Investing Journal: Computers and Internet

Technology that changed my life in 2005

Sat, 06 May 2006 05:07:54 GMT

Every year a few new technologies come along that change the way I live. I decided to start a yearly list of what impacted me the most in the prior year. I don't intend this to equally apply to everyone, but since I do consider myself ahead of the curve in technology, I thought it could be interesting to share. Also, I don't intend this list to cover the best new technologies, just the ones that impacted me the most.

Here are the results in no particular order:

live.local.com - Finding things locally is so much easier with Windows Live Local than it has ever been. I no longer go to individual websites to find stores. I just have to go to Local, and type in Circuit City, and Home Depot, for example, and I can see which shopping center I should go to that has all my shopping needs. If I want to go out to eat, I just type in chinese restaurant, and I get ideas for restaurants that are around me. The Birds Eye view in Local helps me recognize the area before I arrive. It doesn't take a Microsoft employee to realize how much potential there is in this area by adding more features like ratings, or bus routes, or traffic to these maps, and having the site become a serious one-stop-shop for all your local needs. I predict we'll visit this page much more frequently in the future.

FolderShare - I have a computer at home, a laptop at home, and a computer at work. I like to have my music, favorite pictures, investing files, and some personal files everywhere I go. I've tried some other products, but FolderShare works best. There are 2 main features. The first is that you can specify folders to automatically synchronize between machines. It's particularly useful to me to have my investing files everywhere, so I can update them when I get an idea at work, or watching TV. The second feature the program has, is that it lets you log in from the web and access all of the files and emails on your computer from wherever you are. Since I always leave a computer or two on, I have access to my files all the time.

Desktop Search - With so many files hanging around my computers, sometimes its hard to keep track of where I save them. And even if I know where it is on my computer, sometimes it feels like it takes too long to navigate to the actual directory. Desktop Search just makes it really easy to find anything on your computer. I use it all the time to find emails from a specific person about a specific subject. Integration in Vista with tagging will make this even better.

RSS - An RSS feed is a file that contains headlines of the most recent articles published at a website, with summaries and links to the whole article. Instead of having to visit the website to see if there's any news you want to read, you can simply browse the headlines. Head over to www.live.com or open up an aggregator of your choice, and instead of going out to the web to find news about your favorite topics, let the web that you care about come to you. I probably have about 30 rss feeds that I track, but I'll just leave examples of 2 of my favorites:

feeds.feedburner.com/arstechnica - tech news and analysis without the spin.
feeds.feedburner.com/liveside - Windows Live news.

Anyway, if you haven't used these technologies yet, then you should give them a whirl, and maybe they'll make your life a little simpler or richer.

MSN Ad Center

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 01:37:26 GMT

I love to follow internet and technology news and especially MSN and Windows Live news. Thus, I always read LiveSide. Today they mention that Ad Center is starting its pilot in the US, which is exciting news for MSFT. I've been waiting a long time to see this thing ship as we finally help Wall Street realize that Google's growth is not going to continue as there's more competition in the market. When IE7 and Vista ship with integrated search that defaults to MSN Search, and MSN Search will have essentially caught up with Google on relevancy, where will Google get its traffic? Google's been having to buy traffic from AOL, and is in talks with Dell, and that's why Google's stock has been heading south. Today's reiteration by Google's CFO of slower future growth was pretty much stating the obvious. Anyway, here's an old video linked from LiveSide where MSN showed off Ad Center last March. The portion of the video that covers Ad Center starts at about 35 minutes into the video, and although it's now a year old, it has some great information that I hadn't seen.

MSN has a huge user base complete with profile information. You can't use Hotmail, Messenger and Spaces without filling out a MSN Profile that includes gender, age, occupation, location, etc. MSN just know so much more about its users than Google, it will be able to provide both users and advertisers with better experiences. Users will get more specific and customized search results and ads that are more meaningful to them. Honestly, if I could tell MSN my weight, so that I'd never have to see another diet ad again, I'd gladly hand over that information. (Some aren't comfortable with that idea, but it makes sense to me anyway.) Besides, thanks to the FTC, Microsoft is probably the safest place to store your personal information online.

From the advertiser's perspective, this is huge because they're able to target their ads much more effictively. Ad Center will give them the ability to modify ad placement based on the user's attributes, such as demographics (gender, and age), lifestyle, and wealth. When you're setting up ads, you can see which types of people were more likely to search for a particular topic to be able to fine tune your placements.

On the other side there are meaningful reports to help bring it all together, and maybe even to make recommendations for you on how to get the most meaningful results.

I can't wait to see some comparisions between Ad Center and Google's service, to see how they stack up. I think Microsoft is really starting to bring out some important internet services that will help enrich the online experience and bring MSFT some serious cash.

IPTV and the age of convergence.

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 19:16:36 GMT

Here's a great article on the future of television: IPTV from the SF Chronicle. I hope they deliver this to my area soon.

I really think we're moving into an age of convergence... in mobile devices (I love the looks of the new Gigabeat and Windows Mobile devices), in online services (Windows Live), in gaming (Xbox Live), and in television (read the article... CallerID info on your TV, etc).

While I don't expect to be able to watch a baseball game from 4 angles like the article mentions, I do expect to get lots more HD Channels and other features through it.

I'm setting up my home computer to be a Media Center PC this weekend, so I'll report back how it goes.

Search Result Clustering

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 05:05:14 GMT

Recently I stumbled across the following Microsoft Research site with a new twist on search. Personally I think it's the best thing since Google.

http://rwsm.directtaps.net/

Try giving it a search that is a little too vague, and notice the left bar will show common keywords found among the top 200 results from MSN Search. Click on these keywords to instantly filter your results to only those that include this keyword. It REALLY helps when you have one of those searches where you just can't quite figure out how to describe what you want to search for. I've now made it my default search site. It really makes me realize how much better our search technology can improve in the future.