Ravi’s Blog

This has been a very interesting day at the Where 2.0 conference. A lot of interesting quotes today from interesting people. Few that i can remember:

Life is Local - Craig Donato
Platform beats the application every time - Tim O`Reilly
Geo Spatial visualations are one way to organize our reality - Jack Dangermond

I loved tim o’reilly’s talk as well as jack dangermond’s. The day basically comprised of a various demos centered around visualizations of local information around geo-spatial data (google, msft, few hackers), API announcements (Yahoo! maps, Google maps), few other demos of location based apps (one woman talked about visualizations of various bombing attacks in iraq)

The spirit of hacking, innovating was pervasive at the conference. Several developers who put together cool apps using web services were given an opportunity to present on the stage and several others got an opportunity to showcase their apps at a session in the evening.

In general i am very happy about the current business environment in the valley. There is a lot of encouragement for new ideas, creativity, hacking, and building. Yahoo! is also looking to hire developers who encompass that spirit. Specifically my teams’ charter is focused on building creative, cutting edge apps in several of the new spaces.

If you consider yourself a good hacker, innovator, and you’d like to have an opportunity to work with the great assets yahoo! has to create cool products - we would love to have you. The job descriptions are posted in a previous post.

http://supergreg.hopto.org/google-yahoo/

Greg sadetsky - a hacker - developed this site that combined yahoo! traffic with google maps. He went into details of his experiment over here.

Great demo from john hanke on google earth. All the features promised by msn virtual earth are already released and working. Demo of various sites on the earth (mt. everest, mt. vesuvio, greece) followed by a demo of trup planning experience in minneapolis. Some of the notable things:

• turn on and off various services (mark roads, lodging, etc)
• fully integrated local search and web search
• store locations in my locations
• overlay routes on the 3-d map
• visually “drive” through the route
• 3-D visualizations of a lot of land marks and metro areas (not sure if they have 3-d visualizations of all landmarks)

Overall this just rocks!

So, after the comedy show, they delved into a preview peek of MSN Virtual Earth. It looks like both google and Microsoft are racing ahead in satellite imagery integration with maps/local experience. Here are some features that they talked about in MSN Virtual Earth.

• Tag/Label streets on the satellite images.
• Zooming in and out much like google earth.
• Panning works more like gmaps and not like gEarth. They also have a auto panning mode (like gEarth)
• OverLays. They have several overlays on top of the satellite imagery. They do driving directions (gEarth does it too), local search results.
• There are some talk about multiple points of interest, but it seems like it’s just placing multiple POI on the map and not multi point routing.
• You can share the multiple POI via blogging/IM etc.
• In addition they announced mappoint webservice and location server. Was this already public?
• Their vision - “Global Access to Local Information”
• Of course, this is not released yet. The speaker said something about “summer” release.
• However when ever they release, they intend to release developer apis and resources.
• Announced partnership with OrbImage

Just saw the talk by michael frumin about fundrace2004 project. He demo’d pretty cool overlay of party fund contributions over a map like interface. Very cool, you can type in your address and findout what your neighbors have contributed and to which party. This is about presentation of known information as an overlay of geography. Very compelling application. My mind races to think about other information that can be overlayed on maps.

Now i am sitting through a microsoft comedy show about MSN virtual earth :p

Just as I was headed to where 2.0, I saw the headline about richard nixon calling indira gandhi an old witch. I was just curious to follow up and checked out the actual transcripts. Here’s some specific text where richard nixon, wished that indian people were struck by “mass famine”.

Kissinger: They’re such bastards.

Nixon: A mass famine. But they aren’t going to get that. We’re going to feed them—a new kind of wheat. But if they’re not going to have a famine the last thing they need is another war. Let the goddamn Indians fight a war [unclear].

Kissinger: They are the most aggressive goddamn people around there.

Nixon: The Indians?

Kissinger: Yeah.

Nixon: Sure.

I guess, i am ok somewhat ok with the name calling of a nation’s leader. But wishing that a billion people die of famine? Whoa!
I am sure this has a lot of other controversial stuff, but i don’t have time to get into it right now

I am going to be at where 2.0 in SF starting tomorrow. This is the first oreilly conference i am attending. This should be interesting. From the Oreilly page

Location-aware technologies combined with mapping and other data are poised to create a whole new class of web apps and services……But where is location-based technology leading us in the larger sense? And where’s the business model beef? The first Where 2.0 Conference brings together the people, projects, and issues leading the charge into this technological frontier. Join us to debate and discuss what’s viable now, and what’s lurking just below the radar.

So this is the first “Where 2.0″ conference. I don’t get why it’s called 2.0, if it’s the first

An IM from a friend spurred me into thinking about gBay. The question he posed was

What would it take for google to unseat eBay?

Simple as that. I guess eBay is no longer considered as invincible. Not that eBay as a company has done anything wrong. There weren’t any missteps, poor execution. The marketplace that eBay has created is still just as useful and dominating as it was before. The astounding growth rates of the past few days don’t seem realistic anymore, but eBay is still is expecting to grow at 30% y/o/y sales growth rate.

I guess we know live in a G-centric world where people are in awe of google’s success and wondering where else google can impact their life. They are wondering what other fields can google innovate in or leverage their market position into. This despite the fact that google has only demonstrated 2 market successes. According to me, they were only successful in doing search and maps. All the other endeavors of google are in a way - flop. I can go into my thoughts on this topic in another post. This one is to talk about gBay.

What would it take for google to unseat eBay?

A good online Marketplace is about connecting sellers with buyers (vice versa) and facilitating transactions. Google has a lot of traffic and clearly connects buyers with sellers. But, i believe, google has a bit more ways to go before they can unseat eBay.

• If I am a seller, the bar to “use” google to sell my item is way higher than that for ebay. What do i mean by that? Well to be listed in ebay, you need an item, and a credit card. Just go to ebay, with a bit of pain, you can get your item listed and people looking at it. On google, you need to have your own website, and optimize it the right way for it to be picked up by google. Google needs to figure out a product for this kind of low volume, possibly non-repeat seller.
• If you are a mid-level seller, let’s say you have few items in a category that you acquire and sell. May be you restore buy used cell phones, restore them and sell on ebay. You have to have a web presence and software to manage your inventory etc. You then pay google purely for some keywords. Apart from paying for those, you have to either learn about keywork marketing and figure out the right ROI or employ an outside vendor. eBay is still very simple at this time. They have bulk tools.
• The top results that appear organically for google are permanent web pages with reputation (PageRank). So if you are searching for a “used honda civic in sunnyvale”, google won’t show you all the used hondas, instead they show you where you can likely find used hondas. As a seller, you’d rather be paying to be on those pages. Because any page you list doesnot have the reputation to be ranked in the top 5 pages anyway.
• Freshness. You list your item on ebay, you can find it in search results soon. google crawls the web once every few months.
• As a buyer, there’s limited information available to me about the seller. None of the reputation/feedback tools that ebay has.
• There are bad people in the world and fraud is a real problem for any marketplace. ebay has been dealing with fraud for years and the marketplace is slowly putting up some sort of restrictions in place. Granted these need to evolve, but gbay needs to think about fraud before jumping in.
• Facilitating pricing. eBay’s great asset is the auction format. Price negotiation happens and market flow sets pricing. How would gbay assist in price negotiation?

These are problems google can solve and they probably will address them. But to be a gBay, there are still quite a long way to go. The above list is just scratching the surface. To really “unseat” ebay, google needs to build compelling, advanced marketplace application and then open the traffic hoses to it.

Sorry for the gap in blog posts. In the last month, i got married and also cranked out the first version of internal product i have been working on. It’s been pretty hectic. I kinda fell out of the blogging world, till i got an IM from a friend talking about ebay.. actually about Gbay.

some thoughts on that - coming next.