Posted at Jeetendra Mirchandani's Photo Gallery
by Jeetendra Mirchandani
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Vishal, Moulaali and I left for Mt Rainier at around 11.30 on Sunday. Vishal was oncall and was carrying his pager, laptop, etc. It was a fun trip, though we got to only one point – the Sunrise Lake Location: Mt Rainier, WA |
Posted at Geeking with Greg
by Greg Linden
Jitendra Malik from UC Berkeley gave an enjoyable and often quite amusing invited talk at KDD 2008 on “The Future of Image Search” where he argued that “shape-based object recognition is the key.”
The talk started with Jitendra saying image search does not work well. To back this claim, he showed screen shots of searches on Google Image Search and Flickr for [monkey] and highlighted the false positives.
Jitendra then claimed that neither better analysis of the text around images nor more tagging will solve this problem because these techniques are missing the semantic component of images, that is, the shapes, concepts, and categories represented by the objects in the image.
Arguing that we need to move “from pixels to perception”, Jitendra pushed for “category recognition” for objects in images where “objects have parts” and form a “partonomy”, a hierarchical grouping of object parts. He said current attempts at this have at most 100 parts in the partonomy, but it appears humans commonly use 2-3 orders of magnitude more, 30k+ parts, when doing object recognition.
A common theme running through the talk was having a baseline model of a part, then being able to deform the part to match most variations. For example, he showed some famous examples from the 1917 text “On growth and form”
A near the end of the talk, Jitendra contrasted the techniques used for face detection, which he called “a solved problem”, with the techniques he thought would be necessary for general object and part recognition. He argued that the techniques used on face detection, to slide various sized windows across the image looking for things that have a face pattern to them, would both be too computationally expensive and have too high a false positive rate to do for 30k objects/parts. Jitendra said something new would have to be created to deal with large scale object recognition.
What that something new is is not clear, but Jitendra seemed to me to be pushing for a system that is biologically inspired, perhaps quickly coming up with rough candidate sets of interpretations of parts of the image, discounting interpretations that violate prior knowledge on objects that tend to occur nearby to each other, then repeating at additional levels of detail until steady state is reached.
Doing object recognition quickly, reliably, and effectively to find meaning in images remains a big, hairy, unsolved research problem, and probably will be for some time, but, if Jitendra is correct, it is the only way to make significant progress in image search.
Posted at ReadWriteWeb
by Sarah Perez
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has fallen prey to social media spammers and it is now full of requests to spam bookmarking services for pennies per link. Although these HITs may stop short of being “fraud” in the legal sense of the word, they are certainly dishonest and unsavory. In addition to these spam bookmarking requests, we’re also seeing HITs for Diggs, Stumbles, Slashdots, etc. of spammers’ web pages and web sites.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourced marketplace for tasks. A person needing work done can set up a HIT (human intelligence task) – the small job they need done. Others come along to perform the HITs, earning micro payments along the way. In this way, businesses, developers, and other individuals have access to an affordable, scalable workforce
Unfortunately, it appears that the convenience of the Turk marketplace has some appeal to social media spammers, who are now using the site to earn Diggs, bookmarks, and other social recommendations they do not deserve. Here’s an example:
Photo courtesy of Brynn Evans
Anyone who uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has no doubt come across similar HITs posted by spammers. For example, this guy is requesting someone create 29 social bookmark accounts from 29 sites:
A search for “bookmark” on MT today displays 48 results (at the time of writing) where spammers are requesting social bookmarking of their web site. Search for “digg” and you’ll find people paying for Diggs.
Of course, whenever there is a system in place (like social media) that can help drive traffic to a web site, there will be those people who use it to generate traffic for their spam sites. But why are they able to use Amazon Mechanical Turk to do so? Shouldn’t Amazon police the Turk to shut down these spam accounts?
However, this doesn’t mean that Mechanical Turk doesn’t hold any value – it’s still an innovative and useful tool for many. In fact, members of the HCI community (Human Computer Interaction) have begun to use Turk for user research studies with great success. This work has inspired others like open source advocate, Chris Messina, to do the same. He plans to use Turk for usability studies on OpenID and OAuth. Since the HITs are spread out among many, the cost of performing these studies is greatly reduced. Being able to crowdsource research is a great way that MT can be used today, and one that will have a big impact on the future, too.
Thanks to Brynn Evans, a graduate student in the Department of Cognitive Science at University of California, San Diego for discovering this and thanks to open source advocate Chris Messina for sending it along to us.
Posted at TechCrunch
by Steve Gillmor
Comcast’s decision to cap monthy broadband usage at 250GB is being decried as the end of the Internet as we know it. Maybe so, but it can also be seen as the dawn of the Streaming Era. As the Olympics drew to a close with big numbers – 75.5 million streams (NBCOlympics.com), 40 million (BBC), another 130 million from the European Broadcasting Union, and 100 million Chinese viewers – the networks were already moving on by serving the Democratic National Convention in HD. CBS offered an after-convention netcast with Katie Couric, and CNN promoted “full and complete” streaming coverage of all speeches.
The Comcast move seems more focused on the politics of the FCC decision to rule out Comcast’s filtering of P2P traffic. But BitTorrent and other such traffic is all about downloading, not streaming, and the advent of new look-ahead streaming capabilities in Silverlight suggest that streaming can accommodate DVR-like functionality that makes the value proposition of “owning” the data on a local drive much less important.
It used to be that having physical control of entertainment and other software was critical to the user experience. Record and film companies kept accelerating the quality levels of their products to stay ahead of the pirates and the growing ability of consumers to capture and archive content off the radio and television networks. But as broadband became more available as competition between telcos, cable, and satellite increased, sharing of MP3s and DVR time-shifting had an oddly counter-intuitive impact.
First, the Netflix strategy made renting movies a less onerous process, with no late fees and a large catalogue to choose from. When Blockbuster and Hollywood Video adopted similar MVP programs, the cable and satellite companies were forced to counter-attack with on-demand offerings that were even easier to acquire and in fact were spooled from servers rather than downloaded to home machines.
This, of course, is the same shift software has undergone from shrinkwrap to service, from Outlook to Gmail, Office to Google Apps, and from the hard drive to the cloud. In effect, productivity apps are now streamed to and the data from the user. With the data stored redundantly in the cloud, we are more comfortable with a streaming situation than with the former illusion that we “owned” our data locally.
Read the rest of this entry at TechCrunchIT.
(Photo by Quinn Dombrowski).
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Posted at Pluggd.in
by Ashish Sinha
Image via Wikipedia
Here is wikipedia’s definition:
“A startup company or start-up is a company with a limited operating history. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets. They have an uncertain future, and may result in a spectacular success, or failure”.[source]
Like every generic term, I see a need to localize the definition of ’startup’ term for the Indian market.
As somebody, who has been quite involved in this space (from outside, have been maintaining the startup directory), I really see a different picture:
To me, it’s a basic diff of taking it Part time vs. Full time?, i.e. :
Are you giving it all for this baby of yours? Are you ditching your cushy job and embracing ‘those’ tough times? Do you really believe in this venture?
If not, then you are not a startup (you are a wannapreneur, but still not an entrepreneur.)
I am surprised to see whole lot of entries coming to the Indian startup directory, who are nothing more than casual ideas.
I am surprised to see whole lot of media/events promoting such ‘casualpreneurs’ (term I read in livemint) as entrepreneurs – and in turn, promoting mediocrity.
These casualpreneurs tend to close their ‘venture’ very soon – they have no obligation to product/users and even to themselves – their life doesn’t depend on this – their credibility is not at stake.
I am not against trying, but am against calling those ‘casual’ ventures a startup. To me, it’s an insult to all those entrepreneurs who are taking the venture full time at the risk of personal/professional life (no matter how good/bad the venture is).
Let’s accept this – pluGGd.in is not a startup (even though the amount of effort/traction we receive is awesome) and so are all other entities who are running their ventures part time.
Let’s respect those who are ‘giving’ it all for what they believe in – I hope other entities who ‘romance’ these ‘casualpreneurs’ take note of this – ‘coz if you aren’t, you are just adding to the noise.
You are infact, hurting entrepreneurs because they need to steer through this ‘black’ noise created by damn stupid ‘casual’ media and such events.
And unfortunately, I witness whole lot of events/media articles talking about such ‘casualpreneurs’- they don’t seem to matter to me anymore.
And you?
I like your thought process.
Increasingly, I only see furstration and misplaced utterances put on this blog. From Axis of Evil to now this. Let others be what they are. You focus on startup as you define them. Why are so rattled by what noise others are making! Everybody is a wanabe afterall…you being a techcrunch wananbe.
“You focus on startup as you define them. Why are so rattled by what noise others are making” – You need to understand the importance of ecosystem that helps US startups achieve what they are.
If you promote mediocrity (as they are doing in India), you get mediocre stuff only.
I think we know why US startup scene is what it is. They dont dissipate their energy in undermining others (who might be on a different level of evolution; if it can be called so) and putting themselves on a higher pedestal.
It goes like:
“The entrepreneur in us sees opportunities everywhere we look, but many people see only problems everywhere they look. ….”
So may be in this problem of medicirty and noise , you could see an opportunity and become an enterpreneur….and not a problemeneur (sorry was being imaginative but doesn work)
But still,a full time devotee has more probability of getting success than a part-timer in startup world.
There s nothing wrong about it – just that it doesn’t deem to be called a startup then.
At the end of the day, many of such part timers simply shut shop – they dont care.
But, what they leave is a big black mark, qns like viability of a good startup happening from india.
I am of course, irritated with such behavior, esp when they emanate from few personalities who have bydefault taken a ‘mentor’ role in the ecosystem.
But nothing to worry. There’s space for everyone. If something is worth making a voice, am sure it wud be heard beyond miles, even with such noices… After all, its the survival of the fittest..
Yes. There could be wannapreneurs who are just testing the waters, and even if the response is not good, they believe in it, and take the first step into entrepreneurship and go for it.
The point is: how many of the wannapreneurs would take the plunge after they see a not-so-helpful response from the market, the VCs, the Angels, friends and family?
Don’t the wannapreneurs skew the startup scene?
The maturity of this article is probably a little beyond the cantankerous fellows who are getting all angsty with this piece.
The very nature of ‘headline news’ is that it gets replaced the very next day. So really, nothing to worry about if these casualpreneurs/wannapreneurs are getting all the attention. What really matters is success – if they are able to get customers, revenues – that ultimately distinguishes the men from the boys.
But i appreciate the fact that this article is going beyond just talking about the PR blitz/noise they generate. It is true that they create a terrible impression of startups in the market. In a world where a spoken word has enough power to bring stock of a successful company crashing down, this is a serious problem. But what can one do?
Entrepreneurs are good at putting their head down and working fanatically at what they are best at. So i guess we will have to continue (as always), while good people like you talk about it. I hope it helps.
Let us sincerely hope that entrepreneurship does not become like the Page 3 phenomenon. Elitist, pretentious, and wannabe.
Also, every word rings true – and it makes sense for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs only. The rest will just not get it. (Which explains some moronic comments above mine) They will sit on the fence and talk talk talk. Maybe someday their ass will start hurting from sitting on the fence, and they will ultimately take the plunge from being spectators to players.
Great post, worth exploring in detail.
The question is one of commitment and confidence. There is nothing wrong doing a part time business as long as you have some other way to demonstrate your commitment and seriousness.
For example : You can work at TCS and run a lorry transport service. Your commitment takes the form of your investment in the vehicles, permits, drivers and such. It may not be possible for a tech startup to go this route because of the time required from the founders.
Wannapreneurs are those who do not have many cards on the table which show their seriousness.
Keep it up. I like this blog because you are not afraid to voice unpopular views !!
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/uncov/~3/366631052/an-article-about-startups-that.html
I think the smart guys incubate ideas while holding a day job. The fools jump the gun not knowing that 9 out of 10 startups fail.
“Two college time friends meet after a long time in a alumni meet. Decide to help their Alma-mater. Both have day job, one in US and other in India. They have all the resources but little time to put in. They can’t leave there day job as this supports their families. So they float a venture. This venture helps the students of their college with all the resources/ guidance they need to make their first product. Now when it comes to promotion of this product no one is willing to call this a serious business. Just because the two friends behind it have not kicked their employers’ ass to bid them good bye. The students never bothered to distribute designations, all they were concerned with was successful development of the product.
Now tell me who is the real mother of this baby? The two friends! whom you call as part time or surrogate moms or the students whom nobody bothered to take seriously, just because they did not decide the product manager, strategy planner, UI developer.. blah blah and all those serious looking designation amongst themselves. All they new was “i am in the team.” ”
Please let me know what would you call such people who help grow the ecosystem without kicking their employer’s ass. And also who is the real mother of the baby.
@Ashish, you probably know which web product i am talking about.
I wont mention it here else you will call it an emotional-promotional stunt.
and also tell me which is better.
1. I gather lot of resources(to survive 3-4 years) from my job and then jump in the startup pool.
Or
2. I get enough resources and to get started and then jump in the startup(pardon me! not allowed to call it a startup, yet) pool and also help some budding brains to experience what it feels like being in and around the pool. Making sure nobody drowns but some (including me) might learn to swim.
@naman may be you should not leave an anonymous comment. Its your boldness that would get you noticed. Read Vivek’s comment above. You have to demonstrate dedication in one way. Btw .. leaving a job is not kicking the employer’s ass. How is it that? Staying there, not working on their stuff, taking salary and working on ur startup in office is.
i get it. A few rotten apples have destroyed the whole basket.
I think no point debating the righteousness of this post, we all have a right to our views.
Ashish has raised some valid points, rather than debating, it will be better for “anytype – preneurs” to reflect on it and strengthen their foundations.
If you read carefully he talks about people who take everything written on the net very seriously. That is exactly what you are doing.
That man quit a job at google to start up. He a big f****** example of what is an entrepreneur.
Btw, no definition of start-ups mention that it has to be a full-time venture.
). It takes a lot of courage to take that step and a lot of foolishness if I may add ( Stay hungry, Stay Foolish anyone?)
I think what Ashish is irked at is the media and I share the sentiment. In the name of ecosystem if all you have are opportunistic entities who are out to glorify each and every thing out there, I doubt if it will hold up when going gets tough (recession ?). It is not something on which I can depend for support and good critical advice as an entrepreneur.
It might be possible for good companies and ideas to come on top of all this noise as somebody said above but it will surely take a lot more effort and energy, something which can find better use. But I guess in the end, each one of us is a part of the ecosystem and shares the responsibility in how it shapes up !
Abhaya
I clearly said that trying out is an awesome thing, but that doesnt mean you call yourself an entrepreneur.
Why would you want to do that, when you are not?
Also all the quotes about “stay hungry…. stay foolish” (refering to someone’s comments above) are nice to hear on youtube videos or a grad speech and from someone who has already made it big. I am sure these words would not have come out before the success story or if it had been a failure.
No, I don’t take EVERYTHING i read on the net seriously. I take only some things seriously – like that article.
The point of the link is that the glorification of entrepreneurs simply for the risk that they take is as stupid as cheering the moron who does motorcycle stunts without any protection.
In summary, entrepreneurship is about new ideas and their execution regardless of whether the founder quit a job or stayed at his job.
I definitely agree that you shouldn’t quit until you see a good chance that things would be back to normal in a year or two, but that’s not the point of the post.
It’s about the fact that when you go to the media and talk like you’re the shit, you should have something real to back it up.
Quitting your job is like graduation. You can only go so far without it.
By the way, shouldn’t your name be second-post now!!
I totally agree. The only thing that matters is if the food is tasty in the end. But to make good food while also reading a book would need a master chef. So if we bring the analogy back to the start up world, in order to stay on his job and also create a successful startup, one would need to be a master entrepreneur and if he is such a big stud, why would he need the day job in the first place !
The thing is this: 9 out of 10 startups fail but out of those who never start, none succeedes. If the aim of starting a company is to make money, I guess you might be fine doing it part-time. If it is about living a dream, I am wondering how can you be honest to both a day job and a start-up?
But I think all of us here are pretty much sold on the idea of running their own company. So guys do as you find it best for your situation as nobody else can tell you better about your life then you yourself.
Abhaya
I would agree with you if you people wrongly call their startup projects as startup companies. But there is no shame in calling your 3 weeks hack a startup. In fact, by definition, it is a startup.
And it is mistake on part of stakeholders if they get swayed of number of startups. They ought to gather more information before making any decision. It is like people who want to invest abroad get confused by number of countries in the world.
So now I’ll try to give a different analogy.
Ashish’s point is that, although not wrong, part-time ventures create a noise and divert the focus from the real good startups – the one who have gone full-time. This is an “insult” to them and they “deserve” better. Media “should” report more on the latter.
Although plausible and well-intentioned, I’m not too sure this argument is valid and it can be shown with a simple thought experiment. Lets take two startups, A and B. A’s founders have day jobs but they burn the mid-night oil to create a product which is truly awesome ! Not just cool, but this product actually solves real problems for the users and they are even able to find people ready to pay for this !
Startup B, on the other hand is just the opposite. Although they went full-time and put in all their savings into the startup, the product they built is, well, a pile of crap. It is mediocre, does nothing useful that wasn’t already available and is unusable. I don’t know, another yaari.com, may be?
Now here is the thing. No amount of “passion”, “commitment” will make B’s product less crappy. Users want to discover the useful products, wherever they come from and as long as the media is doing just that, I think everything is fine. (Please don’t misconstrue this. I am NOT saying that the Indian media is doing everything right.)
There is a story which goes that, while attacking France, the German forces burnt the bridges after crossing them in WWII to keep the soldiers motivated. Going full-time is a bit like that. It shows that you’re committed to this thing and are willing to put up. All fine and dandy, but at the end of the day, look at the results and not proxies.
Startups don’t “deserve” anything from the media, the users or anyone else. They have to earn it.
I think all of us will do well to not fall into the trap of labels or generalizations. By definition, startups are working in the zone of low probabilities and labels are likely to cause more harm than good here.
cheers
nilesh
Here is wikipedia’s definition:
“A startup company or start-up
Posted at Rediff News
The company also launched a desktop at Rs 11,999 in Mumbai. It comes loaded with Windows Vista or XP Home Edition.
Posted at Jeetendra Mirchandani's Photo Gallery
by Jeetendra Mirchandani
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Cooking in Seattle! Location: Seattle, Wa, 98101 |
Posted at TechCrunch
by Michael Arrington
First came 360, launched in 2005 as an early attempt to get Yahoo into social networking, was unceremoniously shut down earlier this year. In 2006 Yahoo was unable to close a transaction with Facebook, despite being willing to pay up to $1.62 billion. Nor could they pull the trigger on a $1 billion Bebo deal (Bebo went to AOL for $850 million). Now Yahoo has shut down Mash, which launched less than a year ago and is best known for sporting a Darth Vader playing guitar and eating a banana image when it was in private beta.
Today, Yahoo emailed users notice that Mash will be shutting down on September 29, 2008.
Fifth time’s a charm they say (right?). Let’s hope the next grand strategy works out better than the first four.
Meanwhile, Yahoo Mash joins the deadpool.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Posted at www.oreillynet.com
Most so-called Linux security issues turn out to be some insecurely coded PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/fill_in_the_blank app that is simply another application and not a core part of Linux at all. So, I wasn’t alarmed when I read this in Information Week.
Red Hat Confirms Intruder Breached Fedora Servers
From the sound of it, the problem has been contained. And, more importantly, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) production software is not affected at all. The assumption is that RHEL is used for production work and the quickly changing experimental Fedora distro is used for testing, personal workstations, and maybe test servers.
But, I wonder if that is really true? We’ve probably all seen little servers running on platforms that were never intended for that purpose or are incredibly ancient. You’ve probably seen isolated ftp servers running on Windows 98 or a small phone system still running on an unpatched Windows NT box. I’d hazard to guess that there are more than a few small or forgotten servers running Fedora because a RHEL license couldn’t be obtained in a timely fashion and they didn’t know about the CentOS distro.
Posted at WATBlog.com – Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India
by Shāyon
Get ready to dial a new set of numbers in near future. WiMAX industry in the country received a major boost as the DoT has reportedly modified its policy on wireless broadband technologies including WiMAX services. For long, this medium stayed in the wings as mobile danced its way to glory in India. The earlier announced guidelines had specified that spectrum for broadband wireless can be used only for data services. However, the Telecom Commission, in its meeting on August 21 has taken a decision to remove the restriction.
Unfortunately, the new boost comes at a cost of increased reserve price for WiMAX spectrum in the auctioning process. The Commission now wants the base price to be 50 percent of the 3G base price as compared to earlier 25 percent. A pan-India WiMAX licence may now come at an estimated price of Rs 1010 crore.
It seems that such a decision did not go well with the existing GSM operators. A GSM industry representative echoed,
“The WiMax lobby had argued that reserve price should be lower to enable them to make broadband services affordable. If they are allowed to offer voice services also they should be treated at par with existing mobile operators bidding for 3G spectrum.”
Internet telephony will mean convergence of broadband for voice (calls), data (web surfing) and video (cable TV) for the masses. It will not only be a low cost option, but also a medium that can do much more than just web.
At present, telephony predominantly remains the main source of inter-business consultations and is widely considered a fundamental component in the on-going growth of effective customer service. The Internet today is changing every industry, with telephony being no exception. Traditional telephony is now being accompanied by IP based telephony in order to primarily reduce the cost of telecommunications and effectively provide more communication options.
Nonetheless, the decision of allowing voice telephony over the WIMAX networks is a very important step taken by the Department of Telecom in the direction of increased internet penetration and cheaper call rates which are already the cheapest in the world.
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