John Wilson is fascinated by the application of technology more so than technology itself. Having spent 15 years working in and around capital markets involved in systems, process and projects, he has too often seen "solutions looking for problems" - he derives great pleasure in finding those problems and marrying the two up.
Just sitting in listening to the third speaker of this evening's event (wonderfully organised by sarah blow), - maryam scoble, robert scoble's wife.
She's one of the most enthusiastic people I've seen speak at the event & without any agenda.
It drew into sharp contrast the previous 2 speakers on the bill - one was a chap who did a product pitch & the second was a lady who was staggeringly patronising to women, which was odd considering it was a girl geek dinner! Her pearls included - don't dress provocatively if you are a women (can men dress provocatively?) - don't sleep with your male colleagues - might be unwise to sue for harassment because it may affect your career - women spend their lives looking for Mr Right - be more complementary (normal people give 12 critical comments for every one of praise; winners do 12 praise comments & only 1 negative apparently - not sure where Gordon Ramsey the chef fits into this model)) - women are useless at networking, because they try to make friends unlike men who seek to do business.
In case you don't believe me, Ian Forrestor of bbc backstage, geekdinner & cubic garden fame did a video of the event which he will publish soon.
Aside from Ian & the Scobles (not a band!), it was great to see Hugh Macloud resplendent in dapper suit & tie (inc great shirt). The number of folks who feature his cartoons on the back of their business cards is getting huge & apparently its almost mandatory on the west coast of USA.
Hugh also told me that Threshers web site crashed off the back of people looking for the 40% off coupon! Should have gone to Stormhoek website.
Hugh is also organsing a pub crawl for the Scobles this Friday - meet at Eros in Picadilly at 1pm.
Steve Clayton of Microsoft blogging fame was there tonight, together with Katie Ledger - both great company.
Weird thing was, after having just driven back to London after 3 days on biz in Yorkshire, its so clear that tonight's (insular?) discussion has someway to become mainstream. Yet what is niche & early adopter today seems to hit mainstream so much faster than ever provided its useful eg youtube; mobile photoblogs; google maps.
Its rare that someone disagrees with the notion that meetings are a great way for people to waste time & fill in their day in an unproductive fashion.
Indeed JK Galbraith, the famous economist, once observed that meetings are indispensible when you don't want to do anything.
Yet every company feels they must hold a meeting citing the need(s)
- to make people feel included and consulted
- to allow for debate on issues
- to ensure consensus decisions are reached on key issues
- improve communication
...same themes, different slant
How often have you sat through meetings in which much of the content was not relevant to you simply because the audience invited was to widely drawn or the agenda too wide/unfocussed. Or the meeting was dominated by a few individuals. Or worse, appalling decisions were arrived at simply because the majority view had to prevail and this could only be achieved by either agreeing to do nothing with more analysis (cop out & just a means of avoiding/deferring a real decision).
Its odd that some companies can get quite wound up when small groups of people just get on and do stuff without inviting lots of people to a meeting - that the small team achieved stuff & didn't waste the time of people who neither cared or could contribute anything of seems irrelevant to them. More important that those other folks at least have the opportunity to contribute something (probability suggesting that at least once in their lifetimes they might, provided they attend enough meetings).
And I am willing to admit that I have fallen fowl of these failings too.
So here are my new proposed rules
Everyone shall remain standing through the entire meeting - no slouching or sitting permitted
No meeting may last for more than 30 minutes, with Outlook calendars set at 20 min rather than 30 min increments
No participant may speak for more than 10 minutes in total at the meeting
It appears McKinsey's are soon to go to press with a report that big US companies are jumping en masse onto using software-as-a-service.
The survey found that 61% of North American companies with sales over $1 billion plan to adopt one or more SaaS applications over the next year, a dramatic increase from the 38% who were planning to install SaaS apps in 2005.
Chris Anderson has coined a phrase of freeconomics to describe to growing incidence of things that could be considered to be of value being made available free.
Understanding when to shift out of scarcity mode and start giving away what you once held dear is a core competence for our age.
Michael Schrage had a good column in the FT that talks more about the power of free, and the policy quandaries it creates.
"Never in history has so much innovation been offered to so many for so little. The world’s most exciting businesses – technology, transport, media, medicine and finance – are increasingly defined by the word “free”. Whereas WalMart, the world’s largest retailer, promises “everyday low prices”, entrepreneurs and ultra-competitive incumbents develop business models predicated on providing more for free. It is a difficult proposition to beat."
Does raise an interesting question of how people make money in such an environment and what motives them to provide these facilities for free. Clearly altruism is one reason. But one other model may reflect circumstances in which all output has a marginal cost of zero once the capability to produce the first "widget" has been created, and has been done at low cost.
I've recently asked lots of tech folks how much they would pay for an RSS reader - it's clearly of value to we users; Universal answer has been "Zero"! Why? Because we know that we can get them for free and that despite this "price", people still seem willing to make them available with ongoing innovations/improvements.
When expectations are set, it is nearly impossible to shift them - rather like the withdrawal of free retail banking is causing poor PR, defections.....
What's the consequence of the environment Chris Anderson is describing - in my view we'd better start getting smarter about how else we can make money before investing our time/effort/money in such giveaways. Moreover, when you don't reward effort & innovation, it may just diminish to all our detriments.
This New York Times story reports on the increasing interest by capital markets firms in utilising neural networks to detect previously undetectable patterns in data such as news feeds, from which trading strategies may be constructed and implemented.
Neural networks permit computers to create new rules and automaticallychange underlying assumptions by experimenting with thousands of random sequences and processes.
“Five years ago it would have taken $500,000 and 12 people to do what today takes a few computers and co-workers,” said Louis Morgan, managing director of HG Trading, a three-person hedge fund in Wisconsin. “I’m executing 1,500 to 2,000 trades a day and monitoring 1,500 pairs of stocks. My software can automatically execute a trade within 20 milliseconds — five times faster than it would take for my finger to hit the buy button.”
........
The downside with these systems is their black box-ness,” Mr. Williams said. “Traders have intuitive senses of how the world works. But withthese systems you pour in a bunch of numbers, and something comes out the other end, and it’s not always intuitive or clear why the black box latched onto certain data or relationships.”
........
“There are some pretty substantial misconceptions about what these things can and cannot do,” he said. “As with any black box, if you don’t know why it works, you won’t realize when it’s stopped working. Even a broken watch is right twice a day.”
Several key things are pertinent to this article
The desire by firms to see "order" in "chaos" and thereby extract relationships from which they can identify trading opportunities that others may not see
The importance of speed - its no go being right about an opportunity if you are not fast enough to implement it before its gone; such opportunities may last less than a second!
The dangers of blindly adopting such technologies without having a clear understanding of how they work and how they draw "conclusions"
The first of these relies upon the past being a guide to the future. Human behaviour is shaped by our past experiences - putting your hand in a fire will hurt! Yet we also appreciate that environments change whilst cause and effect can be incorrectly inferred e.g. markets go up on sunny days. Firstly we have to find such relationships which the computers can do - harder is for them to demonstrate causality. Yet on top of that, we have to assume that others infer the same relationships and will react in the same way.
Many people that work outside of capital markets fail to appreciate that investing is actually about speculating on the reactions of others and assessing to what extent those expectations are already factored into the current price.
A recent example was the legislation in the US that outlawed internet gambling. The share price of many leading UK online gambling companies was devasted by that change in the law. It seemed reasonable to assume that if the legislation passed, everyone would believe that these businesses would be materially affected and put a lower value on them. So, "the profitable bet" was that the legislation passed and so the price would materially drop.
Had the introduction of this legislation already been factored into the price, there would have been no significant drop and hence no opportunity to profit. That it hadn't, was evidence in the price drop. Sometimes, when a profits warning is issued, the share price goes up and the layman is baffled as it seems contrary to common sense. The reality is that the profits warning had been factored into the price already and the upturn may be because the warning is not as bad as had been expected or simply other things are influencing the price on the day i.e. new positive information.
To continue the example, it was easy to see a connection between the two things; legislation and impact on the gambling companies. Yet some of the relationships that the neural networks uncover will be "new discoveries" which the wider market is ignorant of. Had investors not linked the legislation and gambling companies share price, the price would not have moved in immediately, only feeding through in subsequent periods as profits diminished - a longer term bet.
Where a relationship/link is widely acknowledged, it then becomes a speed game of who can react fastest to changes - e.g. have you noticed that when there is a supermarket tannoy announcement that bread has been reduced then what you had perceived to be infirm little old ladies, become superhuman athletes with sharp elbows that beat you to the shelf!
This speed advantage may be in the detection of the change or in being able to execute your order fastest before the price moves. Firms invest staggering amounts in both - the NYT article is focussed on the former, but having fastest comms is just as vital and this is operating at the level of miliseconds. I was chatting with a friend who is a trader in the week about how they've just spent £300k to have their comms moved closer to the Stock Exchange machines - an extra 10 feet inside a machine room. Why bother for 10 feet? Because the laws of physics means that 10 feet closer gives them a speed improvement that they think they can translate into profits!
However, its the last of these three things that is scaring most firms and regulators. Such is the complexity of the "computers", that very few people have any idea how they work. Moreover, if the "machines" stop working, would anyone realise.
The worry is that Firms are commiting considerable capital to backing the "ideas" of the machines and if the answers are "wrong", not only could those firms could bust, this could also affect the stability of the markets.
As an aside, if you think about it, every day we put life/death reliance on things that we don't understand how they work e.g. getting into a lift to travel down from the 20th floor [it could of course accelerate to high speed and smash into the bottom!].
Ok, I appreciate it won't be entirely in keeping with my normal musings but stick with me. Thanks to the guys at Stormhoek Wine for this massive tip off.
For ten days, from 30 November until 10 December, Threshers will offering 40% off ALL their wine. That means all Stormhoek, all red and white, all French, all Spanish, all Australian, all Champagne. Everything.
To take advantage of this you need to download one of the coupons here, kindly provided by Stormhoek. Threshers are reportedly not promoting this offer - simply a word of mouth thing. For Threshers part it's quite an interesting test of how powerful viral marketing is. Tada, that's the link with the blog.
Thanks to Alistair Morrell (top bloke) of Stormhoek for letting people know, who happens to be coming along with me to the England v South Africa rugby game with at Twickenham tomorrow (25th Nov). And of course to Hugh Macloud who is publicising on his blog, which is famous for its cartoons on the back of a business card.
For an idea to spread, it needs to be sent and received.
No one “sends” an idea unless: a. they understand it b. they want it to spread c. they believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind d. the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits
No one “gets” an idea unless: a. the first impression demands further investigation b. they already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea c. they trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time
This explains why online ideas spread so fast but why they’re often shallow. Nietzsche is hard to understand and risky to spread, so it moves slowly among people willing to invest the time. Numa Numa, on the other hand, spread like a toxic waste spill because it was so transparent, reasonably funny and easy to share.
Notice that ideas never spread because they are important to the originator.
Notice too that a key dynamic in the spread of the idea is the capsule that contains it. If it’s easy to swallow, tempting and complete, it’s a lot more likely to get a good start.
The Canadian Broadcaster CBC is running its own version of "Dragons Den", which I've previously written about in relation to the BBC version running in the UK.
The clip above is the coverage of the firstmeeting following one venture having been awarded funding on the show.Unfortunately, during the meeting a huge conflict arises between the investors & an adviser to the young entrepreneurs. Aside fromcheap insults about the VCs, the adviser outlines a completely different vision of the company to that which was originally pitched and won the funding. This vision appears to be supported by the management team. What a surprise therefore that the Dragons withdraw their offer as it a) wasn't the vision they bought into b) createsenormous concern about the management team that they are so hugelyinfluenced by an outside party, sufficient that their vision can so quickly change.
Now its certainly the case that the prelude to deals is usually more than an hour - even if you love the concept, buying into an existing legal entity exposes one to legacy risks/baggage, so you do need to do some investigation. Some pushy advisers will play the silly card of "its such a good deal, why do you need more time" - if it's that good, why isn't the adviser all over it. An investment begins a marriage and some potential partnerships just don't have the right chemistry.
Most fundamental thing in funding meetings - be yourself and say what you passionately believe, not what you think you should say. There's just no point being false because that will come back and bite you when you actually revert to whoever you really are. Moreover, if you don't know something you may as well confess, since the other person may already know they answer and will conclude you are either stupid or misguided - instead, just add that this is how you will go about finding out. If the chemistry isn't good between entrepreneur & investor it much better to find out beforehand because it sure is messy after consumation!
Likewise, it can be important to jointly demonstrate your abilities in these forums. More companies are testing candidates out on their skills/experience against real life challenges. I always use the "job interview of the juggler" story to illustrate this, which I had a long time back. Essentially the juggler is asked questions about whether they can perform various named tricks (2 balls, 3 balls, from behind the back, on one leg, blindfold, 4 balls) and answers yes, so is given the job. At the end of the interview, the juggler says "Would you like to see me actually juggle?"
I have no idea if Vista works, will make a difference to my computing/work experience or is simply more bloatware that I can avoid by using online apps. But......
check out this site which introduces it - I think its visually stunning. Sure, Microsoft have got the money to spend to produce something this good, but when I watch a movie I don't care that the studio are able to throw money at the film, so why should it make any difference here [there's enough example of people throwing money at something and it still coming out badly].
Just one thing small point; they do seem to have plagarised the search engine antics of Ms Dewey if you don't click the screen to select items. See if you agree.
When posting comments on webpages or entering text in online forms, I do find the absence of a spellchecker a bit of an inconvenience. I type reasonably quickly and in doing so make slip ups/typos. In sense checking the text, I hope to pick up these errors but sometimes.....
I'd recently read about a spellcheck tools that web administrators could easily embed in their websites to provide users with this functionality. Trouble is, I was dependent on the sites to do this.
So I was delighted to find SpellingCow, which is a favelet I can invoke within the browser which will check my text and reduce my likelihood of looking an idiot by poor spelling [all other reasons still stand]. I've started testing it and confess I've had a few teething issues with it.
Of course, if you happen to use Firefox 2.0, there is a spellchecker in that too.
12 months ago, I think I would have been excited by the notion that I could carry my important programs along with all of my bookmarks, settings, email and more with me on a flash drive/memory stick, such that I could use them on any Windows computer. All without leaving any personal data behind. This is what PortableApps provides.
But today virtually all of my data and applications are online, accessible via a browser. Since it's increasingly rare to find a computer without a browser and internet connection these days, so I can dispense with the need to carry the memory stick. Moreover, people are far more relaxed about someone using their browser that connecting a memory stick to their PCs.
The only times I have encountered difficulties have been when the browser in question didn't have important add-ins like current java run-time engines [albeit I do find using older browser versions like IE6 frustrating because of missing features like tabbed browser windows]. Similarly, I can't recall having hit firewall issues for sometime, since most of the applications/data goes via Port 80.
Whilst PortableApps is free and will undoubtedly be useful to some, I believe this may be a evolutionary stepping stone that gets skipped over.
Isn't it odd how one memo from a chap at Yahoo crystalises thinking from a bunch of people who were also thinking the same thing. Last night, I blog about why i loathe working in a big company and today Hugh Macloud blogs about the same subject. But he's not the only one - I must have read 40+ posts in the last 24hrs from different people that have recognised the issues and perceptions felt by the author of the Yahoo memo.
This note from an executive at Yahoo just endorses my views on big companies.
Ok, I confess I'm not a big company guy. I've always preferred operating within a small partnership of likeminded individuals, as I am now, in preference to the roles I had on boards of major companies. There are several key reasons, the flavour of which is echoed in the AOL note.
- In a small company you are forced to talk to the outside world and in doing so remain in close contact with the market. In contrast, you can easily remain within the walls of big company dealing with internal issues/politics and become detached from reality - why trouble yourself with commerce when there's admin to do.
- Small companies aren't big enough to carry passengers nor do firms of "A-Listers" employ "B-Listers", usually detesting people who are unwilling to throw themselves into whatever is required [self-starters] and who aren't willing to take risks because they fear failure. However, Big companies usually enter a viscious circle of being unable to attract "A-Listers" for the reasons above and in hiring "B-Listers" find they drive away the existing "A-Listers". This latter group get tired of working with unproductive bureacrats that are unwilling to accept responsibility and who run from opportunities. As was commented to me on Friday, conscripts rarely fire a shot in battle because that involves sticking your head up to fire.
- Entrepreneurship is often opportunitistics; you sense an opportunity and look for ways to see it through, which may not necessarily follow a pre-determined plan [whenever I've run big programmes of work for firms in my consultancy days, they were usually spooked by my attitudes towards plans - great for considering the many ways that the battle might play out, but when circumstances change its more important to be agile and adapt, that to adhere to a plan and end up in the wrong place which no-one actually wants. Better that you are willing to make decisions and accept the responsibility for their outcome.]
But Big companies don't work like that do they. They have pre-set ways for doing stuff, usually grounded in a project office/admin mantra that "we've done this before", but which completely ignores the fact that environments change. And when they do encounter someone willing to take risks, challenge the staus quo and seek forgiveness rather than permission, they are freaked - I've regularly been challenged about whether I actually had the authority to do "X", and always answered that they were welcome to ask the CEO/COO about that but suggested they firstly assess how they'd be judged on whether their effort in intervening was adding value. They'd usually chicken out because they couldn't ever be sure how it would play out and wouldn't want to take the risk!
Contrary to those "B Listers" impression - I never sought controversy for the sake of it [albeit baiting them was fun sometimes]; it was usually because I felt doing what I did was in the best commercial interest of the client/company and was happy to accept the related responsibility.
In a small partnership, you are all expected to pitch in and get on with it. In fact, peer pressure will maintain that. But you'll do it anyway because you don't want to let your colleagues down and your are motivated to succeed. That just doesn't happen often in the Big company and that's why they are screwed up usually.
I know I'm not alone in having these beliefs - I meet thirty and forty something year old former senior executives almost daily who having made their "pile of cash" got out of the big company because they now wanted to "do something" for a change.
I've previously written about the excellent video email service from Springdoo . No install and no fees.
Most of my email activities are handled on my Blaspspringckberry whilst I'm on the move - utilising free moments between meetings to read and respond to emails that only require a short note (80%). For longer compositions, I will usually turn to either my webmail client or Outlook (which these days mainly acts as my backup device for my email messages] simply because I can use my full size keyboard (15%).
But as for the remaining 5%, I've been increasingly using a video email. The circumstances for this usually include
- when I've not met physically met someone to date and so want to introduce myself on a more personal basis than a text email. This is more important if I am to meet them so that they know who to look for - beats agreeing to wear a red rose blind date style.
- emailing a sensitive message to someone. Whilst its easy to type a few lines of text in an email, that's just a cop out/being chicken. Its normally better to meet or talk to someone in such circumstances, but sometimes this isn't possible. Likewise, sometimes that meeting would be difficult for both sides, because there isn't necessarily a productive outcome possible from the discussion. But in such circumstances, I think you should at least have to go through the "mental pain" of talking to the camera.
- when you want to convey a personal/cheeky/friendly message but which could be easily miscontrued if they don't see the little twinkle in your eye ;-) Facial clues are one of the key elements to human communication, hence phrases like "they won't look you in the eye when they are talking to you"
Anyway, Springdoo have added some great new features ncluding the ability to post video messages to your blog, which they call a Springcast - not that I intend to inflict that one on you. Worth checking out.
I had lunch with the fabulous Katie Ledger this week, former UK Channel 5 news presenter & journalist [& ITN + BBC], who amongst other roles now is an occasional presenter on BBC Click.
Our lunch conversation strayed onto IPTV and the impact on MSM. She'd seen my post on Blinkx and had been similarly impressed by the possibilities it created for the personalisation of TV.
Following our lunch, it occured to me how much good programme content is already available, with favs of mine including 1. Askaninja 2. Rocketboom 3. MobuzzTV 4. ZeFrank
There are also many BBC shows, which are now available online including the increasingly popular Dragons Den.
In addition, its becoming increasingly common for many events [generally geek related] to be filmed & posted to the web. I've caught up on a number of events I couldn't make for whatever reason in this manner. This content is simply a by-product of the production, similar to the Deacon Blue CD I bought last night.
The facilities now available online to support narrowcasting are increasingly sophisticated and have taken much of the complexity out of the process, allowing people to focus on the opportunities presented by generating great content. I've already mentioned services like blip.tv and veotag in previous posts. Another is vpod.tv - an excellent service which even allows you to use your webcam to create content and post it directly to your blog, albeit I've not tried this - I've got a face best suited to radio!
Most of these services are presently free, hence dropping the bar even lower for people to kick off their efforts to "test & prove a concept" and build an audience.
Some people describe the web as one of the most powerful means of democratising the planet - these types of services definitely are contributory elements, providing the means for all to be heard - "listened to" is slightly harder.
Le Web 3 is certainly pulling in an international audience for its event on December 11th. Here's a summary of the attendee countries I generated from the attendee list published as at November 16
COUNTRY
Total
AT
3
AU
2
BE
21
BR
1
CA
6
CH
29
CY
1
CZ
1
DE
44
DK
2
DN
1
ES
13
FI
4
FR
273
GR
2
HU
2
IR
7
IS
6
IT
19
LT
1
LU
7
MO
2
NL
32
PH
1
RO
1
SE
4
SW
1
UK
57
US
33
Grand Total
576
That's impressive - must only be a few web events that can match this, acknowledging that in Europe there are lots of countries nearby.
Musicovery is a Pandora-like online interactive music station that allows you to create an instant personalised radio station based on how you are feeling at that moment. No registration; No download.
It has an excellent user interface - great design. Simple to use and visually engaging. You can select your mood, genre and period, as well as whether you only want to hear hits and "misses" (non-hits). You can even select to "discover" new music. To navigate between the tracks presented just click on them and watch the screen instantly reform (similar to the visual thesaurus interface)
I'm a Pandora fan, but I'm going to give this a try. I like to listen to music whilst working - have done so since I was a small child doing homework on the floor :-) . I've found that music mood can influence how I think - lively stuff for when I need to be creative/inventive and source inspiration; mellow for when I need to examine detail.
By way of warning, there does appear to be subscription element lurking within the service, which I activated by clicking on the "Discovery" checkbox.
I'm standing in Hammersmith Apollo having just seen Deacon Blue do a fantastic gig.
This is my fifth time of seeing them live over the years, which included once in a club in Washington USA in 1989 on their first US tour - it was a tiny club befitting their unknown status in the US and I was taking the Greyhound bus touring round the entire USA, when the two tours coincided.
Anyway, the gig has just finished & of the two thousand or so crowd, there's 500 of us in a queue waiting for the live CD of the gig to be burnt and sold immediately.
I saw this notion discussed a couple of weeks back on a BBC News programme. Idea being - kills off the bootleggers opportunity of illicitly recording & then distributing the material - provides better quality recording for the fans, as it comes straight out of the mixing desk - provides additional revenue for the band - satisfy impulse demand of the crowd, who've just had a great time, to preserve the memories.
Really impressive - 10mins after the gig finishes, the CDs are being handed over. At £15 each that's a 50% enhancement to revenues on the ticket. Each gig has run this process so from a tour you get say 15-20 unique recordings to sell as a byproduct of existing performance effort. Not only that, but the band avoids all of the studio costs and marketing expenses that would ordinarily be involved in producing an album.
The promotion literature on the night insisted that only 400 copies of the CDs would ever be made available - buy it now or lose the chance for ever type offer. Doubt that the scarcity element actually bothers the customer in this instance, so they may as well sell as many as they can thereafter, especially as they have a marginal cost of near zero.
Greenwich Associates has today reported on the widespread use of equity derivatives among institutional investors:
81% trade single-stock options
75% trade index options
74% using ETFs
Two-thirds using index futures
It doesn't report on how effectively they are being used, nor the processing & reporting issues their inclusion in portfolios is causing those same firms - most buyside firms draw from the same small pool of systems and most of those systems cope poorly with derivatives. They normally struggle to show the economic exposure resulting from holding options - simply showing their market value e.g. an option may have a low market value and almost be insignificant in materiality terms, but actually be equivalent to holding a sizeable share position.
I notice that volatility swaps are not mentioned in the top list - this is a straight bet on how volatile prices are and which pay out if price movements exceed pre-set targets. These are becoming popular amongst managers desperate to generate alpha because of the stellar payouts that can occur with these instruments.
Veotag is a new service that lets you display clickable text, called "veotags," within an audio or video file. The viewer can see the veotags whenever they play the video on the web. Clicking on a veotag lets the viewer jump right to that part of the file.
I stumbled (not stumbleupon) on this one whilst viewing a VC video roundtable. The video is 53 minutes long. The addition of the veotags had 3 effects on my willingness to watch a long video.
1. I could easily see the main topics within the video and hence whether it looked worth starting to watch
2. With the tags I felt in control such that I could dip in & out of what I perceived as appealing topics.
3. With the aid of the tags, it was obvious that watching part of the video & returning later would be viable because visual prompts existed to "bookmark", in addition to the timestamp.
Whilst the basic service is free, there is a premium corporate service.
I mentioned about having your own video channel thanks to Blinkx - I put my football team, "West Brom", in and the word "win". Came up with footage from 1978 which is one of the last times we won :-( BUT what a win. Beat Man Utd 5-3 at Old Trafford and that was with Big Ron in charge (30th Dec 1978). Well, at least that will make Neil Martin laugh on both counts.
Go see this.Search results for videos presented as a video wall that dynamically updates as new content is found against search terms. Hover over the video wall "bricks" and get a lightbox + more info. But best of all, click the brick in the wall and navigate straight to the underlying content.
That is very cool. Why? Imagine that you are searching for programme on say cricket. You are presented with a wall of videos matching that criteria. Get the related tags as you hover and then dive into the items you want to view. In effect you could build your own micro channels.
And there's more. You can embedd these video walls into your own web pages and they will continue to dynamically update, serving up new content for you to watch.
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