I met up with Robert Scoble last night at an Orange party in San Francisco (my photos from the party are here). He brought along his Amazon Kindle and let me and others test it out. It was the first time I’d held one - the Kindle I bought hasn’t arrived yet and my co-editor Erick covered the New York launch.
Anyway, he took video of me giving my opinion of the Kindle (thumbs down). The problem is the UI is completely non-intuitive and the screen is unreadable in medium light (it was much brighter in the room than the video suggests and it was easily bright enough to read a normal book). I was trying to simply pull up the browser and go to a web page and I couldn’t figure it out. The scroll wheel on the side is obviously designed only to frustrate users. And without any sort of mouse, I kept touching the screen to try to get it to do what I wanted (which of course doesn’t work). I also compare it in the video unfavorably to the etch-a-sketch.
I asked Robert to pull up a web browser and load TechCrunch. He did it once and it took so long I asked him if I could video it. He agreed, and did it again. It took him 55 seconds to pull up the browser and enter the TechCrunch URL. I then pulled out my iPhone and did the same thing in 14 seconds.
The Kindle can be given some slack since web browsing isn’t its core function. But web browsing on the iPhone isn’t the key feature of that device, either. Amazon just didn’t design a good device (the user interface, keyboard and screen are all very flawed), and they had all the time in the world to get it right. Hopefully v.2 will be an improvement.
Of course this is just my opinion after trying it out for a few minutes, and I’d had a couple of beers. Don MacAskill wrote up his own review after a day with the device and says its wonderful.
Can product reviews be done in a wiki? And can they be done better than the regular way of each reviewer having his or her own say? One of the entrepreneurs I spoke with at our Boston MeetUp, Omar Ismail, thinks they can. He is a founder of ProductWiki, based in Waterloo, Ontario. The idea behind ProductWiki is to create collaborative product reviews that boil all the judgments about a product into one single review. It avoids revision wars by requiring every reviewer to list both pros and cons, and then every other ProductWiki reader can vote on each pro and each con until a consensus emerges. Here is a review of the
Last week, the site turned on three new features which Ismail hopes will allow him to create the ultimate “product graph” (this is like a social graph for products, showing how products are related or connected to one another). Reviewers can now identify competing or related products, and vote on which ones they like better in a head-to-head, A-B fashion. The third feature is a product rank derived from the first two features. For instance, based on 15 votes, the iRex iLiad beats out both the Kindle and the Sony Reader in the e-book category (so far):
I like the ideas of a product graph and product rank. A true product graph, however, would surface surprising connections. I know the iPod and the Zune are related products, but what about the more tangential connections, like the toaster oven with the iPodish design? That is what I’d like to see.
ProductWiki is another bootstrap startup with three employees (Omar, his sister Amanie, and her husband Erik). It was launched in November, 2005, and has about 15,000 product reviews.
Facebook and Google have been competing with each over more than just social networking. Facebook is growing from 300ish employees today to 700 next year. And the best place to get good engineers and others is Google, where many have already vested on their stock options and are looking for the next big hit.
Facebook has already claimed Youtube CFO Gideon Yu, eCommerce Product lead Benjamin Ling and GDrive developer Justin Rosenstein.
But Ex-Googler’s inside Facebook are saying that the problem goes further than a few high profile exits caused by vesting stock. Facebook just seems a hell of a lot “sexier” than Google (see Rosenstein’s exit email). A steady stream of Google employees are making the switch to Facebook, and competition for top college grads is fierce as well.
Senior VPs at Google have dubbed it “the Facebook problem” according to a number of sources. At least ten “top performers” have made the switch over the last two months. Ex-Googler’s expect to continue seeing at least two to four more leave for Facebook each month. That doesn’t sound like much, but Facebook is targeting the cream of the crop. The best Googler’s are being actively recruited, and many are leaving.
Our sources are also saying that Google has been aggressively countering Facebook offers with offers of stock units (GSUs). The options weren’t enough for one Google employee, who says he was getting promoted quickly and hitting huge bonuses with high priced stock. But he says “it’s not just about the money. Entrepreneurs want to work at the hottest place on earth and right now that’s Facebook.”
When it comes to online maps, there is a gap between the 2-D maps and pictures you see on Google Maps, Live Maps, and Yahoo Maps, and the more fully-immersive, fly-through experiences of Google Earth and Virtual Earth. A small four-person startup in New York City called UpNext is trying to bridge that gap, by bringing extremely detailed, 3-D maps to the browser.
UpNext only maps Manhattan right now (they hope to add Boston and San Francisco next spring), but it is a powerful demonstration of how 3-D experiences could soon become more mainstream. (No download is necessary, but you do need Java 1.5—and be warned that older Macs might have some issues with it). I met UpNext chief architect Raj Advani last week at our Boston MeetUp, and he came by today with CEO Danny Moon to show me the site and its new Facebook app.
Yesterday, UpNext launched its map on Facebook, although it is not yet in the app directory. (Unlike many Facebook apps, it is not a subset of the main site’s functionality. You can do everything inside Facebook you can on UpNext.com.) UpNext is a complete 3-D representation of the city, down to practically every single building. You can pan and zoom, and click on any building to get a list of the businesses inside. Type in an address and the map flies right to it. If you want to see nearby restaurants, bars, stores, hotels, museums, or sports facilities, you can set a filter to light those things up on the map. This building-by-building and category search “is something you cannot do on Google Maps,” claims Moon.
For many businesses, UpNext pulls in ratings and reviews from other sites like CitySearch, the New York Times, and Time Out. And you can add your own reviews, and look at all the places your friends on UpNext have rated, reviewed, and visited. That now includes all your New York City Facebook friends, whom you can import into the main site as well. They pop down in a friend slider that lets you sort through them and all the places they’ve rated.
UpNext gets its map data from VisionMedia, which flies over the city taking pictures and then extrapolates the height of each building, allowing UpNext to render them in 3-D. It then takes local business information from Localeze, and drops it onto every building (which is geocoded using data from the City of New York). “We want to reach a new level of detail in immersive search,” says Advani, “so I can see at a glance where things are happening.” He’s even added day and night cycles to the map.
All of this would not be possible using Ajax or even Flash, says Advani. Only Java lets UpNext tap into the video acceleration card on your PC to render the polygons fast enough. The trick is to compress each building, rendering it with as few polygons as possible. There is some lag time while you are waiting for Java to load, but that should be fixed in an update to Java coming in about three months.
And what about a mobile version? Advani is thinking of entering the $10 million Android contest sponsored by Google for its new mobile operating system. And of course, he would develop for the iPhone in a second if Apple “would tell us some details about their API.”
UpNext is a real bootstrap operation. The four employees put in $50,000 and pulled together another $45,000 from friends and family, which was enough to create the map of New York City. Now they want to raise about $1 million to expand to other cities. In terms of making money, at some point they will turn on local search ads as well as in-map ads where buildings light up during certain searches (like for “shoes”). Moon also envisions creatiev banner ads linked to the map. “If Starbucks is launching a new drink,” he suggetss, “all the Starbucks could light up if you click on the ad.” Local business Yellow Pages-type ads are another natural fit.
In reality, though, UpNext is a technology demo waiting to be picked up by a larger company building out a global mapping platform. It cannot survive as a standalone company given the competition. Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft should buy these guys and blow out these maps worldwide.
We’ve previously covered BuyMyBrokenIpod here and on CrunchGear. They paid reasonable amounts of cash for working or broken iPods, no questions asked. In our post, we checked their prices to eBay’s and they compared favorably, without the hassle of going through the auction process.
Today the site has changed its name to BuyMyTronics, and they’ve increased the range of products they’ll buy from users. In addition to iPods, you can now sell them various game consoles, iPhones and Zune MP3 Players.
As you upgrade your devices this holiday season, this site may be the perfect place to dump your old stuff. The company sells broken stuff in bulk to third parties or breaks them down for parts. Working units are refurbished and resold directly to to resellers.
