The difference between “We don’t offer this” and “We don’t have it available, but…”

I picked up smoking recently after 4 years of active non-smoking. Reasons put aside, being back ‘in the game’ I seem to have forgotten most of the brands I used to buy back in the days.

I went to a local store the week before, and asked for a brand that I probably made up since I couldn’t remember the name. The cashier politely explained they “don’t offer this” so I had to leave empty-handed. On my way to work I came by another store, and I decided to try my luck again, being the kind of persistent person I am. Tried my best to explain what I was looking for and this time I received a different reply -- “We don’t have this brand available, but I think we have something you might like.” I am pretty sure the cashier did not have a clue what I was on about, but nevertheless she offered to help. I ended up recognising the brand I was after. Although it looks quite different from what it used to 4 years ago, I decided to buy a few packets.

My point? Don’t turn down Customers just because you don’t understand their requirements. Always offer to help and be sure to mention any products which you might already have available. We, Customers (and that includes you), need to be educated and at times even pushed to the ‘right’ direction. It's that simple.

European Elections

• Financial markets require control
• Nuclear is core energy
• Free trade, mobility and cultural exchange
• Cars should run on electrical power
• Education is an investment in the future
• Optimised food is the future

Head over to the European Parliament @MySpace for more information (if you have AdBlock Plus installed, you may need to disable it for that page only).

Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran on your mind

A fascinating talk about the human brain and how people who have sustained an injury help science put the bits of the puzzle together:

"Three-pound mass of jelly [...] and it can contemplate itself contemplating the meaning of infinity."
Vilayanur Ramachandran

The 'Big Brother' Advertising Framework

Advertising still remains the number one income source for most websites. Whether you are a blogger who gets a handful of visitors or a company such as Facebook, it is likely you rely on adverts to generate a revenue. Nowadays you can start making money within minutes, all you need is a Google AdSense account and a couple of your best friends to get you started. Most solutions rely on content from your pages, but users visiting your website will not always be interested in what you have to say, and thus what the adverts have to offer.

Much like the popular TV show 'Big Brother', let's imagine an advertising system that knows a lot about you and what you like and are likely to buy in particular. To do so, the system relies on a centralised database that collects information from 'partners'. Any website can opt in to participate and act as a 'partner'. To start, you first identify your website with a set of keywords that best describe your business. Each time a user visits any of your pages, you forward information to the centralised database. This would usually contain the IP address of your visitor, keywords associated with the page and statistics, such as average time on the website, referrer and others. The advertising system aggregates all this information and builds a comprehensive profile of keywords based on you, the 'partner', and pages your user visits. As the user goes from website to website, the system knows more about them and things they search for, read and chat about.

At this point it might not seem as a big improvement. Most platforms already do most of the above today. Let's go a step further. Imagine a user browsing the web looking for pages with information on Halo 3 and XBox. We can safely assume the user is interested in purchasing an XBox console to play Halo 3, but we cannot tell for certain whether they already own one. Advertising 'partners' can submit this kind of information back to the centralised database. If a 'partner' is an on-line shop, upon each successful order a list of keywords that match the purchased products is submitted back to the database. At this point the advertising system can offer suggestions for Halo 3 expansion packs or XBox modifications, such as an HD player.

Using data-mining the aggregated information about a user can be sorted in a timeline which can later be analysed and used to provide up-to-date suggestions. If a user visits a page which contains the keywords 'hd dvd', but the user has been looking for 'blue ray' in the last week, we can assume they are interested in an HD player of the latter kind and serve the appropriate advert.

With this kind of system privacy must be at the top of the list of concerns. Harmful websites may request adverts for a particular IP and based on the results, build a profile for a given user at their first visit. For this, and many other reasons, no personal information should even be kept on record. Details such as first name, surname, date of birth and others should always be rejected by the system. A community, much like the one driving Wikipedia, should keep an eye for harmful websites and abusers. Registrations should be allowed only by referral. Limits on the amount of adverts served per 'partner' should be in place where appropriate.

More start-up companies are founded every day and they need a better source of income. Old companies are already making their best to optimise websites and make more sales, but there is only as much one can do. While contextual advertising might be hot today, I believe person-targeted advertising will soon replace it.

"What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form."
David Ogilvy

The Social Mobile Device Concept

If I am to ask you 'Which handset on the market has the best set of features', you would probably go for an iPhone, an Android phone, Windows Mobile or perhaps Palm's recently announced WebOS platform? Each of these has it's own unique set of features and flaws, but do they make a great social device? While you may be able to use your Google Calendar and Mail on most of them, you would still have to install applications for Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and anything else you are using on-line. It is cumbersome to deal with several background programs running at the same time. Your information is not organised into a single place, rather each service keeps its own copy which is disconnected from the rest…
Meet the social mobile device.

The Contacts List: Your friends and family on Facebook are aggregated into groups. Names, addresses, telephone information, avatars are downloaded to your social device. No longer the need to keep an up-to-date information for everyone, updates on-line are propagated instantly.

Messaging: Twitter is a great service and a lot of people are using it. I do tweet regularly, but on the other hand I don't recall the last time I sent someone a message through my phone. The social device replaces the SMS interface with Twitter. Your text messages become direct messages while you still keep the option to update your public timeline.

Photos: Most handsets nowadays come with at least a 3 mega-pixels camera. Your social device will upload every photo to Flickr and auto-tag it with your current location. Friends and family can subscribe to your stream and will receive updates immediately. Photos can also be shared through Twitpic and replace today's MMS interface.

Video: Recordings you make with the social device are uploaded to YouTube and where appropriate protected so only a handful of your Contacts can watch them.

Mail and Calendar: Let's face it - in today's fast paced World you need to keep track of your schedule. Your social device will integrate seamlessly with Google. You can add personal events, send invitations and subscribe to public and friends' calendars. Mail will be synchronised instantly so you can keep an eye on that very important Customer wherever you are.

Documents: Text, spreadsheets and presentations live on Google Docs. Any changes you make on-line are reflected on the social device.

Files: everything you collect or download on your social device is uploaded to the Cloud. Music, movies, programs they all live on-line while a local copy is kept where appropriate to improve performance. A BitTorrent client is provided for larger downloads.

Multimedia: Streaming TV with a thousand of free channels is available through Livestation and radio through Last.fm.

News: Newspapers are a thing of the past. The social device aggregates content from the hundreds of free sources available on-line. Breaking news, sports and the weather forecast can be accessed at any time. RSS is integrated with Google Reader and updated regularly.

Extensions: What made Firefox a great browser are the free extensions available for download. You can customise almost every aspect of the interface and add new features. Extensions will also make a great add-on for your social device.

Open: Built on top of open and dynamic technologies is a must-do.

These are just a handful of the services the social device might support. Seamless integration is provided throughout the interface. Think about using Mail to forward a presentation to your colleagues and watch their reactions.

The best part? Your contacts, messages, photos, video, mail, calendar, documents and files all live on-line. Even if you have to replace the device itself, you will not lose any data.

The social mobile device is just a concept, but it sure makes you think about how old and disconnect the technology we use today is. It's all about staying connected and sharing.

"There is no delight in owning anything unshared."
Seneca (Roman philosopher, mid-1st century AD)

How much personal information do we share on-line?

Disclaimer: I am a software engineer and as much am involved in many projects some of which may require the use of data mining. I am in no means a data mining expert.

We go on with our on-line identities without paying much attention to the details we share about our personal lives, interests, hobbies and friends. We have profiles on Facebook, accounts on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, discussion boards and other public websites. These are all open and available to anyone. Could that affect us in any way?

Excuse me, did you just say data mining?

Data mining is the process of sorting through large amounts of data and picking out relevant information. […]

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Wikipedia page on Data mining

What good can it do? Imagine yourself sitting at home on a Saturday, no plans whatsoever, but things tend to get a bit boring. You go to www.i-have-no-plans-please-help.co.uk and you enter your user name, the very same user name you share across most websites. Here is where the magic happens:

• You have a Facebook profile registered under that user name. Since your profile is not made public by default, another user can only see your friends and in some cases your and their status updates. Looking at the most popular groups and events, data can be extracted about your interests and causes you support.
• You also happen to have a Twitter account where your timeline is visible to anyone. Your list of friends can be cross-referenced with the one downloaded from Facebook.
• There is a page on Flickr where you share your favourite photos you've taken whenever there was a cool party or a concert nearby. Groups can be cross-referenced with those available on Facebook.
• In some cases you might be sharing your current location via services such as Google Latitude.
• YouTube introduced a new feature called Active Sharing not a long time ago. In a few words, it allows anyone to see videos you have watched. Groups, channels and friends are available and can be cross-referenced.
• Let's not forget Google itself where you can run a query on your user name or your full name (available on any of the websites above) and get a somewhat accurate list of all other discussion boards and websites you actively participate in.

Now imagine all that information gathered in just a few seconds. Using data mining relevant bits can be filtered and further analysed. Here is one possible suggestion www.i-have-no-plans-please-help.co.uk might throw at you:
Hey, it turns out last Saturday you went to a fancy Chinese restaurant [via Twitter] and you enjoyed the food [via Flickr]. Your friends are currently not very far away [via Google Latitude] and are organising a party [via Facebook], but they don't have any good ideas for a nice place [via discussion boards]. You should take them to the Chinese restaurant and after that you might catch a movie. It seems like everyone is talking about RocknRolla [via Twitter, Facebook, IMDB boards]. And while you are at it, stop by Jennifer's place, her sister is in town [via Facebook] and you have a few hours to kill anyway.
* via xxx indicates the service(s) used to gather the information

It sounds a bit scary, doesn't it? But we are talking software here. The website doesn't really know you. It just analyses data and makes the best of it. What is scary is if someone decides to target you. We are bound to have someone take all this goodness and profit from it.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying stop using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and (your favourite services here). Rather, refrain from sharing too much about yourself and your friends.
I have to dash now, I've just received an SMS recommendation for a new coffee shop I must try… wonder how they know I like coffee so much?

"It's just as difficult to live in a self-made hell of privacy as it is to live in a self-made hell of publicity."
Michael Hutchence

Hello, I am a 'nightly freak'. Pleased to meet you.

You may never have heard the phrase 'nightly freak' and there is probably a good reason for it i.e. it just came to me. As a typical Internet user, let's see what Google has to say on it:

A nightly build [...] takes place automatically, typically when no one is likely to be working in the office. The results of the build are inspected by the arriving programmers, who generally place a priority on ensuring the [...] build does not break.

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Wikipedia page on Nightlies

While that may be a perfectly good definition, it still fails short to explain what I mean in details. Being a 'nightly freak' for me means running the very latest and greatest version of a program. The reason they are called 'nightly builds' /as suggested in the quote above/ usually has something to do with the fact they are produced at the end of the day, once everyone has left the office.

What are the benefits you may ask? Nightlies:

• Usually contain fixes and features not present in the official version,
• Are experiments in a way that they may offer a different approach to a task,
• Can have much better performance,
• Are a way for you, the User, to evaluate all of the above and submit feedback.

Take, for example, Firefox. While you may be running version 3.0.x, I have already adopted 3.1 in my daily browsing. It contains a lot of new features among which Geolocation, Private Browsing a.k.a. porn mode and a free video codec. Gmail, Facebook and other web applications perform in times faster than they do in 3.0.x.
Another great example is Thunderbird /if you have never heard of it before, think of what Firefox is to Internet Explorer and then apply the same concept to Outlook/. The nightly build contains so many new features it's hardly possible to fit them on a single blog post.

There is, however, a side effect to all the great new stuff you are getting. Bugs. Yes, nightlies are unstable, they crash a lot, they may even refuse to run or damage your computer /although I have never experienced the last/. Developers need to know about these issues and this is where we, the Users, come in. As a 'nightly freak' I submit a lot of bug reports and sometimes even suggest a possible fix. Your partipation ensures those bugs do not make it to the final version and also has the side effect of making you feel a tad better about yourself.

My advise to you is: get involved. Get the latest Firefox or look for a nightly of your favourite program. Try it out, see if it crashes, inform the developers and enjoy a better product!

"Observation is a passive science, experimentation an active science."
Claude Bernard

Perry Belcher on How To Double Your Productive Hours is Any Day

I found this video while browsing on Twitter. It is more or less a follow up on my previous post on 'Can we have too much information?'

I have been employing Perry's approach for a week. It really is comfortable knowing all you ever had to remember is now written down and away from everything else you need to deal with right now.

You can follow Perry Belcher on Twitter or have a look at "some stupid home videos".

Can we have too much information?

The Internet is a great source of information, no one can deny it. While once you would have to go to the library or buy special literature to learn more about quantum physics, nowadays you can join one of the hundreds clubs available on the web or simply try Wikipedia /Google is also entering the market with Knol/. There is nothing you can't learn about, all you need is time on your hands. You have the tools, you have the sources. But can we have too much information?

Did you know that every time you glance at the moon your brain throws something else away? We humans simply can't comprehend the vastness of information out there. Our brains have limited capacity, they can only store as much memories. When there is not enough room, something needs to go away. Stop and think about it for a second… yes, the simple act of observing an object costs you brain space. So does watching television or having a chat with your mates. Everything you do needs to be recorded so you can play it back later. But we are not like computers, we cannot 'add' more space. What we have is what we get. What role does the Internet play in all this madness?

How many blogs do you follow on average? How many people do you have on Twitter? Do you find yourself spending countless hours browsing the web, going through websites? Researchers have found that ours brains are rewiring themselves to deal with how we manage the large amount of information available on the web. When you go to a website, it's rarely that you read through every single sentence as you would do with a book. Instead, you find your way around by skimming through information, lots and lots of information. Same applies for Twitter, if you are following many people on there, it's rarely that you read every single twit.

Let's connect the dots. One, we know ours brains have limited capacity. Two, we throw away old or unused memories to make room for current ones. Three, our brains work somewhat differently as we deal with huge amounts of data on a daily basis, but it's all in chunks. What do you get? One big mess.

Yes, we can have too much information and many people on the web do. We end up with brains filled with rubbish, things you won't probably ever use or need and yet we throw away childhood and school memories.

By now you are probably thinking does it all mean we should stop reading blogs and using Twitter or even go to such lengths as to say we should kill the Web? No. I think we should focus our attention on the information we are getting every single day. Why have 10, 000 people on Twitter when you are only interested in probably 1% of them, which is still a high number. Why read all those stupid blogs you've meant to remove for ages and yet you spend hours every week to read the headings? Why bother to find what you need on that website when you could as easily try another Google query and get to what you want faster? Why watch television when you could find your way to news you are only interested in and have some real value in your work or daily life? I guess the list is endless, but the main point here is we should learn to filter the information we are allowing our brains to collect.

I, for one, intend to do all of the above and even go a step further. There is only as much data I can store in my brain, why not make the best of it?

"There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.
Tim Berners-Lee (from Weaving The Web: the original design and ultimate destiny of the world wide web by its inventor, 1999)

A new wave of applications hitting your desktop

Back in the days when I started my first job as a software developer I was still playing with C, Pascal and other not-so-popular programming languages. Java was widespread and Microsoft was desperately trying to come out with a new platform to replace it. And so .NET was born and so my journey began.

I was given the task to complete several projects in ASP.NET. Those were the days of Web 1.0 and AJAX wasn't the buzz word it is today. As I learned more and more of how .NET works and what problems it solves, I became fascinated by anything Microsoft. Every project thrown at me was done with Microsoft's tools and technologies… but technologies change and that's the beauty of it.

Open-source projects were suddenly becoming more and more popular. Web applications were used more often than ever before. Once thought to be the land of wacky system administrators, open-source tools and software were making their way into the mainstream. I became ever more fascinated by the opportunities.

I started working on an open-source project called XOAD (formerly NAJAX). As the name suggests, it was a set of tools to allow you to do fancy things never seen before in web applications. As years went on, people realised the power of sharing, collaborating and pushing the limits of technologies. Somewhere around that time Web 2.0 was born.

We have all come to enjoy the wonders of web applications we use today. I don't have Microsoft Office installed any more. I do all my editing and spreadsheets in Google Docs. Why keep all my photos on my PC when I can as easily share them on Flickr? And so on, and so on.

You might wonder at this time - what new wave of applications? Where are you going with all this?
We love buzz words. We use them every day. How about 'cloud' computing… or let's just call it 'The Cloud'. Yes, that's the new buzz word everyone is looking up on Google. But what is it in reality? The simplest way to define it is to be really general and summarise it in a few words: Simply having your stuff on-line. Photos on Flickr; documents, bookmarks and contacts on Google; your favourite recipes stored on-line. And so on, and so on.

Where are things heading?
We now have the tools to move many of our activities to the cloud. But we still run those dreadful desktop applications that take a lot of resources, time to install and support. What if there was a way to move those applications to the cloud as well, wouldn't that be nice for a change? It seems as Microsoft is finally pulling their act together and have come with a few ideas about the future of desktop applications. Welcome to your Live Mesh.

Mesh is a new service allowing you put up to 5GB of data on-line, free of charge. You even have a Live Desktop where you can download and preview those files. Need those reports you did last night, but have no access to your PC? No worries, get them from your Mesh. But the list of features doesn't end here. Mesh allows you to run applications as you would do on your desktop. That's right - the same application you would run on your PC now you run it anywhere you are and that's without having to wait for Setup to finish the install.

Let's let our imaginations run for a while: You go out with friends to enjoy a quiet evening at a local restaurant. You snap photos of everyone around the table and those are instantly uploaded to your Mesh and synced with all your friend's devices so everyone gets their own fair share of laugh. You get home and you open up your Messenger from within your Mesh. You didn't bother to install it and it's always with you no matter where you go. You chat for a while with your friends, exchange that very important website everyone's talking about. On the following day you are at the library and all your stuff is at your fingertip - friends, photos and that very dirty website.

It all sounds really good, doesn't it? I am somewhat glad to see Microsoft using open standards and pushing the boundaries of what today's technology can do to deliver a great end-user experience. I hope they won't screw up as they have done countless times in the past. Live Mesh is certainly a great hub to start your digital life.

I encourage you to give it a try at www.mesh.com and share your thoughts. For those of you more interested in the underlying technology, have a look at Channel9 for a great video of a new-wave application.

"The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn't think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential."
Steve Ballmer