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Internet

Phishing by any other name…

July 12, 2010 in Internet

If you visit The Huffington Post using Google Chrome, you’ll see this alert bar appear at the top of your screen:

It looks just like a standard Chrome alert, sharing the same coloring, fonts and icons as the browser’s notification bar. But it isn’t. It’s generated by a piece of code on huffingtonpost.com and is just a <div> like any other on the site. There are only a couple of clues to its true nature: unlike a true Chrome alert, it won’t stay at the top of the page when you scroll (surprising, since that’s an easy CSS property to set) and the text of the alert can be highlighted. Finally, most blatantly, the ruse is revealed by right-clicking the alert and choosing “Inspect Element” from Chrome’s menu.

I think this is pretty awful and irresponsible. We live in a time where online fraud and phishing is rampant — malicious attacks in which a  site passes itself off as a different, trusted site in order to fool the user into taking some action. It’s a terrible practice that ensnares millions of people. Usually, such fraud is perpetrated by hackers trying to trick their victims into downloading malware or revealing confidential information. The victim is led to believe that the software they are downloading or form they are filling out is from a site they trust.

And that brings us to The Huffington Post, which is trying to cajole its readers into downloading software by making it look like the download link was generated by their trusted Google browsers! When I first saw the alert, I wondered if Google and The Huffington Post had entered into some sort of partnership, but they haven’t (although the extension in question is a “featured extension” on the true Chrome extension site). Then I wondered if the alert bar was being generated by some suspect third party, but quickly determined it originated from The Huffington Post itself.

I think it’s insane that this idea was implemented. The only good news here is that the software in question is not malicious. But the means by which it is being advertised is fraudulent. The Huffington Post is completely misrepresenting Google and their browser by stealing its look and feel for the purpose of harvesting clicks. At the very least, borrowing the look and feel of another application of site is an infringement of intellectual property. I’m stunned by the lack of commentary on it — either people don’t realize, don’t care or – most likely – haven’t equated this version of phishing with its more dangerous analogues.

And HP isn’t the only one — the well-known site DownloadSquad was fooled by a similar scam at The Independent.

I see no difference between an email spoofing my bank and an web site spoofing my browser. I rely on both to provide me with information that I can rely on, and any attempt to hijack that trust is contemptible. The decision to spoof my browser bar should have been accompanied by a highly-visible disclaimer that the message did not originate from Google or, preferably, been scrapped altogether.

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Are you joking right now, AT&T?!

June 15, 2010 in Internet

Hours into the iPhone launch, you’re still “upgrading your systems”?!

Due to a system upgrade the site is temporarily unavailable, please try again later. For immediate assistance please contact customer service at 1-800-331-0500.

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Toiletries (.com)

June 4, 2010 in Economics,Internet

The NYT reports on soap.com, which aims to provide drugstore items over the internet. I’m having a hard time seeing how this is really interesting news.

“Nobody is really buying toilet paper online,” Mr. Bharara said. “We’re trying to shift in a big way consumer behavior over all, and take share from offline.”

Merely being online isn’t a magic bullet. Consumers are more likely to migrate their behavior if the item is better suited to online delivery than off. The nature of a drugstore’s goods (typically necessities) and drugstores themselves (situated on almost every corner) have already evolved into an optimal balance of proximity and immediacy. In NYC, we laugh when we see two Starbucks on opposite corners but we complain when we have to walk more than a block to the 24-hour Duane Reade (or CVS, or the bodega…). So there isn’t as clear a motivation to adopt delivery as there is for electronics, clothing, books or even food, as those industries are otherwise impeded by inconveniences like distance and time.

(And yes, I’m assuming that the target  consumer is urban or suburban. Rural consumers are 1) predisposed to purchasing home items in large quantity – witness the success of Wal-Mart – and at regular intervals and 2) are rarely the focus of online businesses due to more idiosyncratic needs.)

The physical layout of locations like convenience stores and dry cleaners demonstrate that the industry is focused on a hyperlocal experience. One establishment serves only the houses or apartments immediately surrounding it; if two businesses are sufficient distance apart, a third will open to capture the middle share. As such, the online model represents a radical departure from the business norm – as long as we consider every franchise independent. As soon as we look at every DR as an extension of the same overarching business, we’re more in line.

But that speaks directly to another issue: just because people aren’t buying toiletries online doesn’t mean they can’t. Indeed, the drugstore.com market is well saturated by big players like DR, CVS, Wal-Mart and Amazon. They may only account for $8B of a $125B market, but I don’t think it’s for a lack of brand awareness. Rather, it’s that the marginal benefit of shopping online is simply not as great for these types of products.

The one big advantage an online store has, of course, is serving the long tail: e-retailers can stock products which brick-and-mortar can’t afford to give up shelf space for. Again, however, I’m not convinced that such a long tail exists in drugstore items (since their size is infrequently prohibitive) or that it is sufficient motivation to drive consumers online (since this is hardly a new e-market).

So far I’ve only discussed hurdles for a consumer migration to line, and most have centered on the status-quo effect: the industry has stabilized around a hyperlocal but physical layout, and there isn’t a major benefit to moving online. In fact, there might be a cost to moving online: how many people buy toiletries in advance? I would imagine that people buy toilet paper, toothpaste, floss, shampoo etc. as they need it, which means waiting a day or two for shipping is out of the question.

The real hurdle for online drugstores is not enticing consumers to use the internet for commerce (that path was pioneered long ago), but getting them to anticipate their drugstore needs so that the delivery period is not an impediment. One way to do that is to offer bulk discounts, a la Costco. I’m not going to buy two bottles of shampoo right now, because I’ll just buy the second one on my corner the night I need it. But if that second bottle were cheaper… now you’re talking.

If I may break the statistician’s code and use a personal anecdote, I’ve been buying toiletries from Amazon ever since they introduced Prime two-day shipping. The equation’s fairly straightforward: free shipping + volume discounts > my perceived cost of walking to the store + hassle of ordering in advance.

So I’m not quite as excited as the NYT about soap.com’s prospects. It’s not because I think it’s a bad idea, it’s because I think the fundamental shift in consumer behavior that they need isn’t the one they seem to have targeted. You don’t need to convince people to buy online, you need them to buy in advance! It’s psychological, not economical. And perhaps most importantly, I don’t think this is a new idea by any means. But perhaps soap.com can push it to the forefront and help people migrate across the digital divide.


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What is data science?

June 3, 2010 in Data,Internet,Math,Technology

The latest in a series of articles on the topic, Mike Loukides of O’Reilly Radar asks, “What is data science?“:

We’ve all heard it: according to Hal Varian, statistics is the next sexy job. Five years ago, in What is Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly said that “data is the next Intel Inside.” But what does that statement mean? Why do we suddenly care about statistics and about data?

The article is excellent, insightful, and long. It’s not just an overview, it’s an in depth discussion of the who’s, how’s, what’s and why’s of data science – and required reading for anyone curious about what we data scientists actually do.

A few phrases that really stood out to me:

CDDB views music as data, not as audio, and creates new value in doing so.

One of the keys to data science is the realization that data is data is data; it doesn’t really matter what that data represents. A computer (read: algorithm, test, procedure) is content-agnostic. It just does what it’s told. It is up to the scientist — the human — to impose meaning and context on the results of the data manipulation. You might run two distinct analyses on the same dataset; or use the same analysis for two very different datasets. The procedure doesn’t care and — critically —  has no way of inferring its own success without a meta-algorithm layered on top of it. It’s easiest to let the data scientist be that top layer.

The question facing every company today, every startup, every non-profit, every project site that wants to attract a community, is how to use data effectively — not just their own data, but all the data that’s available and relevant. Using data effectively requires something different from traditional statistics, where actuaries in business suits perform arcane but fairly well-defined kinds of analysis. What differentiates data science from statistics is that data science is a holistic approach. We’re increasingly finding data in the wild, and data scientists are involved with gathering data, massaging it into a tractable form, making it tell its story, and presenting that story to others.

This goes hand-in-hand with my last point: there’s no definition of the “right” analysis. Data science is a two-stage process: first, an exploration and second, an implementation (or communication). Repeat.

Once you’ve parsed the data, you can start thinking about the quality of your data. Data is frequently missing or incongruous. If data is missing, do you simply ignore the missing points? That isn’t always possible. If data is incongruous, do you decide that something is wrong with badly behaved data (after all, equipment fails), or that the incongruous data is telling its own story, which may be more interesting?

There’s a nice section, including the above paragraph, on the life-cycle of data itself. The one thing I would add is that data frequently needs to be transformed before it becomes usable. Too many applications today just take data in its raw form and try to correlate it (I’m looking at you, every-application-that-counts-words-in-tweets!). Standardization, whitening, dimension reduction and transformation are important and crucial steps in getting informed results.  If I gave you audio data, you wouldn’t just use it as it appears, you’d probably run it through an FFT first. I suppose you could argue that this step of the analysis is actually part of the analysis itself, and not part of the data preparation.

The problem with most data analysis algorithms is that they generate a set of numbers. To understand what the numbers mean, the stories they are really telling, you need to generate a graph.

Sometimes, sometimes not. The data-visualization/infographic movement in one of the best things that has happened to data science in a long time. Unfortunately, it has also trained us that “pictures are good; simple pictures are better.” There’s nothing more communicative than a good chart, true, but some datasets belie graphic communication. Multi-dimensional datasets are certainly hard to draw without some process like MDS or projection pursuit. I would argue that for many data applications, visualizations are part of the exploratory process but would/should not be considered a final product. For complex data, visualizations show you the question and how the data relates to it; they may not actually show you the answer.

According to DJ Patil, chief scientist at LinkedIn, the best data scientists tend to be “hard scientists,” particularly physicists, rather than computer science majors. Physicists have a strong mathematical background, computing skills, and come from a discipline in which survival depends on getting the most from the data. They have to think about the big picture, the big problem. When you’ve just spent a lot of grant money generating data, you can’t just throw the data out if it isn’t as clean as you’d like. You have to make it tell its story. You need some creativity for when the story the data is telling isn’t what you think it’s telling.

This is a really interesting point — being able to code does not a data scientist make (though it certainly doesn’t preclude the possibility). Data science is about creative thinking as much as it is about creative implementation.

Data scientists combine entrepreneurship with patience, the willingness to build data products incrementally, the ability to explore, and the ability to iterate over a solution. They are inherently interdiscplinary. They can tackle all aspects of a problem, from initial data collection and data conditioning to drawing conclusions. They can think outside the box to come up with new ways to view the problem, or to work with very broadly defined problems: “here’s a lot of data, what can you make from it?”

I’ve actually used exactly the same question to describe the field. It is the central, driving objective behind data science and its simplicity speaks to the incredible diversity of projects and pursuits that the field allows.

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A product only a banker could love

May 25, 2010 in Finance,Internet

There’s a lot of excitement about just-launched startup Betterment, but I’m very wary. At best, it’s an example of “bad” financial innovation. At worst, it’s a straight up scam. It goes to show that it doesn’t take complexity and structured products to pull the wool over investors’ eyes; all you need is a website and the adoration of an unsaavy site like TC.

Here’s the pitch: Betterment provides a “better savings account” which consists of a mix of two portfolios: one an extremely diversified basket of stocks and the other comprised solely of TIPS. Users transfer money to Betterment, choose an allocation between the two portfolios, and are expected to treat the resulting exposure as if it were a savings account.

Please pay close attention: you’d have to be out of your mind to consider this a savings account! Savings accounts pay interest and don’t decrease in value; that’s why they are for saving. Betterment is nothing more than a brokerage account in sheep’s clothing, giving you access to a single equity product and investing the balance of your cash in TIPS. And don’t make the mistake of thinking your Betterment account is principal-insured. It can go to zero just like any equity portfolio. So a savings account this most assuredly is not.

And paying for this sort of account? Even more insane and wholly unnecessary. The only real service the site provides is an automatic reallocation but only to one risky asset, so there’s no justification for paying the indicated levels — or anything at all. Yes,there’s a price to be paid for convenience, but it’s well below this level.

Stocks Can Go Down

Betterment discloses the fact that their portfolio can lose money deep within their website – it takes a couple clicks to reveal the disclaimer, in the section comparing Betterment to traditional bank accounts:

While your Betterment account is as easy to use as an online savings account with a bank, there are a few main differences. Although most bank accounts are guaranteed not to lose value, there is a possibility that your Betterment savings could lose value depending on market conditions.

At the same time, a Betterment account is better than a bank savings account because you could receive higher returns than a savings account.

Notice that you could receive higher returns — nothing guarantees it. Another section of the FAQ addresses the downside risk specifically:

Like all market investments, the securities you own in your account are subject to market risk. If the markets are up, your balance will grow. When markets are down, your account will lose money. Fluctuations are especially hard to predict over the short term, but historic data shows that over the long term your investment is likely to increase.

Though there is an obligatory “past performance is no guarantee of future results” notice at the bottom of the section, they actually invoke historical returns as evidence for expected results! You simply can’t use phrases like “likely to increase” when pitching an investment. It’s unethical by any standard.

Portfolios Are Not What They Seem

Betterment provides two portfolios: an “ultra-safe and secure” TIPS portfolio and a highly-diversified equity portfolio “which allows you to invest in literally thousands of companies all at once. It’s like owning a little piece of every public company in America.”

First off, despite being backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government, TIPS can lose value. Bond yields are only locked in if you hold them to maturity. Indeed, the Betterment TIPS portfolio has experienced a drawdown of 10% in the last 6 months. I’ve never seen a savings account do that before – but I’ve seen an awful lot of people freak out (not to mention a few senators) when stocks fall by a similar amount.

An article published yesterday notes that “the company has already provided returns for its beta users. While the S&P 500 is up 23 percent on the year, Betterment’s stock portfolio is up 29 percent across the same period, which is a significantly higher return than a savings account.”

I have no idea what universe the author is in, thinking the S&P is up 23%. Maybe he meant to refer to 2009, in which the SPX was up about 26.5%. Or maybe he was referring to Betterment’s beta period. I’m not sure, but here’s what scares me about those numbers: Betterment claims that its stock portfolio is extremely diversified — so where is that extra 6% coming from? A fully diversified portfolio should have the market return.(Edit: David Haber points out that I should specify I’m referring to a value-weighted diversified portfolio, in order to be Markowitz-compliant.) Examining the actual holdings, I see that the portfolio is skewed heavily toward a value style of investing — not necessarily good or bad, but something you might want to know. Especially when the S&P’s actual YTD return is -3% and counting. Extrapolating Betterment’s beta on that return means the stock portfolio’s YTD performance is somwhere in the -4% range. Some savings account.

Fees

And here’s the kicker — Betterment makes a big deal about their simple fee structure:

When you change your allocation between our two investment baskets or transfer money to your linked account, there are no transaction fees. Our low, straightforward advisory fee—0.9% annually of your average balance—covers everything. So you can easily access your money whenever you want, without worrying about the cost.

But you’d better be worried about that cost — it’s obscenely high! 90 basis points of assets to invest in the aggregate market and government securities? I’ve invested in actively managed mutual funds which charged half that amount!

This is where Betterment looks like a scam to me. The company takes investors’ money, places it in ETFs, and collects a fee. But they’re not even choosing a portfolio for you — they’re just handing off your cash to the ETF. And those ETFs charge their own management fees, which you’re on the hook for as well (implicitly). So if you’re already paying a separate fee to the portfolio manager, what on Earth are you paying 90 bps for? While claiming to cut out the middleman, Betterment is nothing more than a middleman itself.

If you’re the do-it-yourself type, you can form an identical portfolio for far less. Charles Schwab will let you transact ETFs for $8.95 flat (and that’s not an annual fee). Moreover Schwab will let you trade TIPS for free!

Once you own those ETFs, the expense ratios are significantly less than 90 basis points, ranging from 7 to 25 bps (there’s one ETF described on the website, an iShares S&P 1000 Value ETF, which I simply can’t find…). You don’t really need all the different ETFs that Betterment holds to achieve full diversification — they’re all indices anyway. The Vanguard is the cheapest at 7 bps, and tracks every common stock regularly traded on NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ. It’s hard to diversify any more than that. Buy that ETF for yourself and you can keep the 83 bps that you’d otherwise give to Betterment for absolutely no reason.

If you don’t want to deal with trading actual TIPS bonds, there’s an ETF for that as well. You could use the very same one that Betterment uses, in fact. Its expense ratio is just 20 bps.

Now, Betterment is providing a real service: they will automatically rebalance your portfolio and maintain your specified allocation. It’s not worth even close to 90 bps, though, because it can be done for almost nothing (though not with a nice “speedometer” graphic), aside from small transaction costs to a company actually providing a financial service. For example, at Schwab’s commission rates, you would have to make 100 rebalancing trades a year on a $100,000 account before Betterment’s fee became attractive.

Conclusion

This sums up the Betterment inspiration:

“When you go to a broker you have to pick among a menu of funds and stocks that are available,” said CEO and founder Jonathan Stein. “It’s an overwhelming experience for many people, even Columbia MBAs.”

I’m not sure what the arbitrary Columbia reference is for, but it is definitely true that choosing a portfolio can be intimidating. What I don’t get is why anyone in their right mind would pay almost 1% of their assets to a company which is implementing a passive market strategy! You already know what they’re going to invest in, and I’ve demonstrated that you can do it yourself for a fraction of the cost. This is anti-efficiency. This is an obfuscation of clarity.

I get it, from a certain angle – there’s a CAPM-style appeal. Betterment lets you choose between a risky portfolio and a riskless portfolio: a “roll your own Markowitz-optimal portfolio” sort of paradigm. I’m sure there’s a market out there for people who desperately want to put their money in stocks (because they’re doing so well this year…) but don’t know how, and the stripped-down simplicity of Betterment’s site makes that possible for them. I think they’d be insane to pay 1% of their wealth for that simplicity, but that’s the internet for you.

Stein goes on to say:

“We want to take this really big. We want to make investing accessible for people as soon as possible.”

Oh, I’m sure they do. Highway robbery is so much easier when your customers line up to be frisked.

Addendum

If you’re looking for a Web 2.0 banking solution, keep an eye on BankSimple. I won’t vouch for them directly because I haven’t actually seen their product yet, but it looks very promising and I’ve had the chance to talk shop with one of the founders, who definitely knows what he’s doing.

And if the thought of online-only banking doesn’t terrify you, I can’t recommend Charles Schwab highly enough. Their customer service is beyond outstanding (I’ve never even waited on hold) and I have yet to be charged a fee for anything at all.

(Via Michael Broukhim)

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Adobe strikes back

May 13, 2010 in Internet,Technology

Responding to Steve Job’s first public shot in the Flash Wars (apart from the whole not-including-Flash-in-his-mobile-empire thing), Adobe is running a direct set of ads on major sites like the NYT. The campaign pairs a somewhat surprising banner:

With a more direct sidebar ad:

I predict that within a year, HTML5/Java editing tools will be sufficiently advanced that Flash will seem antiquated in comparison (you run content in a box? you can’t copy text?). As of now, the only compelling argument in favor of creating content with Flash is that there isn’t an easy development studio for HTML5. So what if “90% of the web uses Flash?” When was the last time entrenchment was a valid argument for internet consumption? Moreover, when YouTube finishes their HTML5 conversion (already well underway), that number drops precipitously – and the countless other sites that have or are converting will drop the percentage of Flash-only content to the single digits. It’s only a matter of a software developer stepping up to meet the obvious demand for an alternative creative platform.

Adobe may have a point in their complaint with Apple blocking apps built with their compiling application — I don’t know enough to speak comfortably there — but ultimately it is Apple’s private OS and they can do what they want. To the extent they mess up, someone else will steal their market share. It happened with Windows and it could happen with Android.

With regard to Flash, however, I think the market has spoken – and it wants out.

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The following plug-in has crashed

May 5, 2010 in Internet

The new Google Chrome Beta has an integrated Adobe Flash plugin. The new Google Chrome Beta spends an awful amount of time looking like this:

(Just trying to upload this screen shot with the WordPress flash uploader crashed Chrome not once, not twice, but three times… at which point I switched to the standard uploader.)

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Google allows scripting across Apps

January 29, 2010 in Internet

This is huge. Google has enabled a Java scripting application across it’s online Apps suite. Previously available only to premier subscribers, the scripting capability is now open to anyone with a standard account as well. This competes directly with Microsoft’s cross-Office VBA, allowing users to build their own applications while using the productivity suite as a front end. It’s a very impressive and bold move to allow it over the web – and further solidifies Google’s “the web is the OS” mantra.

Read more at the official Google Enterprise blog.

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What is the impact of HTML5 on Adobe?

January 22, 2010 in Internet

With the recent announcements that YouTube and Vimeo are both releasing HTML5-based video players, one has to wonder about the impact of those moves on Adobe. Adobe’s Flash had been (and is) THE standard for delivering multimedia content over the web, capturing something like 99% of internet users. HTML5 allows many Flash-like animations/videos/experiences without the need for a seperate plugin or buffering (that’s right – skip to a different point in that YouTube video without waiting for it to load!).

Adobe doesn’t derive much revenue from Flash – so this isn’t going to crimp their cashflow necessarily – but it is a major part of their broader brand recognition. (For the curious, Flash and other platforms generate about 6% of Adobe’s revenue, but half of that comes from Mobile solutions that likely don’t include Flash. Creative software is the bulk of the revenue stream, forming about 60% of the total.). I’m curious what indirect impact it could have on the rest of the company.

For that matter, Microsoft’s Silverlight — the Flash alternative that powers the excellent Bing Maps — doesn’t have nearly the market share of its competitor. Where does this leave it?

Flash, Silverlight and other proprietary delivery systems are essentially browser replacements. They deliver web experiences which browsers on their own can not. To the extent we can move away from plugin multimedia and incorporate it directly into the web standard, that’s a good thing in my mind. Unfortunately, browser support for HTML5 is minimal – just the latest version of Safari and the nightly Webkit builds (including non-production versions of Chrome). Plugins, by contrast, are widely supported and bring content to potentially any browser. It’s hard for me to imagine why people wouldn’t want the latest, fastest, and most secure web technology available… but then again, I’m constantly surprised by the number of TGR visitors using IE6!

And a special message for those visitors: please click here to download Google Chrome.

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Debating 3D TV

January 19, 2010 in Internet,Technology

Here’s an interesting case study in internet behavior dynamics: when Engadget publishes a story — any story — about 3D TVs, the comments are filled with fans and excited (potential) consumers. When the NYT publishes a story called “Do Consumers Really Want 3-D TV’s?” the comments overflow with doubters and pessimists.

Thanks to the magic of social comments, each sub-population reinforces its own beliefs. The result is that viewing either story in isolation would convince you that it represents the majority opinion. If the NYT story were a little more critical, crossing some invisible line in the virtual sand, then the fanboys would come running to defend their turf. But it isn’t. Engadget’s stories, on the other hand, have a broad enough audience that they do attract a few nay-sayers — but their opinions are quickly drowned out.

For me, the clincher is that the NYT author seems to be worried that he will be forced to watch old shows in 3D:

And what happens when I want to watch shows like “Seinfeld,” or “Everyone Loves Raymond”? Will I really want to experience these in 3-D too?

3D screens do not automatically make everything into 3D. The spatial processing that would require has not been developed on a supercomputing scale, much less a consumer entertainment device. Moreover, they can display 2D content without any problem – in fact, the “3D” content is nothing more than a specially (and spectrally) oriented 2D image which, when viewed through the polarized or shuttered glasses, is rendered differently by your two eyes. The result is the perception of 3D from 2D – and the key point is that there’s nothing preventing the good old 2D images we know and love.

I have seen a 3D TV – there’s one at the Sony store in midtown Manhattan. It is extremely impressive and yes, you’ll own one one day (though they’re going to be expensive at first). Depending on the intersection of technology and regulation, you actually may have to (a la digital and de facto HDTV).

I completely agree that the glasses are impractical and a little annoying. But I’ll limit my critique to that accessory rather than the entire industry. The NYT article actually notes that glasses-free viewing may be “two to three years away” (personally, I’m less optimistic about that timeframe). Indeed, auto stereo TV’s exist (I saw one in Bloomingdales, of all places!) and certainly will be the norm. Will consumers be ready then?

The NYT article concludes:

Maybe the consortiums and manufacturers are right, we’ll see these images popping out of our TVs in our homes and never look back to a 2-D world. But I’m about as geeky as they come, so are most of my friends. We all wait in line for the latest iPhones or video games and we spend an exorbitant amount of time sharing links about the latest digital cameras, video game consoles and the Apple rumors. But I can’t recall a single geeky friend saying anything, with any excitement, about 3-D televisions.

I have to wonder if those “geeky” friends have ever read Engadget.

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Clay Shirky on the internet

January 19, 2010

Clay Shirky sees the internet poised between Invisible High School and Invisible College, the latter of which sounds a lot like an open source society: What did the Invisible College have that the alchemists didn’t? They had a culture of sharing. The problem with the alchemists had wasn’t that they failed to turn lead into [...]

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Seeking Alpha’s password security

January 5, 2010

As you may know, TGR is occasionally syndicated on Seeking Alpha. This weekend, Seeking Alpha underwent a redesign in order to incorporate a number of new features largely focused on enhancing discussion, like nested comments and notifications. Unfortunately, one issue that has persisted is that Seeking Alpha passwords are displayed in plaintext: This is quite disconcerting to [...]

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The fine print

January 4, 2010

From the “that’s a feature, not a bug” file: I always thought my iPhone’s ability to continue email searches on the server (as opposed to emails stored on the phone) was broken, since it never returned any results even for emails I knew existed. Today, I learned that remote search is explicitly not supported, according [...]

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Easily the biggest news story of 2010 (so far)

January 1, 2010

Not long ago, I wrote that Amazon’s sign in link was keeping me up at night because the noun “recommendations,” rather than the verb “sign in,” formed the actual link. Today I noticed that Amazon has changed the link to reflect what I feel is a more standard approach: …changing the world, one link at [...]

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Modern confessionals

December 22, 2009

We all know that you can get some funny/interesting responses by typing the first part of a question into a major search engine’s search box and letting it suggest the remainder. The NYT has gone so far as to investigate those suggestions themselves. I particularly enjoyed their description of search engines as “modern confessionals:” This [...]

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The new kid

December 9, 2009

Google Chrome for Mac has finally been released (in beta, but who’s complaining?) and I’ve been testing it as my primary browser. It’s already my top choice on Windows (this development making it all the more sweeter) and I have to say – once you use a combined address/search bar, there’s absolutely no going back. [...]

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The Greener Room

November 25, 2009

I’m pleased to present the new TGR: now with more green! I’ve spent some time over the past few weeks learning a little CSS, PHP and Java (and I apologize for being so late to that party). I’ve been experimenting behind the scenes with TGR and tonight I’m excited to make those changes official. So, what’s [...]

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Choropleths galore

November 16, 2009

For a while, I’ve been following development of Indiemapper, a forthcoming web tool from the folks at Axis Maps. It should allow for easy map creation, including – yes – choropleths galore. However, the data analytics that will be available remain to be seen.

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Unnecessary summary

November 11, 2009

Has Mashable implemented a word count quota? In a post about Google’s new search product codenamed Caffeine, they published a brief four-sentence note from the Caffeine development team… and then went on to summarize the note’s “key takeaways” with two bullet points: Since the launch of the developer preview however, we haven’t heard much about [...]

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Things that keep me up at night: signing into Amazon

October 29, 2009

If you head over to Amazon, you may see this at the top of your logged-out screen: Now, there are times when you hyperlink nouns. In fact, most hyperlinks are on nouns, since they lead to more information on the thing referenced (think of the Wikipedia model). Sometimes, it is more appropriate to hyperlink a [...]

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Soylent Flickr

October 26, 2009

Flickr is going after Facebook.

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There’s an app for that

October 22, 2009

Steve Ballmer fires across the bow: “Let’s face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone,” Ballmer said. “That’s why they’ve got 75,000 applications — they’re all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.” I’m not sure what’s more amusing – the absurdity of [...]

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Colors of Harvard Square

October 22, 2009

From Cartogrammar, an absolutely brilliant application of the Flickr API produces this map of the colors of Harvard Square: The map was created by taking geocoded photos from Flickr and calculating the average hue of the photograph, then plotting that color on the map and interpolating between all the resulting points.  Astoundingly, this image shows [...]

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Men are from mars, women are from gmail

October 22, 2009

ReadWriteWeb’s coverage of a new study on webmail demographics contains one sentence that left me a little confused: Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it “too close to call,” but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences [...]

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37Signals is worth $100 billion

September 29, 2009

Closely following the Twitter valuation news comes this brilliant satire from 37signals: 37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1… In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. [...]

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Because no one knows commodities like we do

September 22, 2009

Why did a post up titled “How To Play Natural Gas With Small Cap Stocks” pop up in Silicon Alley Insider’s RSS feed? A little investigating (elementary, my dear Watson) shows that it’s actually from The Money Game – another blog under the Business Insider umbrella. The blogs themselves and current RSS feeds show no [...]

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iPhones support push gmail!

September 22, 2009

Finally. I’ve been using Google’s contact and calendar syncing increasingly, to the point that they are almost indispensable to me. Most critically, when my last iPhone broke I only had to wait a few seconds for my new one to download all of my information from the cloud. The addition of push email completes Google Sync’s basic [...]

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Users still aren’t right about changes

September 20, 2009

Once again, the self-proclaimed “experts” of social media are revealed to be not much more than some anecdotes and a keyboard. The latest is Dan Zarrella, who has written a vitriolic attack on Twitter’s planned adoption of the retweet as an official mechanism. Zarrella does some excellent work in other areas, but I find him completely [...]

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Twitter’s broken data model becomes slightly less broken

September 19, 2009

I don’t usually have anything nice to say about Twitter (though I still ignore my mother’s advice and say it anyway), but the company is finally taking steps to improve one of the most glaring faults with their service: retweets. Previously, retweets were simply new tweets that happened to contain old information. This created clutter [...]

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Speaking of fast flips…

September 15, 2009

My Google Reader was filled with a lot of headlines on Google’s new Fast Flip service this morning, but none of them amused me quite as much as Silicon Alley Insider’s confused monologue: 7:45 a.m.: Google’s Fast Flip Makes Reading Print Publications Online Easier 8:40 a.m.: Google FastFlip Is A Gigantic Step Backwards 10:29 a.m.: [...]

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