Choosing Smarter

Upcoming ChoiceBot demos

If you happen to be in the Ottawa or Montreal area, we will be demoing ChoiceBot at Montreal Startup Camp 3 and Ottawa Demo Camp 11, tonight and next Monday respectively. Drop by and check us out live and in person! No autographs, please.

OK, we'll autograph anything. Yes, ANYTHING. But you have to watch the demo first.

Also, I will be attending next Tuesday's LAMP development presentation by Digg co-founder Owen Byrne at the Ottawa offices of TravelPod, which recently broke into Technorati's top 10 most popular blogs. In the WORLD. Props to Luc Levesque and his team...

Stuff you missed (take 2)

Man.. I have GOT to get better at remembering to update the ol' bloggerino.

So we presented MyChoiceBot at a number of events in the San Francisco area last week, none of which you would have found out about beforehand through this blog. Some highlights:

We were in great company at Myles Weissleder's masterfully-executed SF New Tech event last Wednesday. Cool co-presenters included 23 And Me, Hubpages and Fixya, and we got many questions and "very cool" comments from the 250+ in attendance.

We also hosted our very first sponsored event, a lunch as part of San Francisco's now-iconic Lunch 2.0 series, which saw about 150 of the area's top Web 2.0-types taking in sandwiches and demos in this very funky photo studio.

All in all, a great week, interspersed with productive user, customer and partner meetings and virtually unanimous positive feedback, which is worth gold when you spend 90% of your time sweating over pixels in a basement. Looks like we've finally nailed the ChoiceBot user interface, and everyone seems to "get it" right away. Who would have thought that making something simple could be so complicated... a subject for another post.

Soooo... I hereby promise to post events where we will be presenting ChoiceBot or MyChoiceBot on this blog BEFORE the event actually happens, so you can come and check us out in person if you happen to be in the area.

Where the Web is going

This relatively short (~10 mins) presentation by Kevin Kelly at the recent Web 2.0 conference is a fantastic overview of what's now a pretty widely-accepted view of what the Web will look like in 5 or so years, possibly sooner:

I agree with all of Kevin's predictions. Most sites will make the data in their underlying databases available to other sites in a form that computers can easily understand and use. Sites talking to each other means that users don't have to manually piece data together from different sites when doing research, making reservations, etc. For example, a single site could pull data from a movie showtime site, the Google Maps site and the New York Times site to show the user all the movies starting in the next hour, within 10 miles of their home, and to which the NYT gave 3 stars or more. There are already thousands of such sites and I, like Kevin and many others, think that eventually all sites will operate by passing data around in the background to make users' lives simpler and easier. (Yes, there will be a lot arguing about data standards, but ultimately the business benefits will force everyone to play nice together.)

This is starting to be known as "Web 3.0" among bleeding edge Web types. In geek terms, it can be described as the Web moving from unstructured content (Web sites that can be easily read by humans) to structured content (Web sites that can be easily read by humans AND by machines).

I believe that, in this new structured Web, ChoiceBot technology will play a pivotal role. Hear me out...

Many Web 3.0 applications are designed to combine data from various sites in order to help the user make a decision. For example, a last-minute vacation site may pull data from a travel booking site (for seat prices and availability), a weather site (for forecasts) and a resort rating site to help the user decide where to go for that last-minute weekend getaway. Using a conventional search interface, however, such a site could return 27 vacation options that match the user's price, weather and star-rating criteria (or zero matches, or 127 matches). By the time they review all the matches or tinker with their criteria until they get a reasonable number of matches, it could be Monday.

Layering ChoiceBot on top of that same application would enable users to zero in on the flight, resort and weather combination that represents the truly best overall choice for them in less than two minutes, regardless of the number of choices available (in this example, hundreds of thousands of combinations). In most cases, this represents an order of magnitude increase in efficiency.

Google works great, but in the structured Web, it's not about keywords so the best keyword search engine in the World will be of no use. What's needed is a tool that can help users wade through potentially vast sets of structured data, which is where ChoiceBot comes in.

Delusions of grandeur? You bet. What kind of entrepreneur would I be without those? <grin>

Much to my surprise, iTunes blows

Even though I've been using a few different media players/managers over the years, I was forced to install iTunes so that my PC could talk to my iPhone. After such a stunning user experience on the iPhone, I guess I was expecting the same from iTunes. Wow. Not.

The music selection, while vast, is full of gaping wholes. Putting together a playlist for a reunion revealed that there were no Housemartins albums and -much more shockingly- no AC/DC ones. No AC/DC? Really? While not my favorite band, they're not exactly obscure...

Horrendously bloated (64.1 MB download, 100MB+ while running in memory), slow to install, slow to launch, slow to everything. Primitive music recommendation/discovery system. No mini-player mode. No all-you-can-eat-for-a-monthly-fee plan. Keeps on trying to trick me into installing Safari. Crashed at least three times. YUCK!

Most shockingly for an Apple product, though, was the terrible usability, or lack thereof. I wanted to transfer some pics from my PC onto my iPhone. Could NOT figure it out. The help file was no help at all, and I had to resort to a Google search for instructions, which were not obvious (though ultimately successful). How come no-one else is complaining about this? I don't know... maybe it's because my brain isn't wired for the Mac (i.e., where iTunes was born and ported from). Didn't seem to stop me from the loving the iPhone, though...

I just can't reconcile the fact that the iPhone and iTunes came from the same company. Definitely not from the same design team, I am sure.

Angry blogger post: deceptive PayPal advertising

We just spent several days implementing PayPal on the ChoiceBot for e-Retailers site (not the MyChoiceBot site, which is and always will be free) because they allow our customers (in our case, online retailers) to pay their monthly subscription fees using a credit card OR PayPal.

When we started testing, however, the customer was always forced to create a PayPal account and pay via PayPal, in direct violation of the "no PayPal account required" promise prominently featured all over their website.

A call to their support line revealed that customers of recurring payments must use PayPal. The problem is that this very important fact isn't mentioned in ANY of the product literature I read, not even in this detailed, page-long explanation of the "no PayPal account required" promise.

At best, a horrendous oversight. At worst, a cheap, possibly illegal ploy to get more users to create PayPal accounts. Not this time, though... anyone care to recommend an honest payment processor we could use?

I feel a bit better now, though you probably don't. Sorry about that.