Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

More than a year ago, at the first Seattle Mind Camp I attended a presentation (I believe that it was the first public one) of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. At that time, it seemed like a great idea and we had a good sessions with lots of suggestions for usage of it. The service (you can see it here so I am not going to explain what it is) seemed to contain all the necessary features for a success, Web2.0 like features like crowdsourcing (or the Sawyer Effect as I recently heard from someone at work refer to it) and leverage of the huge infrastructure that Amazon already has in place. Few days ago, a former colleague send me a link tothis pretty funny (but mostly useless) application of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. That prompted my curiosity about how Mechanical Turk is doing so I went to their site to see how many innovative applications people were building on top of it and to my surprise, there are only 31 HITs available and most of them seem to be generated by Amazon itself. Considering that each task on a HIT goes for a very low price in the pennies and that Amazon takes an even smaller cut of those profits, one might conclude that Amazon is just making few hundred dollars on the service, certainly not something to be proud of it. I have not seen too much advertisement of it so that might be a reason but since it certainly hit all the right Web2.0 places when it was launched, I am surprise that the usage of the application is so low. For this service to make any sense to a company of the size of Amazon (and to be useful to its users), you need to have millions of applications and they seem to be really far from it. I wonder how other similar Web services initiatives from Amazon like S3 or the recently launched EC2 are doing or going to do.

CD

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I am officially back blogging after a really hectic period, for the non informed, I left the US and Japan and I am back in Barcelona. Obviously, I changed my day to day job (I work for Telefonica now, look at my updated linkedin profile here, now sporting a personalize URL) but I will remain  involved with Celartem, LizardTech and Extensis which is very nice as it was very difficult to leave those companies after this very intense four and half years and there is still lots to do (but they are all in very good hands). The combination of leaving one job, starting another one completely different, going from a small company to a Fortune 500, going from a software company to a telco, moving back to Spain, getting a place to live (more on this and the Spanish real state bubble in some future post) , getting an ID, social security number, a bank account, getting furniture, getting appliances, settle in with all your stuff, figuring out what else you need, getting together with family and friends, traveling a lot for what I expected, etc. etc. etc. just made it way too complicated to write.

Now Spain has gotten into the “August black hole” that Europe falls into every 12 months and I have been able to settle down, get things done, learn about my new job, the industry and the technologies used (way too far from where I want to be yet but getting there) and finally, start testing some blogging tools that came up recently:

• Typepad Mobile, the previous post with a picture was posted from (my new office) there using my brand new Nokia N70 (and a speedy 3G connection from Movistar), they have done a great job. I was trying two other tools when it came up and the one from Typepad is way better.
• Windows Live Writer, the first things from Windows Live that is actually useful for me (nothing wrong with the other services but I was already being well served in the other product categories they added before). This post is being there with it and all I can say is that finally someone has done a decent blogging desktop tool for Windows. Yes, I already had iWeb on my Mac which is also great but they only support .Mac and in spite of getting myself and account with future plans of doing a full Web and not a blog, I did not want to change my current blog.  Congratulations Microsoft, not only for doing a great tool but for doing it compatible with most services and not just MSN Spaces as Apple did with iWeb and .Mac. I hope that this is a sign that innovation is finally happening in Microsoft (isn’t a product innovation only if it changes users behavior, which in my case it has done?).

CD

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