advertiser is initiated by us with a quick click.

But the Home Box is much more than just a smarter TV set or stereo.  It also runs our home.  It monitors energy consumption levels and adjusts them as required.  It monitors what’s currently in our fridge and our pantry (by the way, computers are already being built into fridges) and notifies us when we’re out of something.  Or, if there’s a particular recipe we want to make, it will let us know what we currently have and what we need to go shopping for.

Microsoft already has the vision firmly in mind.  Many of the components are already here.  The limited success of Microsoft’s Windows Media Center has not dissuaded them from this vision of the future.  Windows Media Center is now built into premium versions of the Vista operating system. And the is Smart Pods I refer to?  Each Xbox 360 has the ability to tap right into windows XP Media Center.  The technology is already in place.

The Work Box

Probably the least amount of change that I see in the future is in how we access the Internet at work.  For those who of us who work in an office environment, we’re already fairly well connected to the Internet.  The primary difference in this case would be where the data resides.  Eventually, as we gain comfort with the security protocols that exists within the Cloud, we will feel more comfortable and realize the benefits that come with hosting our corporate data where it’s accessible to all members of the organization, no matter where they are physically located.

But consider what happens for the workers who don’t work in an office environment.  Access to the Cloud now allows them to substantially increase their connectivity and functionality while they’re mobile.  You could instantly access the inventory of any retail location within the chain.  You can see if a parts in stock at the warehouse.  You can access files and documents from anywhere, at any time.  And, you can tap into the core functionality of your office applications as you wish, where ever you happen to be.

Once again, much of the functionality that would enable this is already in place or being developed.  In the last year we at Enquiro have started to realize the capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server and Sharepoint services.  Just today, Google announced new enterprise level apps would be available on the web. Increasingly, more and more collaborative tools that use the Internet as their common ground are being developed.  The logical next step is to allow these to reside within the Cloud and to free them from the constraints of our own internal hardware and software infrastructure.

The Mobile Device

When we talk about tangible technology that will enable this future; hardware that we can see and touch, the mobile piece of the equation is the most critical.  For us to truly realize the full functionality of the Cloud, we have to have universal access to it.  It has to come with us as we live our lives.  The new mobile device becomes a constant connection to the Cloud.  Small, sleek, GPS enabled, with extended communication capabilities, the new handheld device will become our computing device of choice.  All the data and the functionality that we could require at any time exists in the Cloud.  The handheld device acts as our primary connection to the Cloud  We pull down the information that we need, we rent functionality as required, we do what we have to do and then we move on with our lives.

Our mobile device comes with us and plugs into any environment that we’re in.  When we’re at work, we plug it into a small docking station and all the files that we require are interchanged automatically.  Work we did at home is automatically uploaded to the corporate section of the Cloud, our address books and appointment calendars are instantly updated, new communications are downloaded, and an accurate snapshot of our lives is captured and is available to us.  When we get home again we dock our mobile device and the personal half of our lives is likewise updated.

Consider some practical applications of this:

When we go to the gym, our exercise equipment is now "Cloud" enabled.  Our entire exercise program is recorded on our mobile device.  As we move from station to station we quickly plug it into a docking station, the weights are automatically adjusted, the number of reps is uploaded, and as we do our exercises, appropriate motivating music and messages are heard in our ear. At the same time, our heart rate and other biological signals are being monitored and are being fed back to the exercise equipment, maximizing our workout.

When we’re at home, we quickly plug our mobile device into the Smart Pod in the kitchen, and everything we need to get on our upcoming shopping trip is instantly uploaded.  What’s more, with the functionality built into the Cloud, the best specials on each of the items is instantly determined, the best route to pick up all the items is send to our GPS navigation module, and our shopping trip is efficiently laid out for us. While we’re there, the built in bar code scanner allows us to comparison shop on any item, in the geographic radius we choose.

As I fly back from San Francisco, a flight delay means that I may miss my connecting flight in Seattle.  My mobile device notes this, adjusts my schedule accordingly, automatically notifies my wife and scans airline schedules to see if an alternative flight might still get me home without an unexpected layover near SeaTac Airport. It there’s no way I can make it back, it books me a room at my prefered hotel.

The Missing Pieces

I happen to think this is a pretty compelling vision of the future.  And as it started to come together for me, I was surprised by how many of the components already exist or are being currently developed.  As I said in the beginning, it seems like a puzzle with a lot of the pieces already in place.  There are some things, however, we still need to come together for this vision to become real.  Here are the challenges as I see them.

Computing Horsepower

For the mobile device that I envisioned to become a reality, we have to substantially up the ante of the computing horsepower.  The story that led to my writing of the SearchInsider column was one about the new research chip that is currently under development at Intel.  Right now the super chips are being developed for a new breed of supercomputer, but the trickle-down effects are inevitable.  Just to give you an idea of the quantum leap in performance we’re talking about, the chip is designed to deliver teraflops performance.  Teraflops are trillions of calculations per second.  The first time teraflops performance was achieved was in 1997 on a supercomputer that took up more than 2000 square feet, powered by 10,000 Pentium Pro processors.  With the new development, that same performance is achieved on a single multi-core chip about the size of a fingernail. This opens the door to dramatic new performance capabilities, including a new level of artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photorealistic games, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition. 

A descendent of this prototype chip could make our mobile device several orders of magnitude more powerful than our most powerful desktop box today.  And when implanted in our Home Box, this new super chip allows us to scan any video file and pick up specific items of interest.  You could scan the top 100 movies of any year to see how many of them reference the city of Cleveland, Ohio (not exactly sure why you’d want to do this), or included a product placement for Apple. 

Better Speech Recognition

One of the biggest challenges with mobile computing is the input/output part of the problem.  Small just does not lend itself to being user-friendly when it comes to getting information in and out of the device.  We struggle with tiny keyboards and small screens.  But simply talking has proven to be a remarkably efficient communication tool for us for thousands of years.  The keyboard was a necessary evil because speech recognition wasn’t an option for us in the past.  We can talk much faster than we can talk.

I recently was introduced to Dragon Naturally Speaking for the first time.  I’ve been trying it for about three weeks now.  Although it’s still getting to know me and I’m still getting to know it, when it works it works very well.  I found it a much more efficient way to interact with my computer.  It would certainly make interacting with a mobile device infinitely more satisfying.  The challenge right now with this is that speech recognition requires a fairly quiet environment, you’re constantly speaking to yourself, and mobile devices just don’t have enough computing power to be able to handle it. 

We’ve already dealt with the computing horsepower problem above.  So how do we deal with the challenge of being able to get our vocal commands recognized by our mobile device? Let me introduce you to the subvocalization mic.  The mic actually picks up the vibrations from our vocal cords, even if we’re only whispering, and renders recognizable speech without all the background noise.  New prototype sensors can detect sub vocal or silent speech.  We can speak quietly (even silently) to ourselves, no matter how noisy the environment, and our mobile device would be able to understand what we’re saying.

Better Visual Displays

The other challenge with a mobile device is in freeing ourselves from the tiny little 2.5" x 2 .5" screen.  It just does not produce a very satisfying user experience.  One of the biggest frustrations I hear about the lack of functionality with many of the mobile apps comes just because we don’t have enough screen real estate.  This is where a heads-up display could make our lives much, much easier.  Right now they’re still pretty cumbersome and make us look like cyborgs but you just know we’re not far from the day where they could easily be built into a pair of non-intrusive eyeglasses.  Then the output from our mobile device can be as large as we wanted to be.

Going this one step further, let’s borrow a scene from Spielberg’s Minority Report.  We have the heads-up display which creates a virtual 3-D representation of the interface.  We could also have sensors on our hands that would turn that display into a virtual 3-D touchscreen experience.  We could "touch" different things within the display and interact with our computing device in this way.  Combined with sub vocalization speech commands, this could create the ultimate user interface.  Does this sound far-fetched?  Microsoft has already developed much of the technology and has licensed it to a company called eon reality.  Like I said no matter what the mind can envision, it’s probably already under development. As I started down this path, it particularly struck me how many of the components under development had the Microsoft brand on them.

If you can fill in other pieces of the puzzle, or you have your own vision of the future, make sure you take a few moments to comment.

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The client had already chosen one of the mockups I’d given them for their new e-commerce site, and we were ready to meet to discuss minor changes before coding started.

The day before that meeting, they sent me a layout they’d drawn up and wanted to know if they could use that instead. I told them we should meet to talk about it and they agreed.

What they had come up with was something they really liked.

They felt it suited them perfectly and I could respect that.We discussed the idea and our mutual feelings about it, and it became clear that they were really into this idea and definitely wanted to use it.

Awkward moment – I felt odd about it, being the contracted designer. And they recognized that; it was clear that this kind of just happened and was definitely not planned from the beginning, but it was what they wanted.

They asked if I wanted to continue with the project given that.

I’m not a programmer and don’t really have any interest in taking someone else’s idea and building the backend for it – that removes all the fun from the work for me.

My enjoyment comes from putting together a well-crafted site from beginning to end that reflects the personality of the client, respects the audience they want to attract and then functions without too many glitches to deliver the promised results to the customer.

Web design isn’t primarily about money for me – I love the front-end work, and if you take that away, then, well, it does become much more about money.

I tried to explain this and that I would have to apply an additional fee to make up for the lack of exposure, since I wouldn’t be able to show this site in my portfolio or have my link at the bottom of it.

So they thought about it and decided to go elsewhere and seek someone who would just code their idea. I think that was the right decision, and certainly better for me.

I would be bored out of my mind doing something like that, honestly.

So in this case I’m okay that it worked out this way – but I’m interested to know if other designers have encountered something like this, and how you dealt with it?

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Debbie Campbell
Parallax Web Design | Web Design Blog

Being able to take that vision and then turn it into wire frames or functional specifications that technical people need to make that vision a reality is a good skill to have. Many folks still do not speak geek, nor should they be required to speak geek in order to get their ideas across so that the vision that the retail store has can become reality.

First, while not truly an information security issue, anyone that walks the line between business and technology knows that there are some things that need to be done, and done well to ensure that the process is smooth, and well understood by both parties in the process.

Developing a quick project template, charter, and working with the business folks on must have, nice to have, should not have is important in bringing a project on line. This is where the technical translator or e-commerce liaison should be working with the business owners to work out exactly what they are looking for. Even down to color, systems it should talk to, and what role that web site will play in the greater role of the company. It does not matter the size of the web site, really in working with the business unit, or small storeowner, they should have a document trail to follow back on, and as the consultant, so should you. If the storeowner comes along later to move a nice to have to the must have category, you need to have a document trail that shows the initial thoughts, and then explain that this kind of change will do X Y or Z to the project, cost or timeline.

Standard project management, time lines, functional specifications, color schemas, charters, wire frames, and signed approval of all of them by the storeowner. Working with non-technical people who are requesting that what ever is designed must do things, and would be great if we could do this as well, then need to understand how the impacts to change will alter the product. Business people start thinking, and then start wanting to throw everything possible into the original 1.0 version of the web site. When really, it might be best to wait and see how the technology will be adopted down the road and then maybe waiting until V2.0 or even the V3.0 web site will incorporate that technology. Bringing the visionary to the table and explaining reality may be difficult, but showing them what others in the space are doing (follow the herd mentality) has benefits when dealing with any business owner of a project.

Readers are probably yelling at this point, yes, but what is the point?

The point is that small business owners, small retailers and even business projects within business units see something that they want, either because it is new and shiny, or because the competition is doing the same thing. The technical liaison between the geeks and the business unit needs to guide both sides into something that can be done, meets as much of the vision as is technically possible, and leave a lot of the nice to haves until later versions of the web site. That is a very important and difficult message to get across in any project, and one that is critical to the success of the project. A retailer is either not going to want to learn that they have to maintain, update, and otherwise work with the web site, or they do not have the bandwidth to do so, or the technical staff to do so. Nor are they likely to want to keep on thinking that the web site is going to continue to consume company resources that could be spent elsewhere.

A metaphor I have often used in deflating and working with this mind set is that the web site is like a car, you have to change the oil, windshield wipers, and make sure that it stays clean. A well run web site is no different, and while a car has 15,000 mile checkups, the web site is going to go through a continual evolution as the market landscape changes. The web site cannot be static anymore than the store can always sell the same goods year after year. The metaphor seems to work, even if it is simplistic, and should not be confused with the idea that the internet is a series of tubes or that anyone got the internet last Tuesday.

Retailers are not computer scientists, nor are computer scientists and programmers business folks. The bridge point liaison needs to be able to walk in both worlds, and know what is possible and what is something that should be left until later in the process. Good project managers should be able to play this point with both must haves and nice to haves ,and work with the vested parties to work out a suitable schedule. Even when dealing with very vague ideas, asking a lot of questions of the business unit, in getting them to sit down with the project manager and working out as much of the vision as possible before ever getting to a developer pays off in the longer run.

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Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.

Is Facial Recognition Coming To Google?

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
-- Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"

Stop, children, what’s that sound? It’s the muted clacking of keyboards across the blogosphere, as some seek a Deeper Meaning behind Google’s purchase of Neven Vision beyond the search advertising company’s desire to organize all the world’s information.

Neven Vision’s technology centers on object and facial recognition. Google’s stated plans for the software will have it integrated with the Picasa photo management product, to provide for better search functionality that will make it easier for people to find a given image out of a large number of images.

Oh really?

The day before the news of the Neven deal hit the Official Google Blog, the Google Operating System blog speculated on Gmail avatar images being used for facial recognition:

Then the Neven news became public. Google Operating System followed up by noting how Neven Vision has a client for mobile phones that can search out relevant content based on an image.

So on one hand, we have Google actively asking for identification of facial photos used in Gmail. On the other, there is the Neven purchase, involving object and facial recognition technology that even the Feds like.

What could it all mean? Is this just a lead-in to the day when Google reveals itself as a front company for the CIA? So long and thanks for all the information, a federal agent will be stopping by to see you shortly?

Richard Korman at Silicon Valley Watcher website summarized one possible scenario envisioned by the paranoid among the bloggers:

Society would have to have a lot more cameras installed before the scenario could become reality. But if there are aspirations for Google’s use of Neven beyond Picasa, they likely have dollar signs associated with them.

Considering Neven’s mobile expertise, it isn’t difficult to imagine how Google can tie this in to advertising. A camera phone user who take a photo of a person or place may see ads delivered to their mobile browser’s search results based on the image.

Or maybe this is just disinformation, and we are just trying to distract you from Google’s intentions at the behest of our masters in the Illuminati. Bwah ahahaha. (Just kidding. Fnord.)

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Visit the Neven Vision website today and this message appears for visitors: “Thank you for your interest. Neven Vision was recently acquired by Google Inc. and Neven Vision product information is no longer available on this site.”

Information is available on Google’s Official Blog, in the form of a post from Adrian Graham, Picasa Product Manager. Terms of the acquisition, however, are not available.

Neven Vision’s technology enables sophisticated recognition of objects in images. Graham discussed this in his post:

Google isn’t ready to talk about their plans for Neven and Picasa, other than Graham’s observation that they and Neven Vision share the goal of making photo searches easier for people to do.

The purchase probably lays to rest any chance that Google will purchase Riya, a startup with a focus in facial recognition technology. Last year, it was rumored briefly that Google would acquire Riya for possibly as much as $30 million, but time passed without the deal taking place.

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Participation is key and it’s what’s guiding their strategy. Enabling users to find use share and expand. They want to tap into the vast amount of content that’s already out there or, things that are in people’s minds. Imagine, only 30% of the commercial operations in the US have a web presence enter an opportunity (hint).

Yahoo!’s vision for local – enrich people’s lives by enabling them to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge.

-a platform for user generated content – allow usres/consumers to add to and create content. Yahoo! Has built the container enabling users to contribute.

-Provisioning for ratings and previews

-Eg. Yahoo! Answers – tool being built by users

-Yahoo! Video – upload, tag videos

-Moving forward we’ll see more integration of flickr and maps

-Much energy and innovation with maps is focused on trip planning and helping peple get information about going from point A to point B

-Of interest from the labs geo-referencing content.

-See zonetag.research.yahoo.com

Where’s the business around this? The 25 million US businesses that aren’t online is a vast, untouched market. (eg. Local fetured listings)

Recall, free APIs – flash and AJAX flavors. Divinci Code and Baskin Robins have recently held commercial promotions built on Yahoo! Maps

API pros

• Global coverage
• Support for open standards (geoRSS)
• Complimentary content APIs – flickr, traffic, events, local search
• No commercial restriction!!

A reminder, see the new blog at http://www.ysearchblog.com

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Anything Geospatial: Tracking developments affecting GIS, geospatial technologies, location-based services, mapping, google earth and google maps. Published by the creator and editor of GISuser.com & LBSzone.com