There’s been some increased buzz lately about the semantic web and what it all means.  Alex Iskold, CEO of AdaptiveBlue has a great piece on SemanticWeb.com, titled "The Semantic Curmudgeon".

AdaptiveBlue make an interesting browser plugin that understands context and applies that understanding to generate useful shortcuts on pages, links and text.  So if you’re browsing music on the web, their plugin "understands" that and suggests useful contextually-related links.  Visit the site and take a tour — it will explain it much better than I just did (sorry Alex!).

Part of what we do here in MonkeyVille is semantic-technology related, in that some of our code understands words and attempts to imply context.  But by no means are we a semantic web application (and no, I will not get drawn in to the idiotic "I’m a web 3.0 app" discussions that are bouncing around the blogosphere).

However, our choice not to be a fully semantic app was deliberate, and Alex’s article hits the proverbial nail on the noggin as to why:

1. It lacks memory and is not iterative in nature.
2. Its ultimate goal is to deliver perfect answers, which are unattainable.
3. It is technologically impractical to achieve.

Back in the day, I was involved with a company that did a lot of research into symbol recognition for engineering drawings.  The idea is just like OCR — scan a page of text and get real words — but for engineering symbols.  It is a tough problem to solve, arguably worse than handwriting recognition because symbols can be anywhere in a drawing and can be drawn on top of other lines and features.

We had some clever engineers who spent a lot of time trying to solve the problem.  Using AI, fuzzy this and neural that, they boosted recognition rates from ~65% to (I think) 80+%.  We were proud, and very condescending of our competitor with their stubby and sad 65%.  But the competition were smart, as well as clever.  They responded not by developing even better technology, but creating better workflow.  They redefined the real problem: customers wanted to quickly convert hand drawn squiggles to symbols within a CAD system.  Customers really didn’t care how they got the end result.  So competitor took their oh-so-sad 65% algorithm, used it to identify everything in the drawing that might possibly be a symbol, and developed some very quick tools to tab around the drawing and manually replace all the squiggles with symbols.

Using their system, you could convert an entire drawing in ~30 minutes.  Using ours, initial processing would only take 10 or 15 minutes, but the cleanup (finding the 20% that wasn’t recognized correctly) took an hour or more.  So their dopey oh-so-stupid technology kicked our asses by 2x or more every time.

Doh!

Smart almost always beats clever.

And the situation with the purely semantic web is almost identical.  The idea that code will ever be able to identify context and meaning with 100% certainly for every individual is absurd.  It might hit 85% for most people, or more.  But it will never, ever, hit perfect accuracy.

The second issue I see with "pure" semantic web plays is that they expect authors of web pages to add additional markup that conveys contextual meaning.  Given how long it has taken for CSS to be adopted — something obviously useful at the individual level –  I question how readily authors will adapt to adding contextual markup.  Not to mention that there is an awful lot of data already out there.  IDC reckon that “The digital universe in 2006 could be likened to 12 stacks of books extending from the Earth to the sun. By 2010 the stack of books could reach from the sun to Pluto and back…”.

So while semantic tools absolutely have their use, they are just another component of an overall solution, not a universal magic bullet.

More on what we’re doing on Wednesday!

Categories: Old Posts
822 Comments »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2007/10/08/semantic-schmantic/Semantic%2C+schmantic...2007-10-08+23%3A34%3A00NickN

My family and I live in some kind of crazy wildlife-gone-mad bit of suburbia, so animals of all shapes and sizes are a common sight.  We get deer, turtles, frogs, insane kamikaze squirrels and bizarre nocturnal beasties that seem to have opposable thumbs (from what they’ve been able to get in to).  Of course, this all fascinates my daughter — and me for that matter.

The other day I was coming home having just picked up my daughter from daycare.  As we got out of the car, I saw a hawk-like bird (that seems to live somewhere in the back yard) just a couple of meters away.  I was just about to point it out to my daughter, when I realized it was busy ripping the head off a squirrel and flying away with the blood-soaked furry corpse.

Needless to say, we didn’t spend time looking at the pretty birdie…

And that got me thinking about how sometimes in business, you have to choose to ignore real events and feedback that are happening around you.

Obviously, this is dangerous territory to be in.  I am a big believer in keeping things real.  A is A, after all.  And I’m firmly on the same side as Public Enemy when it comes to hype.  But sometimes it does seem necessary to ignore reality.

Some examples:

1)  We’ve been talking to many different VCs.  Some of them have had a real problem with the fact that we are targeting the SMB (small to medium size business) market.  This is usually because they’ve had bad experiences with an SMB-focused company.  Why do we believe in it?  It’s the only market that makes sense for us right now.  The consumer market would require a radically different approach (all about traction and users and not about revenues), which in turn requires a consumer-targeted and  foresighted VC.  The Enterprise market is very much a walled garden.  We immediately face multi-billion dollar players who are very entrenched in the market, customers that are mostly unwilling to try radically new solutions to existing problems. very long sales cycles and a market who’s growth appears to be slowing.  Meanwhile, the SMB market is vibrant and growing.  SMBs are very willing to try new tools and move much faster than an Enterprise when buying something new.

So we think we’re right and therefore choose to ignore anti-SMB feedback.

2)  In the same vein…  Some VCs don’t like Software as a Service.  We see it as a logical fit for the SMB market.  SMBs are usually light on IT support and infrastructure, so the ability to roll out a tool at the swipe of a credit card is pretty appealing.

We plan on offering a deployable version of the product, but version 1.0 will be SaaS.  So we ignore the anti-SaaS feedback.

3)  Back when our message was less clear, we got a lot of feedback.  Some folks felt we were a knowledge management tool, some thought we should be part of the OS, others saw us as a business intelligence tool or a data warehouse or a wiki-killer.  While some small part of each of those may be relevant, you still have to choose to ignore some of the "truth" out there.

But as I said, ignoring reality is a dangerous business, and it can have unintended consequences. 

For example, when I ran an animation studio, times were often tough.  Margins were thin and our survival was greatly aided by the genius cash flow management skills of our CFO.  As a management team, we decided to insulate our team from the financial roller-coaster we were on.  We made that choice because keeping the team together was vital to our success. The truth of the situation would certainly have triggered some job hopping,  and payroll was never at risk, so we didn’t see much of a downside.

But the lack of connection between the team and the financial situation lead to some real issues.  Some staff treated small projects very poorly because they felt they didn’t matter.  Some continually pushed for aggressive raises multiple times in one year.  Almost all were reluctant to adopt productivity tools that could have increased the amount of work we could get done (and bill clients for).

Even with the benefit of hindsight, I think we made the right decision.

But I’m not sure you can ever know which "realities" to ignore while you’re living through them.  All you can do is remind yourself that you are consciously choosing to ignore certain events and make sure you have someone who’s a good sounding-board for the logic behind your decision.

And now back to our regular programing. 

Categories: Old Posts
81No Comments »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2007/10/05/fun-with-double-edged-swords/Fun+with+double-edged+swords...2007-10-06+01%3A16%3A00NickN

Some folks wanted to know what exactly we do all day in our little startup world.

So here it is.

Enjoy.

But my daughter likes my solo act better…

Thanks to Jib Jab for providing a nice distraction this afternoon…

Categories: Old Posts
802 Comments »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2007/10/04/what-we-really-do-all-day/What+we+really+do+all+day...2007-10-04+21%3A26%3A01NickN

Since most of my posts seem to be about how smoothly things are going, I figured I’d buck the trend…

Today we heard that we were rejected by the NC Idea grant program. 

If you don’t know about NC Idea and are thinking of starting something here, they are worth checking out.  Twice a year they hand out grants of up to $50,000 to help companies that are just getting started.  Since it’s a grant you don’t have to repay the money or give up equity for it.  Pretty sweet.

The only caveat is that you can’t use the money for salaries.  It is supposed to be used for things that help you get venture funding down the road e.g. patent applications.

I have no idea why we didn’t make the grade — unfortunately you don’t get feedback on your application.  But for the right kind of company, I think it’s a good program.

In other funding related news…  I have no wish to offend any members of the local community, but I am increasingly of the opinion that in the RTP region, new ideas in software (especially web-related) have almost zero chance of being locally funded.  The business community is fantastic for new-comers, but the funding side of things seems dramatically less so…

At this stage we have one local group that is actively following up and has been very supportive (thanks!).

When I look at locally funded early stage ventures, in almost every case the local investor was working along side non-local investors.  In a perfect world, I would prefer to work with local investors so that we can build the local early-stage community.  Unfortunately, I don’t think that is going to happen any time soon.

Anyway.  We’ll be here having our private pity party and building our kickass product.  I promise to talk more about the big "it" next week.

Categories: Old Posts
794 Comments »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2007/10/03/rejected/Rejected...2007-10-04+00%3A27%3A04NickN

With the exception of airlines and banks, I’m not one for pointing out how degenerate some companies are, but this particular story annoys me.  Nerve Media’s behavior is reprehensible, and in my opinion thoroughly immoral (not a term I use lightly or frequently).

My wife reads a blog called Sweet Juniper.  It’s written by a husband and wife team and is mostly about being a parent.  Some months ago, the authors discovered that Babble (owned by Nerve Media) had taken a photo of their daughter from Flickr and used it without permission.  The photo was clearly marked with a copyright notice and "all rights reserved".

Not only did they take the photo without permission, but they used it as the title image on a story about the dangers of lead paint. 

The photo shows a toddler with a doll sitting in front of a wall with peeling paint.

I would be annoyed by someone using my pictures without my permission, period.  But using the picture as the intro to a scare story with the CLEAR implication that this is a child impacted by lead paint — that would make me angry.  And probably litigious.

When the author of the blog (also the father of the toddler in the picture) contacted Babble, they offered $100 to use the photo.  When the author refused they did eventually remove the photo.  The Editor of the magazine blamed the site’s photo editor, claiming the the editor thought it was under a creative commons license.  Any editor that doesn’t know that creative commons licenses exclude commercial use is clearly an idiot.

But it gets better.  Several other folks piped up and said that they had the same experience with the same publication.  The Editor of Babble then claimed it was all the fault of an intern and made initially positive noises about being concerned.  The CEO of Babble then joins the conversation to "justify" the events, crying that they were a "small budget" operation, and at the same time claiming that the $100 they offered was 4x what they would normally pay Getty Images for a photo.

When the author points out the many flaws in the CEO’s argument, the CEO goes on to try and smear him, claiming "Sweet juniper, on the other hand, has a very specific agenda here: he is trying to find a way to make some money off of us."

Unbelievable.  And a fantastic way to NOT run a business.

If you care to, you can read all the BS here. But the short summary is that Nerve are clearly a reprehensible organization with no ethics whatsoever.

Categories: Old Posts
782 Comments »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2007/10/02/why-nerve-media-deserve-your-scorn-and-not-your-business/Why+Nerve+Media+deserve+your+scorn+%28and+not+your+business%29...2007-10-02+23%3A46%3A35NickN