As everyone in the world surely knows by now, June 27th was Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft. 

With 100s of books and 100,000s of blog posts detailing every known second of his controversial career, I won’t waste words saying what has already been said over and over again.  Surely, Bill Gates was a ruthless businessman.  He did not become the world’s richest man by befriending the competition.  Surely, Bill Gates was arrogant.  He didn’t withstand the most relentless antitrust litigation in US history (with his company virtually unscathed) by yielding to the prosecution. 

But, whatever you choose to think or say about Bill Gates, it is hard not to admire him for what he has already accomplished, what he continues to accomplish, and what he has contibuted to the world.  There aren’t many people who can make a legitimate claim to have had the impact on society that Bill Gates has had.  Whether the ideas were his own or stolen doesn’t really matter in the end.  Great leaders act on behalf of their advisors, their consituencies, and even their competition.  In national politics, “leaning over the isle” is considered a positive trait.  Whether Gates ran Microsoft ethically or not is largely irrelevant, and I challenge anyone to show me a large corporation that doesn’t do whatever it can to make more money for its leaders and shareholders.

Like him or not, Bill Gates wielded a tremendous amount of power at the helm of Microsoft, at least up until the last years.  At the end of his reign, I think we are all in a better place than we were when he started.  We have the internet.  We have cheap desktop computers.  Regardless of his ruthless business practices, his brutal treatment of the competition, or his arrogance against congress, he leaves the techno-world in a better place than he found it.  Few US presidents can say the same thing of their terms in office. 

Whatever your opinion of the man might be, we were all fortunate to have had Bill Gates to hold the reigns of the world of technology for a while.

Idée Inc, a Toronto-based company, has announced that it has built a new search engine that employs true image recognition.  Currently in private beta, Idée claims:

“TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. Given an image to search for, TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web—even if it has been modified.

Just as you are familiar with entering text in a regular search engine such as Google to find web pages that contain that text, TinEye lets you submit an image to find web pages that contain that image.”

The company released a widget that demonstrates some of the algorithm’s findings:

While I am excited to see progress being made toward moving search algorithms beyond text, I question the utility of such an application.  TinEye relies on images as its search query.  When a user uploads a picture, the program creates a digital “fingerprint” for it.  Then, it compares this fingerprint against its index (said to be rapidly growing).  The results, in theory, are exact or near-matches of the searched image.

Image to image search isn’t new.  I worked for a company in 2000-2001 doing the same thing (never publicly released as a search engine), and not just for images (also video and audio).  The problem this company will have is the same as our problem was then— the application, while cool and novel, has no real practical purpose beyond copyright protection.  According to the company, uses for TinEye include:

Find out where and how an image appears online

Research products using a product photo

Find modified versions of unmodified images or vice versa

Research the usage of editorial or stock images

Get international, multilingual websites in your search results

Research corporate imagery or brand usage online

Use a webcam to digitize any image and search for it on the web

Search for your images to see where they are being used

Yes, copyright protection is important and valuable, even if less so for images than for other media (movies, music).  So, maybe they stand a chance serving a relatively niche market.  But, other than being interesting to try once, this doesn’t solve the bigger issue of providing a useful new feature for mass audiences to adopt.

How can a company create a truly useful utility out of recognition-based image search, you ask?

Build a method for generating, validating, and maintaining textual data to accurately describe each “fingerprint”.  Only then can the search query move beyond uploading an image, and starting to use words instead.  Only then will the mass public find it appealing, and adoption of the new technology can begin.  Google’s started on this using their Image Labeler game.  But, with millions upon millions of images on the web, this method of collecting meta data isn’t scalable or effective.  Perhaps the best bet is using meta data collected from image collection management software/services, such as Picasa or Flickr.  But, without validation (something Image Labeler is successful in achieving), such a process would certainly be plagued with bad data and prone to manipulation. 

Either way, I wish Idée Inc the best of luck and really hope they succeed.  We are definitely overdue to start thinking about how search can move past text-text, and on to other useful applications like text-image or text-video.

According to the latest Comscore data, Yahoo sites still generate the most unique visitors of any internet property (121,962,000 as compared to Google’s 85,685,000). 

This is no surprise, as Yahoo is a content play before anything else.  With thousands and thousands of pages of proprietary content, discussion groups, forums, email, and everything else under the sun, being a search engine has never seemed to be the biggest priority in Sunnyvale.  With all these page views— one would think that Yahoo would reap enormous revenues. 

According to Yahoo’s own finance page on their business, Yahoo posted gross revenues of $1,817,602,000 for the first quarter of 2008.  By dividing gross revenue by the latest Comscore data on unique visitors (extrapolated to be representative of the same 3 month time period), Yahoo appears to have grossed $4.96 per visitor per month.  And, using a 41.5% cost of revenue (calculated using data from the same balance sheet), that would effectively reduce Yahoo’s net profit to $2.90 per user per month.  Yahoo claims to average 3.4 billion page views per day.  That’s 102 billion page views a month.  So, if my math is correct, Yahoo makes about $0.017 per page view.

When you are talking about how much money you make per page view, less than 2 tenths of a cent per page isn’t too good.

Compare this with Google.  By the same calculation, Google posted gross revenues of $5,186,043,000 for the same period.  Divided by the number of users in the Comscore report, adjusted for time, that equates to $20.17 gross, or $11.90 net per user (profit margin being calculated in the same manner).  Good luck finding accurate page view per user data from Google— so, let’s just say it is 2.7B (thanks to SearchEngineWatch for the guess).  That means, by the same calculation, Google makes $0.52 per page view (that’s 30X more per page).

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this math is absolutely and completely flawed beyond being in any way accurate.  It fails to take into account any variables that exist, including revenue from other sources (content network, partnerships to name a few).  But, I would argue that this analysis is “directionally correct” at the very least, if not true to scale.

Although terribly simplified, this analysis does illustrate the problem Yahoo has.  All the users in the world are worthless if they don’t generate revenue.  That’s why Yahoo’s stock is at $21.45 (as of June 22) and Google’s is $545.21. 

But, don’t count Yahoo out— it takes many years, millions of dedicated users, and billions of dollars to generate the depth of content Yahoo has across its properties.  Search is easy, serving ads is easy.  A recent deal with Google might finally give Yahoo the means to better monetize that traffic.  Combine that with true dedicated usership, and Yahoo still might have a chance to win in the end.

It is possible.

Friday, the Personal Democracy Forum announced that it will be hosting a presidential candidate debate to be entirely conducted over Twitter:

“We’re pleased to announce a first for the Internet Election of 2008: Starting tonight, a designated representative of both of the major presidential campaigns are going to participate in a free-wheeling debate on technology and government, moderated by Time magazine blogger Ana Marie Cox and channeled via Twitter.”

While the actual presidential candidates will not be submitting their own “tweets“, some pretty respectable figures from each of their campaigns will.  According to the post:

“The McCain campaign will be represented by Liz Mair, the online communications director of the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign will be represented by Mike Nelson, a professor at Georgetown University who served in the Clinton White House under Vice President Gore on tech policy issues.”

For a lot of us in the industry, this marks a pivotal moment.  Not because the candidates look to be a tiny bit closer to embracing the internet as an effective (and cheap) means of communicating their messages to potential voters, but because it may be the first truly meaningful use for Twitter. 

For anyone who lives under a rock, Twitter is a website service that provides one single function: users submit >140 character messages (by web interface, text-message from their cell phone, or third-party application), and they are pushed to all of their “followers” (and for most users settings also posted on the public timeline for anyone to see, even if only available for a brief moment in time).  In this time of text-messaging mania, Twitter provides a useful (if not meaningful or profitable) function.  But, short of using it to quickly organize an audience rebellion at a conference (a great story worthy of reading), most tweets consist of one of the following: a) what is for lunch, b) where to get that lunch, c) how the weather is today, or d) where to eat lunch because of the weather today.  Nonetheless, Twitter has racked up impressive usership (an estimated 1.3 million users in March). 

As a free service, with no on-page advertising visible, many people wonder what the real business model is.  Where is the opportunity for revenue?  That hasn’t stopped investors from pumping Twitter full of money to keep going.  Recent estimates have them as having already collected over $20 million.  Many heads are being scratched as to what they are thinking— I for one am wondering, have I missed something here?

So, while the online presidential debate does not represent a way to make Twitter any money— it does give the site a further boost for its popularity and/or notoriety.  And, as long as the 1990’s don’t repeat themselves for this industry, maybe that will prove to be enough.

Here’s something you don’t see every day:

A San Francisco photographer posted pictures on Flickr (yes, Flickr and not Picasa) of the Google Maps “Street View” camera vehicle pulled over by the police in the Presidio.  It seems that a SF motorcycle cop found the enormous apparatus mounted to the roof of this lady’s Prius to be a little suspicious.  Either that, or she was speeding. 

I have always wondered what Google’s camera apparatus for Streetview looked like, and thanks to Damian Spain, now I know.  Some bloggers are speculating what the hardware included– with some convinced Google is working on collecting 3D data for some new functionality to add to Street View.

So, now we know what it looks like.  And, the next time you see a hybrid vehicle with a 5-foot camera array following you down the street, don’t miss your chance.  Do something visible and memorable for the camera, write down where you were when you saw it, and watch for it on Google Maps.  When else will you get a chance for such fame?