Apparently the marketing plan for Riya is bloggers and online "word-of-mouth". This seems to be paying off very well: Many are blogging about or discussing this "amazing" product, and how it's going to revolutionize the photo tagging world. Flickr (Yahoo!) and Google are going to be knocking down their door trying to get a piece of that action!
Remarkable, though, how incredibly few people have actually used the product, and how few will actually vouch for its capabilities. If you want to sign-up currently, and try the product out yourself, it's an "invite only" affair (though strangely you have to send them your email address - That's not invite only. That's a lottery system). Despite the so-called press (see the Wired article above) heaping on strangely uncritical praise, no credible reviewer has had a round with the software. Odd, wouldn't you say? Wouldn't it make sense to get a respected reviewer to vouch for its capabilities before firing up the press wagons? Someone credible who would put it through its paces and either credit or discredit it, putting their actual career on the line if they misrepresented it.
Facial and scene recognition is easy in theory - it's something we've all imagined up, inventing our own naive ways to do it - but in reality it is extremely difficult. Yet these guys not only managed to leap the gigantic hurdle of facial recognition (including discerning among incredibly similar people - close relatives, and supposedly even twins), but they added in fantastic, unparalleled text detection as well (in one case purportedly reading a tiny car logo sloped about 70 degrees away from the camera, among other fairly impressive feats).
When it comes to revolutionary technologies like face/scene recognition, it is critically important to withhold judgement until it actually proves itself in the real world (and no - I'm not being hypocritical. I'm not saying it doesn't work - I honestly don't know - but I'm just say that without proof otherwise claims of revolution seem a little premature). Facial recognition in particular is a field filled with hucksters and fraudsters, grossly overselling the capabilities of their system with dummied up sample cases and ridiculously ideal scenarios (or even worse - "mechanical turks" have been known to occur). I consider facial recognition much like the compression market - how many times have we heard about revolutionary new compression technologies, sold through jimmied up demos and "observers" on the dole, that in the end turned out to be nothing but a fraud (or a completely impractical edge scenario that is of no value in the real world).
I have no idea if this particular product is legitimate or not, but the lack of credible analysis thus far makes the growing chorus of revolution a bit difficult to stomach.
A wide range of motivations drive the creation and maintenance of weblogs (blogs). I'm using the term "blog" to generically refer to the content management system that many are using today (such as what you see here), even though it is quickly evolving away from the minute-by-minute "what I'm doing and what I'm listening to!" style that earned it so much deserved derision in the first place.
Sometimes someone really has something they want to gripe about, and a blog offers an easy and accessible soapbox to vent from. Brand X makes terrible cars, the waiter at the local Denny's was a jerk, or Walmart represents satan incarnate (or incorporate?). No one is forced to read it, and if search engines are polluted with these random rants, well that's a search engine problem and not a blogging problem.
And why shouldn't they use this cathartic medium if it helps them get it off their chest? Even if their entries are only read by a couple of close friends or family, that is the original spirit of the internet materialized.
Other times a blog is a tool to promote yourself, or a product, in a way that one hopes to leverage into business or personal success (in new-speak: to monetize it somehow. Indeed, that's the case here - I have an exciting venture that I'm going to use as a source for content in here on occasion). Generally this sort of self-promotion blog gets the initial slingshot by capitalizing on some association with a famous event, product, or corporation, and leveraging that into (often unearned) authority in other realms. "Bob, the guy who worked on the install for Office 95, has written some thoughts about Microsoft's opposition to OpenDocument..."
It's become quite a proven formula, and examples abound.
I consider Joel Spolsky of Fogcreek Software a pioneer in using a blog for this sort of self-promotion, using the "authority" technique I mentioned previously, even though he was doing it before we called it blogging. He has used www.joelonsoftware.com to publish some fantastic essays of various levels of formality (which were even printed out in dead-tree form), doing so for quite a few years. He has taken the fact that for a brief period he worked on the automation engine for Microsoft Excel and parlayed it into attention and credibility for his business, and has gotten attention for his thoughts regarding virtually anything relating to Microsoft (in particular those things that could be interpreted as "anti-Microsoft". The minions love when Joel disparages Microsoft, because his tenuous association with Excel in the past makes him an authority figure on all things Microsoft).
Joel is a "best case" example of this technique, as he happens to be incredibly insightful and pragmatic, and is an excellent author as well.
The "Joel Fomula" - leveraging some industry connection or history to build awareness for some new venture - is growing in popularity as more are seeing this as a critical strategy. Everyone who had anything to do with any well known (or infamous) product, however remote their role, is coming out to give their take on some current situation (and a cynic would say that they're "karma whoring" - they're saying exactly what the populace wants to hear, throwing sand in the eyes of their old masters if it helps get them mentioned on Slashdot).
This is becoming so formulaic that I'm getting a bit cynical about it all. Oh look, the former `Director of Product Marketing for Apple's "Pro" applications' has given the world his thoughts about digital rights management (all 271 words). Zzzzzzz.
Expect more somehow-connected-at-some-point people to pander to the populace as they try for their piece of the Bubble 2.0 action. They'll tell us how everyone should get along, Microsoft is evil, all IP should be free, and so on. It's a proven equation.
Came across this looking at the gift issue of Consumer Reports. You can see their website at http://www.flypentop.com/. It's the most heavily produced, "Hollywood"-type website I've seen for some time. Quite impressive.
The technology itself is really intriguing. I suspect a lot of it is smoke and mirrors (e.g. you can't randomly adhoc, but instead have a fairly constrained set of actions, each with a limited set of options, that they just happen to demo, acting as if it magically correlated with their need), however it's an interesting approach - could this be an alternative to PDAs? There are a tremendous number of possibilities with that sort of technology. Interesting stuff.
Does anyone know if it's possible to simulate a SAN on a PC? e.g. a VirtualPC session, or even on another machine, mounted as a SAN on the local machine? Whether the server is in Linux or Windows, preferrably the client will be available from Windows machines (e.g. via iSCSI, or a proprietary driver). This is just out of curiousity about a technology matter.
On a completely different note, based upon some feedback I've added a new category - Everything - that all posts will go to (well unless I forget to check the checkbox). To explain - when I post something I choose which categories that it will go to. If, for instance, I'm talking about a weekend outing, I'll send it to Personal but not to the home page. If I'm writing about .NET generally, I'll send it to .NET and the home page, unless it's highly technical (e.g. code) in which case I'll leave it only in .NET. The home page is meant as a more generally readable section, while the categories are more interest specific. Often there will be overlaps - for instance .NET will contain a lot of the same content as the home page section if I've been writing a lot about Microsoft/.NET topics.
However some people just wanted to see everything, regardless of categorization, so that category now exists. I've been pushing stuff there for the past couple of days.
[NOTE: For those who come right in for Launch Event entries and see this first, please jump down to the first post and come forward (up) - I thought that it was a fantastic event, and a great use of the time, and the stars in this entry only apply to the final segment - Q&A]
4:30pm - 5:00pm
If you've ever watched the Daily Show, imagine Jon Stewart saying "awkwarrrrrrd" in that way that he does.
I really don't understand why Q&A sessions continue to be featured in these sorts of events, when they virtually always follow the same clumsy sequence - people ask very domain- and problem-specific questions (the kind that would best be asked in usenet newsgroups or email support), there are communication issues leading to the same wrong answer being provided multiple times and the questioner re-asking the question, and then everyone finally giving up. In the odd case that the question is actually understood, often the prospective answerer dances around it for a while, or gets defensive, because they really don't have a clue (for the reasons covered in a prior post - questioners have an infinite set of questions to draw from, versus the finite knowledge of anyone on the stage).
This one was no exception. Everyone hung around only to see if they won an xbox360 (which they gave out - to be shipped when released - to one person at the entire event who had filled out their evaluation form. They also gave out some Toronto Maple Leaf shirts, but they went over pretty poorly), or to figure out how to get their bounty (previously documented).
As is standard at events with evaluation forms, more than once I heard presenters admonish the crowd with lines like "If you're giving us less than 8 or 9, then please come up and tell us how we could improve the show..." I find these sorts of requests disingenuous and manipulative - the real purpose, obviously, is to guilt people into giving an 8 or 9 (under the guise that if they're too lazy or unmotivated to go up and detail their complaints, then they should suck it up and give a good mark regardless). Event managers should banish these sorts of requests by presenters, because it's basically stuffing the vote and eliminating the value of the feedback - and I'm saying this as someone who gave honest 8s and 9s pretty much across the board.
3:00pm - 4:00pm
Obviously my observations are getting shorter and more terse (I'll probably expand them tomorrow), but this session covered some of the high availability solutions available with SQL Server 2005. For instance the not-yet "released" database mirroring, online reindexing, partial database availability, zero-init improvements, fast recovery, peer to peer transactional replication, snapshot versioning of rows, among other availability improvements. Very exciting improvements that should significantly improve the already impressive availability of SQL Server. The demonstrations were clear and evidentiary of the features, demonstrating a corrupt database, readers simultaneous with writers, taking a server in a mirrored configuration offline, and other new features. Very interesting.
1:30pm - 3:00pm
This session covers the trio of Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services.
After a funny intro video (including some snide back and forth between an "IT Pro" and a "Developer". Not sure what an IT Pro was supposed to be, but it sounds like it's the new Microsoft lingo for administrative type roles. The video included comments like the developer calling the IT Pro a "glorified DJ", and the IT Pro saying about development "A monkey could do that". Quite funny), the session got underway. This was a full house, and covered topics like integration services (formerly DTS - which has seen some huge improvements), including a demonstration of its performance improvements (processing and importing 2 million rows in seconds), data cleansing and "AI" abilities, among other advances.
The discussion then moved on to Analysis services, XML/A and unified dimensional model, data mining (such as the demonstrated associative model), key performance indicators, and the dashboard. Very informative.
It then moved to reporting services, demonstrating how developers could create and deploy reports, and how even relatively untrained users could do the same.