Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

A friend of mine pointed me to the story about Aleksey Vayner, a Yale Student that organized a huge lie about his resume (fake CEO of a fraudulent investment firm, member of a fraudulent charity, author of a book about the Holocaust that was copied from an existing one) to try to get a job at investment banking firm USB. As part of the job application, Aleksey put together a 7 minutes motivational video about himself titled “Impossible is Nothing” that portraits himself lifting weights, doing karate and dancing and is full of lame comments like “if you are going to work, work. If you are going to train, train. If you are going to dance, then dance but do it with passion”. What a freak (and a liar) you might think and so did someone else at USB HR department since the story got out and the video ended up in YouTube. Click here to find out more information about this story.

This is where the second part of the headline of this post comes in. The video is no longer in YouTube due to copyright infringement, apparently, Aleksey himself sent a letter to YouTube asking to remove it and, scare as they might be about law suits (and with an announcement about a $1,6BB acquisition a couple of days away) they did remove it. So now is somewhere else (here you can find it and enjoy it) which makes me think about the real value of the YouTube traffic due to the following two reasons.

First, the video was embedded into blogs posts so when I tried to see it, assuming it was still posted in YouTube, I could have seen it without actually going to YouTube. So whatever advertising strategy that YouTube had implemented to monetize their traffic, unless they are embedding ads in the video (which they have publicly said they will not do), I will have not been exposed to that advertisement at all. I wonder how many of the 100 million daily downloads happen from blogs or MySpace pages without never going to the YouTube site.

Second, the video is now gone due to copyright infringements. People tend to upload videos to YouTube but I wonder what will start happening if all the copyrighted material gets removed quickly while other sites (in this case, Veoh) keep it there or people just place it in their own servers (as it also happened in this case). The media has been focused very much on the risk of YouTube (now Google) getting sued into oblivion by content holders but I think that the risk is not getting sued but actually losing the traffic and the market leadership the moment that copyright content is strictly forbidden from the site.

I guess we will have to wait few months to see how the acquisition develops but certainly is going to be interesting….

 UPDATE: The New York Times has a story about Aleksey this weekend, apparently Aleksey has spoken and he claims that the story on his resume (the charity, the company, etc.) is true and that he is looking at suing UBS….

CD

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In the recent International Congress of Mathematics host in Madrid, Spain, the International Mathematical Union (IMU) awarded the Field Medals, what is considered to be the Nobel prize of mathematics (for a very interesting discussion about why there are no mathematics Nobel prizes read this article), and this was all over the news because of the rejection of the award by Grigori Perelman (I think that the fact that IMU still awarded him with the prize even knowing that he was going to decline it was pretty good and talks a lot about how mathematicians still appreciate science and not just politics).

Another prize that was awarded and that is a lot more relevant for today’s Internet was the Nevanlinna Prize that went to Jon Kleinberg for his work on Web organization and search engines through his theory of hubs and authorities, something consider an alternative/inspiration to Page Rank. Wikipedia claims that his algorithm is not commonly implemented in commercial search engines due to computational issues (part of the innovation that Google did with PageRank was not only on coming up with the ranking mechanism but showing how it could be calculated in an computationally efficient way, something that is not obvious when you are dealing with the massive size of the Web and given the fact that Page Rank is a recursive definition). I sort of remember that the hubs and authorities concept was actually used somewhere commercially so a bit of Web research pointed me to this other Wikipedia article that talks about Teoma, the search engine that now powers ask.com (which I have started to use more and more often, I think that they are doing pretty cool thinks, same goes for Amazon’s A9, btw, can someone tell me why A9 is called A9?) and how the ideas for that search engine started at the IBM project Clever which Kleinberg worked on and where his paper was originally written (btw, it is funny to see how researches still use Tex/Latex and generate PS files instead of PDFs).

I think that we will still see more innovation in search technology coming up in the next few years so we need more Jon Kleinbergs out there. The reason I think this is that search is still largely an unsolved problem in many respects. Just do a simple test, ask someone on the street “search engines” and the answer will be most of the time Google, Yahoo! and perhaps MSN search. Well, do a search for “search engines” in Google and you can see that Google cannot even recognize itself as a search engine in the first search results (see screen shot above) and the same search in Yahoo! (screen shot below) does better since it lists search engines but none of them is Google or Yahoo! (so they cannot also recognize themselves).

CD

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This week I had a chance to spent some time with my former professor from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Osamu Watanabe. It is funny that I ended up seeing him here in Barcelona after not seeing him at all the last few years that I was in Tokyo a lot more often.

He explained me an anecdote about how he thought that Sudoku meant “numbers poison” since you could actually write it that way using Japanese kanji and how he told so an American that he met on a plane trip that was playing Sudoku. In fact, Sudoku is not written with the kanji for “number” (su) and “poison” (doku) but numbers and “single” (doku means also poison but with a different kanji) and as explained in this article, the game, not invented in Japan but in the US and popularize by a Japanese magazine under the new name which was trademarked (the game itself cannot be patented or trademarked) was originally referred to as “suji wa dokushin ni kagiru,” which means “the numbers must be single”—meaning not repeated. The name was then shortened to Sudoku, which means “single numbers.

Watanabe-sensei is working with one of his student on trying to solve the problem of providing a way to enumerate Sudoku problems. As far as he knew (and few Internet searches confirmed this in an extremely experimental way), this problem has not been solved, what has been solved is counting how many Sudoku problems are out there.

Solving this problem and providing an algorithm for generating a unique number for each Sudoku number will prove to be very popular since someone could easily create a centralize database of known Sudoku problems (just the numbers) and then check against that to see whether that one exists and then claim that number or someone could be challenged to create Sudoku problem number 234,934 knowing that someone else has already created problems 234,933 and 234,935 and fill the gap. Notice that since every Sudoku problem has a unique solution, what we are counting here are unique solutions but for each solution one can generate a lot of different starting points just by removing numbers differently. That also leads to the problem of how many numbers can you remove while leaving the problem solvable which is another interesting problem. Since Sudoku is basically a constraint satisfaction problem, as a theoretical computer scientists will say, it is a a very interesting source for mathematicians and theorists to study it. You can apply known computer science techniques like integer programming to solve it.

Finally, the article in the American Scientist has a short but interesting discussion about Sudoku strategies and whether you can solve it by pure logic (you always put a number in a place knowing that is the only number that can go there and that allows you to continue) or backtracking basically guessing till you arrive to a mistake and then go back to the initial guess and try with another one). I have always solved Sudoku problems by logic (which is in fact why I like Sudoku since using backtracking is not mentally challenging) so it will be interesting to know whether this is in fact the only way to solve them or there are problems where backtracking is absolutely necessary.

CD

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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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Since we are in WorldCup season, I guess it is unavoidable to talk about football. While watching some matches last week in the US with American colleagues and with Japanese colleagues in Tokyo this week, I have been trying to educate them a bit about football since many of them they either do not know anything about it (not even the rules) or they only know the very, very recent history (from Beckman and on). For instance, no one gets how good is the Adidas commercial that says "Jose+10" basically because they do not know who Platini or Beckembahuer are or what is to play football on the streets. Another football celebrity that is on TV a lot this WorldCup (the previous one he was not allowed to enter Japan or Korea due to his past legal issues) but that is not very well know either in the US or Japan is Maradona, Diego Armando Maradona so I have been trying to educate them about him since he is someone worth talking about.

So today is the 20^th anniversary of a historical day in football history, the day that Maradona scored with the “hand of God” against England and the day that Maradona also scored in the same match, what is considered the best goal in World Cup history, check it out in the video below (my first YouTube embeeded video in this blog), the quality is pretty bad but you can get what he did.

Listen also carefully to the English commentator saying “for God’s sake, someone stop this guy!!! It is hilarious. To put things in historical perspective, Argentina had lost just a couple of months before this WorldCup match a war against England, the Malvinas War (or the Falklands War as it is known among anglosaxons) so they were expecting revenge in the field and they did get it big time.

Argentina, after beating England that day, went on to win that WorldCup in a final match against Germany where Maradona played against a key role with a deadly passed towards the end that put Argentina up 3-2 and gave them their second WorldCup win.

CD

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It has been ages (over a month) since I have updated my blog, the longest period of inactivity in my blog since I started back in November. Just too many things going on professionally and personally (soon you will find out as I will be posting about it in a couple of weeks). Fortunately, blog frequency does not matter anymore according to Eric Kintz (read his very interesting post in the topic here). I agree with most of the things he says, in my case, blogging is not about high traffic but about keeping an open discussion and communication with some colleagues and friends via my blog (so I do not need the frequency to increase the traffic) and due to my job responsibilities, I cannot agree more that frequent posting is not very compatible with a high pre assure job (the main reason I have not been blogging lately is lack of time and concentration to do so).

Also, RSS fatigue has definitely set in myself. I stopped reading a lot of blogs that post too frequently and only occasionally reading some of their posts if they get to the front page of Techmeme which has become my major source of blog reading after entirely dropping my RSS reader due to way too many feeds with too many posts being tracked there. Also, as I tend to write long posts, I cannot do it frequently unless I drop the quality of the content and I have never been a fan of just posting a short post linking to someone else (even though I have done it occasionally). Actually, that so many people do that in a large portion of their posts and add little value to the conversation has been one of the reasons I stop reading many blogs I used to follow. I might now be missing something interesting that person has to say because he also writes many non-interesting posts, clearly not a good think for that blogger.

So as a conclusion, I will repeat what Eric says on his blog (oh no, I am doing what I just said is not a good thing to do!!!), I will only post when I have something to say (and I have the time to do it).

CD

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The champions league as well!!!

50 years ago it was Real Madrid in its first edition, this year it was Barcelona.

CD

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I finally got Windows installed in my MacbookPro and in my case, the experience was less than smooth. First, Bootcamp gave an error before I could even make a partition and I had to repair the OS X system disk which I could not do initially since to do so you have to boot the computer from the CD with the OS and I did not have it with me. Once I repaired the OS X system disk (I wonder how it got corrupted as I hardly used the computer since I got it) I prepared the partition, burned the CD with the drivers and started installing Windows. The installation itself was pretty good but I was shocked to see that the installation of XP (first time I actually saw it) still look and feel as installing Windows 3.1, I heard that Microsoft has change the look and feel of the Vista installation, it was probably time I guess. The real problems started now. The drivers were not being installed properly, I had to removed some of them and install them again (the Bluetooh one was a particularly problematic one) and after thinking I was done, Windows asked me to reboot which I accepted and then it freeze while shutting down. After waiting a while I manually had to close the computer and restart and Windows will not boot. I rebooted the OS X partition and removed the Windows installation CD which was trapped inside (no way to eject the CD manually on a Mac, I guess putting an eject button was not within their design guidelines). Btw, first time I started OS X after the installation of Windows it took forever to start and since Windows was not booting, I totally freaked out thinking that no none of the two OS partitions will boot. After that, reboot again and Windows finally started. I looked to get online but no wireless icon or connection anywhere to be seen. I checked the drivers and saw that the wireless LAN driver was not working well so I try to reinstall it but nothing. I was suggested that it could be a firmware problem so reboot again, start Mac OS X and attempted to upgrade the firmware but nothing, I already had the latest version. Reboot again, start Windows (at this point, several hours since I first started…) and started trying things till a colleague found out that actually, the Bootcamp drivers for the wireless LAN do not work on Japanese MacBook Pros since they use a different wireless LAN card that the US ones, check a  thread about this issue here. I guess that I will have to get a USB wireless LAN for the time being…

Other drivers are missing but I cannot figure to which hardware they belong (the camera?) and at this point, I am not trying more things and I am just going to use it for a while to see whether it works well or not.

So not a very smooth experience but I must admit that when Windows was finally configured and I saw it start at the really high res of the MacBook Pro it was pretty cool and it feels very fast, faster than my current Sony notebook. So I hope that I do not came across more issues and I can finalize my switch to a Mac.

CD

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