Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

One Search, 17 Ways - Searching from the Web, Mobile, Twitter, Cars, and Beyond

This is the latest in a series of posts about and inspired by discussion's with Ford's executive team at CES, including a conversation with CEO Alan Mulally, an interview with Director of Connected Services Doug VanDagens about the future of in-car search, the full interview with VanDagens, and an interview with Ford President of the Americas Mark Fields on imagining cars as social networks.

Below is my MediaPost column that ran today that expands on these ideas.

One Search, 17 Ways

Inspector Gadget via WikipediaAfter the Consumer Electronics Show this month, where I met with the executives from Ford and heard about  their ambitious voice search plans, I kept wondering how the ability to conduct voice searches from their cars will change how people search, communicate, access information, and drive. It then made me wonder about all of the venues and devices people can search from. At CES, Dick Tracy, James Bond, and Inspector Gadget would have had a field day testing out the latest gizmos (if they could avoid Gadget's nemesis Dr. Claw tricking them into joining a booby-trapped tweet-up).

These new devices aren't meant to be solely for Inspectors; they're supposed to be for all of us. Here's a vision for how searches will differ when conducted in different settings from different devices. In all of these situations, we'll take the example of a young, female, Dallas-based professional named Penny who's searching for the best cupcakes.

INDOORS

Home PC

Query: "best cupcakes dallas tx." Penny has a craving for something sweet after dinner, so she spends a few minutes trying to find recommendations. She uses Yahoo where, thanks to SearchMonkey, reviews from Yelp and Citysearch appear on the search engine results page.

Work PC

Query: "cupcakes plano tx." It's her receptionist's birthday and Penny wants to find something near the office.

ON THE GO

Twitter

Query: "does anyone have any favorite cupcake places in dallas? I hope sam's not following me or it'll ruin the surprise :)" She texts this to 40404 and uses  TweetReplies.com to get responses emailed to her.

Twitter Search

Query: "cupcakes dallas." Thinking she might not have too many followers in or from Dallas, she can also check search.twitter.com to see if anyone has mentioned this recently.

SMS: Search Engines

Query: "sprinkles dallas tx." Over lunch, Penny overheard her receptionist raving about the cupcake place Sprinkles, so Penny decided to go a bit out of her way. She forgot the exact address though, so she sent a text message to GOOGLE (466453) while she was at a light.

SMS: Q&A Services

Query: "anyone know where to get the best cupcakes in dallas" sent to ask@mosio.com. Other Mosio users then respond with answers. She could do this through her iPhone as well.

WAP (Mobile Web)

Query: "sprinkles dallas tx" entered in Internet Explorer on her smartphone running Windows Mobile 6.

iPhone: Google

Query "sprinklers dallas to." She's still having a little trouble with the touch-screen keyboard and the auto-complete features. Trying again, she gets it.

iPhone: Google Voice

Query: "cupcakes" and then "dallas texas." Fortunately, with Sprinkles Cupcakes being the official name of the business, it's even easier to find the listing.

Voice Search

Query: "cupcakes" and then "dallas texas." She used 1-800-FREE-411, though she could have tried 800-GOOG-411 too.

Car: GPS

Query: "bakery". On her GPS device, Penny selects "search nearby" and then picks the closest category match. Right now it doesn't return the most relevant or most comprehensive results for this query, but it works better for others.

NEW AND EMERGING

Car: Voice

Query: "I'm looking for cupcakes in Dallas, Texas." She tells this to her 2009 Ford Focus equipped with the latest Sync platform.

Airplane

Query: "best cupcakes san francisco." During a month of business travel, Penny flies from New York to San Francisco and winds up on an American Airlines Boeing 767-200 plane equipped with Aircell-powered in-flight Wi-Fi. Determined to sample the best cupcakes at her destination, she boots up her laptop, goes to Google, and finds Kara's Cupcakes as the well-optimized top listing.

Wristwatch

Query: "meilleurs gâteaux paris" spoken into her LG Touch Watch Phone, set to debut in Europe later this year (Penny's quite the polyglot). The phone's capabilities will include voice recognition and text messaging, so she'll get to choose her method of searching.

TV

Query: "cupcakes 75023" entered on her Samsung with Intel software running Yahoo widgets. There was plenty of buzz about this at CES. Penny may find the initial technology frustrating compared to what she's used to on PCs and mobile devices until remote controls better mimic keyboard functionality.

Augmented Reality

Instead of entering a query, Penny may be able to put on a special set of glasses and scan her surroundings for store names and reviews. The headsets and eyewear from Vuzix now link up to other portable devices such as iPods and camcorders, but they keep including more functionality within the gadgets themselves.

Word of Mouth

Query: "Know any good cupcake places in Dallas?" The past, present, and future of searching are anchored in word of mouth. It's not always the most efficient; it might take Penny 20 minutes to think of people she knows living in the right area who enjoy cupcakes and would have opinions on which ones are the best. But when she calls her friend Quimby and he tells her she HAS to check out Sprinkles, there's no question where she'll wind up.

Ford President of the Americas Mark Fields on In-Car Digital and Social Technology

Image via Wikipedia

I've been holding back on one more Ford post, as I wanted to get something up on Advertising Age's DigitalNext blog where I've joined as a regular contributor. There, you can find excerpts of my interview with Ford President of the Americas Mark Fields; it's a more bite-sized highlight reel and you may find that's all you need; if so, no need to reed further.

Over the past week or so, I've posted a number of entries about Ford  -- including a recap of meeting Ford CEO Alan Mulally, a column about the future of in-car search with Director of Connected Services Doug VanDagens, and the full interview with VanDagens -- because it's a great story about new applications for technology that should prove to be very pervasive. As consumer adoption escalates and behaviors change, marketers will inevitably follow suit. These new opportunities for marketers could combine the best parts of marketing through billboards, radio, local search, and mobile - all for a very captive audience.

Ford's team also covered so many angles. While VanDagens talked a lot about search (unprompted, mind you - I wasn't even thinking of my column at the time), President of the Americas Mark Fields talked more about social media and listening to customers. As I did with VanDagens, the video is included below followed by the full text of the interview (slightly tweaked for readability) so you can choose how you get it, or share it if you find others would be interested.

Mark Fields: My name is Mark Fields and I'm President of the Americas for Ford Motor Company.

David Berkowitz: How did this happen where a car isn't just for driving? What do you see a car as being about?

MF: A car used to just get you from Point A to Point B. What a car is becoming now is not only getting you from Point A to Point B, but allowing you to stay connected to the entire world as you're doing it. We've introduced our Sync feature which basically allows any Bluetooth-enabled device to be connected to the car through the audio system in the car. It keeps people connected as they're driving they're vehicle and they're able to be more productive, but it's also very important that they stay connected to wherever they want to stay connected to, whether it be a person, or their music, or traffic directions - those types of things.

DB: You're making a car sound a lot like a social network.

MF: Very much so, when you look at where the trends are going, and people wanting to be connected, and wanting to know where other people are, and what they're doing, etcetera, it's going to become more and more a piece of that - it's what people are going to expect out of their vehicles.

DB: How pervasive is this mentality? Does this go into the design of the car? Is it more about what features are added on to it?

MF: I think in terms of the design of the car, what we're using for our Sync platform, what it allows us to do - it's an open platform, so we're using an open platform and using the creativity of all the programmers that are out there to develop applications. Our expertise, what we bring to the party, if you will, is all these applications are out there that we can access through our Sync system and through the customer's handheld device, the phone, etcetera, to access the cloud, so to speak -- the expertise that we bring is what's the customer's experience with the application while they're in the vehicle. What's the format and how should it be presented? How do we make sure that it's not a distraction to the driver so much that safety starts becoming a risk? That's where we're trying to integrate both the outside world and the driving experience and doing it in a way that delivers you there safely.

DB: I was hearing your CEO talk about the car as a platform and I'm hearing you talk about the open API, and I feel like I'm talking to people from Google or something. It's just not the image I think most people have when talking about Ford or any car company for that matter.

MF: We're spending a lot of time as a company listening to customers. I think in the past, we've listened as just a car company, providing transportation, but as you listen to customers and what they do with their lives, we've had to broaden our thoughts around that. That's why we started working with Microsoft. That's why we're coming to CES every year, to be part not only of the learning, but hopefully to be part of the discussion of really understanding the trends and what customers want, and then seeing, as a manufacturer of cars, how we can help integrate that. It's a very different way of thinking about the transportation business than we have in the past.

DB: Given the channels available with digital media, are you finding new opportunities for listening to your customers, and are you finding your customers are using these more to communicate with you?

MF: Absolutely. When you look at our Sync system, for example, we get lots of input back from various blogs, but also our own website SyncMyRide, and we get a lot of feedback from customers who are either using Sync and are providing us lots of feedback for improvements, or customers just in the blogosphere that maybe don't have experience with Sync but have wants and needs and say, "Why can't a car company do this? Or why can't a car company do that?" But we're really using the Web, the cloud, the social media as a very efficient way of doing a lot of market research in real-time. Whereas in the past as a car company what we used to do if we were going to come out with a new feature, well we'd go out to a couple of different cities to do some market research, then our market analysts would really crunch the data... but now you get it real-time.

DB: It sounds like you're pretty well versed. So you're seeing this yourself - this isn't something that you've outsourced to someone ten levels down.

MF: The other reason it's so important to us is word of mouth in the car business is very important, but with social media, etcetera, that's completely turbocharged word of mouth. So we really need to listen. We really need to listen and use it to help us become at satisfying the customers as opposed to just ignoring it. I think any company that ignores it does it at their own peril.

DB: Do you do that yourself, just to poke in and see what people are saying?

MF: Oh yeah, I try every morning to go on various blogs and see what they're saying about Ford Motor Company, see what they're saying about our products. We do specific research on themes that are coming through in the blogosphere. It's really important to us, particularly as we try and have our Ford products and brand appeal to a new generation.

Have You Driven a Search Engine Lately? - Ford on Cars as Search Engines

 

Today's MediaPost column is excerpted from my Ford interviews at CES. This week I'll also post the full videos and transcripts.

Have You Driven a Search Engine Lately?

YOU MAY be used to using your phone as a search engine, and you've seen ideas for years about your TV serving as a search engine, but have you thought about your car as a search engine?

The idea had occurred to me before. Fittingly, the last section of my final column of 2008 noted one trend to watch this year is that "your car engine's your search engine." I wrote, "Then there's vehicle telematics -- anyone who's searched for a restaurant, attraction, or drugstore via a GPS device on the road will appreciate how valuable that can be." 

Ford Motor Company has an even more ambitious vision for the future of in-car search engines. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, I met a number of executives from Ford at Social Media Club's Ultimate Blogger Dinner, including CEO Alan Mulally. I seized the chance to record video interviews with Ford's President of the Americas Mark Fields and Director of Connected Services Doug VanDagens. The full interviews, including text and video, will soon run on my blog, but I've excerpted segments with VanDagens that address how consumers search from their cars.

David Berkowitz: Do you want to share what you're doing?

Doug VanDagens: I'm the director of connected services, so I'm responsible for connecting our vehicles with all the services off-board -- satellite radio, an Internet connection, HD radio, things along those lines. So we've got a whole host of awesome services, some that we've just announced back in December.

What we're announcing here at the show is an ability to connect to the Internet through a normal voice plan. So all you need is your phone, and we can take Sync through Bluetooth, connect to your phone, and connect out to Tellme, which is a best-in-class voice portal, and Microsoft now owns those assets. From there we can direct you to a number of Internet data sources. We can send the GPS information from the vehicle, we can send diagnostic information over your voice plan, and then we have traffic, directions, business search, and information, all Internet-based.

DB: So have you done some initial testing to see how people are already using this -- or is this really just rolling off the shelves now?

DV: It's just rolling off... It will be available in the spring, but the coolest thing about it is, it's going to be available on every new vehicle we're going to make in 2009, from the Focus to the high-end cars.

You'll have access to Internet information. You can personalize it. If you want news you can go in and say, "I want technology news," "I want business news." It'll be read to you. You can get sports, news, weather. Later this year we're going to introduce movies and stock prices.

You can get navigation information, so you can go out and say, "Find me the closest Starbucks," and it will go out, based on your location, and find the closest Starbucks to you, analyze the traffic conditions, tell you how to get there the fastest way, and download the directions to your car. The call will end, and now you'll get turn-by-turn directions. It will say, "Turn right at 200 yards," "Turn right now," it will take you anywhere you want to go. It will do business search -- you can get the phone number. And all of this is free for three years.

DB: Does this work in conjunction with GPS or more as a replacement?

DV: We use GPS in the vehicles. Starting in January, all of our new vehicles will have GPS. So we send the location from the car so we know where you are. You can say things like, "Search nearby," and they'll find anything that you want nearby. You can do a business search, you can do it by category, you can do it by actual business name, by proximity. So you can say, "Find me an Italian restaurant."

DB: What is Ford getting out of this by making it a free service?

DV: We're making our customers happy. We're offering something to them that nobody else is offering. It's free navigation, free business search, free directions, free information, and all you need is your cell phone.

DB: Have you been taking this for a test drive yourself?

DV: We are fast to the market. We just got the first version of this over Christmas. So we took it out and we've been running with it and it works great.

DB: The car was one of the few places people couldn't readily search before, and search is so ingrained in people's lives. How do you think your new service is playing into that fact?  How might this change consumer behavior?

DV: I think the first thing it does is, it makes it safer to drive your vehicle. Right now when people want to find a place to go or use their phone or an MP3 player, they're doing it anyway. They're looking down and dialing. This makes your car safer to use because if you need to find a place to go, it will automatically do it through voice. Our priority is voice. You can just talk to it, keep your hands on the wheel, your eyes on the road, and you get the information you need. That's the first thing it'll do.

The second thing it'll do is it will make access to information that you need fun. You can get the latest technology news. You can personalize your sports, you can personalize the weather. So it makes the driving experience fun and safe.

 

The Berkies: My 10 Impactful Technologies in 2008 - Technology That Changed My Life

I started to come up with a list of some of the most meaningful technologies for me in 2008. The one thing that they have in common is that they all changed the way I do something. Amazon is starting to change the way I shop and read. Hulu is changing how I watch TV. Zemanta is changing how I blog. It's not usually a complete revolutionary overhaul; I read the same amount with the Kindle, for instance, but what and how I read, and the way I purchase books, is shifting.

I'm curious to hear how technology has changed your life in the comments.

The Ten Technologies That Changed My Life in 2008Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Amazon's iPhone app: I'm not yet taking full advantage of it, but I love what Amazon's doing in the mobile space. Take a picture of a product and it will try to find the link to it on Amazon, where you may be able to buy it at a better price. This uses the manual lookup via Mechanical Turk, which could wind up being an incredibly valuable 'secret' weapon. Meanwhile, while this app hasn't totally changed things for me yet, Amazon's WAP site is also incredibly useful. I was in Best Buy recently and saw a great deal on a Canon camera for about $150, and I've needed a new point and shoot. I checked Amazon and it sold for about $105. Plus, Amazon had 375 customer reviews, which meant a lot more to me than the opinion of the generally non-existent sales clerks at Best Buy. I went home and ordered the camera from Amazon right away (I'd have done it from my mobile device but needed to dig up a gift certificate code to apply).

Facebook Connect: I love how easily I can now interact with various sites thanks to Connect functionality. We're just starting to see what we can do with it.

FriendFeed: The best thing I do with FriendFeed is scan it before any campaign planning, or when I want to know more about a topic in how it's represented across the web. Its public timeline is probably one of the most underused tools - search for what any FriendFeed user is posting across dozens of services online. It doesn't replace other tools like Twitter Search, but it does make it much easier to get a rich view into online activities.

GPS: I know, this is broad. I'm referring specifically to the $10/month VZ Navigator app I used on my summer road trip. Yet it could have been any other service. It makes one of my favorite activities, travel, so much better and freer, and I'm already starting to enjoy some of the more mundane or entertaining options through iPhone apps and the like.Image via CrunchBase

Hulu: Because of Hulu, I now watch 30 Rock religiously on TV, and I didn't have to watch the full episodes of Saturday Night Live since the election clips made it online after (I always forgot when those Thursday specials were on anyway).

iPod Touch: I've become so much more disappointed with my Samsung i760 since I got this. I'm still not ready to leave Verizon and use the iPhone as a phone, but I love the apps for both utility and gaming. Image via CrunchBase

Kindle: It hasn't yet changed how I read. But it might, and it's already starting. I don't lug as many books around when I travel. I'll buy some books on the Kindle when I think the odds are pretty good I'll just read them once.

Twitterfox: This firefox plugin is what I use most often to write and read tweets. Yet it hasn't been showing me all the replies lately, so I may find alternatives for 2009. Runner up for Twitter: Twitturly, which makes it so easy for anyone, whether or not you use Twitter, to see the most popular links being tweeted. It's how I found this amazing fan trailer for a Thundercats live action movie, for instance.
Image via Wikipedia
Wii Fit: Especially now that it's cold in New York, I'm so happy to have this as a way to push myself to work out. And the passive-aggressive tone it takes gets the guilt flowing every time.

Zemanta: The best thing about Zemanta is the easy embedding of images, which makes for a richer blogging experience both for writing, and, I hope, reading. Its feature set keeps getting better; I'm sure embedding video is coming. Great work to the team here.

Have Gadget, Will Search - Searching from the iPod Touch, Amazon Kindle, and Chumby

Image by The Rocketeer via Flickr

Today's Search Insider, Originally Published in MediaPost

The biggest prediction I’ll make for 2009 is that it will be the first year where the device you search from will matter almost as much as what your query is. Having mobile scale as a viable search marketing channel will be the biggest driver, but this extends beyond smartphones. Consider how GPS is making in-car telematics mainstream.

As I’ve been trying out some alternative devices lately, today we’ll look at the search experience on the iPod Touch, Amazon’s Kindle, and the Chumby.

iPod Touch
It’s a different mentality searching from the iPod Touch than from an iPhone. Both devices are similar, except for three key differences: the iPod Touch relies on Wi-Fi rather than the 3G/Wi-Fi combo the iPhone uses; there’s no GPS for the Touch, but it can hone in on location via Wi-Fi signals; and the Touch doesn’t have a camera.

Searching Google from the Touch delivers a mobile version of search results, where some ads appear above the natural results, but there are no ads to the right. Yahoo and Live.com also use the single-column approach. While it can vary from publisher to publisher, the experience is generally a hybrid of the Web and mobile, and as it evolves will only get better as a practical but powerful search driver.

I’m not yet willing to rely on AT&T and switch to the iPhone as a phone, but I love the Touch interface more than my Samsung i760 smartphone. When I want to quickly check email in the morning or look up a few things on the road, I reach for the Touch first, with the Samsung as a backup. As more data comes out, marketers will come to have a better understanding of what Touch users search for.

Kindle
I’m not ready to give up on books (or bookshelves) quite yet, but after plowing through Philip Roth’s “Indignation” on Amazon’s Kindle, I’ll keep it on me for awhile. It was great traveling on an overnight trip to Boston where I could finish “Indignation” and download another book on the road rather than taking two volumes with me.

The Kindle’s experimental options include a Web browser, with bookmarks to Google, Yahoo Finance, and the Yellow Pages. Amazon operates on what it calls the “Whispernet,” a free Wi-Fi based connection to Sprint’s EVDO data network that has worked well anywhere I’ve tried to use it.

Trying to search Google on the Kindle requires several extra clicks to enter the term in the field and search. The concept of the first page of results is different here too, as you generally need to hit the “next” button to cycle through a few screens. Google’s results come from its PDA-optimized browser, although on the Kindle it’s in black and white. I couldn’t find any ads running.

The most useful search engine on the Kindle is its NowNow service where you can ask a question and humans respond with the result, sometimes within minutes. I asked it which U.S. president was the first to be inaugurated in January, and I received a page of facts and links about Franklin D. Roosevelt and his 1937 inauguration.

Chumby
The Chumby, a Wi-Fi enabled touch-screen device, is an odd duck of a gadget. You can select from a constantly growing list of Web sites, games, and utilities to add, and the Chumby cycles through them every 30 to 60 seconds; if you interact with one, it will stay on longer.

Some selections are meant for viewing, like clocks, while others are designed for interaction, like the addictive game Chumball. Certain selections can be personalized, like Facebook or Twitter, where you can view friends’ updates. Most have some interactive component. The Chumby can even play videos such as David Letterman’s Top Ten lists, which update daily.

There’s no actual search engine on the Chumby. With Yahoo Buzz or Google Trends, you can view recent top movers, but you can’t search beyond that. Google News shows top stories, but no other information beyond a brief synopsis. You can preprogram a query for Google Blog Search and Chumby will show the latest results, but that’s it. The best search experience I found is with the Twitter Search module, where you can enter a query through the Chumby’s on-screen keyboard.

Looking Forward

If mobile devices are considered the third screen (after the TV and computer), the Kindle must rank somewhere around the 11th screen — and the Chumby might be the 28th. Don’t even try to figure out the iPod Touch, which alternates between acting like the first screen when playing videos, the second screen when running applications, and the third screen when accessing the mobile Web. With all of these Web-enabled screens, there are opportunities for searching. The nature of the device, from its usability to where and why people use it, will impact the queries.

Not all screens will be search drivers. I’d be surprised if any agencies started to specialize in CMO — Chumby marketing optimization — or KIBRO — Kindle browser optimization. But since it’s easier to build in Web accessibility to a wider array of affordable devices aimed at the mass market, search engines will spill over into the new frontiers — and when searches from these devices reach any magnitude of scale, marketers will inevitably follow.

Chrome Coverage for Google's New Browser War Volley

Google's new Chrome web browser is launching today, and based on the comic book version, it might speed up browsing and give people more insights into what slows things down.

Here are some links for further reading

• The comic book - 40 pages of making the techie stuff easy to digest for laymen (like me) - brilliant
• Ad Age coverage with some other blog links
• Google Chrome official site - not live as I write this
• Webware coverage with screenshots - see the full color version of what's in the comic book
• Mandatory TechCrunch linkage - TechCrunch says Google's becoming the next Microsoft, but when did Microsoft do anything this user-friendly (assuming the browser's as good as the book)
• Google Blogoscoped screenshots - several images here, on the blog that broke the news (congrats)
• Google press briefing webinar - 2pm ET - link is to Windows Media Player... how long before the Google Media Player?

My two big questions:

• When will my favorite extensions work? Del.icio.us and Twitterfox are my two most important, and I use a bunch of others
• Will this lead to the Google operating system? Between Chrome, Android, Gears, and everything else, why not?

Vacation Recap: Most Useful Technologies

I took a week off last week, driving with my wife upstate from New York City to the Finger Lakes for some sightseeing and winery touring (with stops along the way in White Plains, Binghamton, and Corning), and then to Hyde Park (via Ithaca and Woodstock) for the FDR Library and Culinary Institute of America, and then on to East Hampton (along with some excursions there to Montauk, Sag Harbor, and Southampton).

I managed to spend the entire week off email - even off Facebook mail - but still made some good use of technology. Here are the most useful sites and tools that helped with my vacation (you can also check photo albums of the upstate and Hamptons legs):

1) Zipcar: We're car-less Manhattanites, and while we were able to borrow a family member's car for the update leg, we used Zipcar, the car-sharing service, for the Hamptons journey. It worked out very well, with only a couple glitches. While the rental costs include free gas and tolls, the gas card didn't work so I have to file for a reimbursement. Also, they have a four-day limit, and since we needed it Tues-Sat, we had to time the pickup and dropoff to get the most out of the 96-hour window. Overall though, it was a good deal and very helpful.

2) Google Maps: This is a 'duh' moment, but the best feature here was being able to drag routes through different roads and cities to automatically reroute it. For instance, after driving up through Binghamton, it's hardly a scenic route and there aren't any fun stops. Going to Hyde Park had us covering largely the same route back. Instead, I dragged the map through Ithaca and Woodstock, which led to some other unexpected stops like Coles Maple and an alpaca farm.

3) VZ Navigator: We don't have a car so we don't have GPS. My smartphone, the Samsung i760, isn't equipped for GPS either, but my wife's Motorola Krazr can run it - does that make any sense at all? Not really, but we were fortunate to have her phone so we could spring for Navigator at only $10 a month. It fared as well as any other GPS device I've used (and when I rent cars I always get GPS now), and it allowed us a ton of flexibility on our trip. Great deal.

4) The mobile web: My phone did come in handy for getting Mets scores and letting my wife read NY Post's Page 6 at the beach.

5) Television: Anachronistic? Sure. But once the Olympics started, we actually switched where we were staying in the Finger Lakes since the first B&B didn't have a TV. Getting to watch Michael Phelps win that final gold medal live, and then getting to marvel at Usain Bolt and the US women's Olympic team, made me so thankful for television. While I tested out a couple versions of online video around the Olympics, I didn't need the web for anything beyond medal counts and reading some athlete bios in Wikipedia. TV delivered 99% of the experience.

Google's Video Speech Recognition Baby Steps

It's about time.

Google's finally starting to use speech recognition for video search. I still don't know why it hasn't just acquired Blinkx and owned the market. Compared to YouTube, Blinkx would be a bargain, and they could monetize it better.

Anyway, the rollout could hardly be more limited. It's only for political speeches, and worse yet, you have to add a Google Gadget to even use it. Find out more on the official Google blog. I've only tried it briefly and it works well enough, but it's hardly pioneering. For another good video search example, see what Reuters Labs is doing with Viewdle's face recognition technology, or check ClipBlast, VeoTag, or Pixsy.

Thanks to my colleague Izzy for the link, originally in the Atlantic Monthly.

PSP: Ominous iPhone Harbinger?

There's a great Mobile Insider article by Steve Smith today you should read in MediaPost. For those who follow what Al Ries, Christina Kerley, and others have cautioned about convergence, this is especially salient, and it'll be of interest to anyone following new trends in technology. Steve writes:

Even when you bring a startlingly good new toy into the market and succeed in grabbing the early adopters, the question becomes “then what?” Sony seems to have been learning a hard lesson that some analysts predict Apple may experience later this year. Selling the first few million units may be the easiest part.

Catch the whole thing - well worth a few minutes.

Spock Invites Available

I'm on the Spock beta for the people search site that made a strong impression at the Web 2.0 Expo. First three comments get the invite; if you comment after that, I'll still keep you posted if and when they offer others.

I'm generally impressed with what you can do here for tagging people, showing relationships between others, voting on accuracy of information, and other features. It could even be a new sort of Wikipedia for celebrities, and it can also potentially give you a leg up on Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon as it develops. There are bugs right now - for instance, with trying to denote related people, and there are multiple people with the same name, it's almost impossible to know if you're selecting the right person. I also had trouble claiming my LinkedIn profile for my Spock page.

If you do get an invite, come back sometime and share your thoughts.

PS: I might be a little slow today in sending the invites, but you'll get one within 24 hours.