Google Beats Spell-Check for Figuring Out How a Word is Spelled

I was writing an email to my friend and entrepreneurial colleague Mike Horn over at CraftCoffee trying to help him articulate his company's vision in a way that will help potential investors see the opportunity as clearly as he does.  Somewhere along the line it became clear that the word connoisseur was going to have be used.  In writing.  Except that I had no idea how to spell it.  


Not only did I not know how to spell it, I couldn't even get close enough for the spell-checker to figure out what I was talking about.  I tried out "conneseiur" and "connesiour", but MS Word (and ironically Chrome as well, which must be using the same spell-check engine), just wanted to suggest words that started with the word "connect" (connections, Connecticut, connectible, etc.).  Quickly calculating that the ratio of vowel combinations to my knowledge of French approached infinity, I realized that this was not going to get anywhere.  So, I turned to that modern oracle of all knowledge, Google.


In the address bar of my Chrome browser (not even on the Google site!), I started typing: c-o-n-n-e-s.  The first suggestion Google gave me was "connestee falls."  But the second?  You guessed it.  Google 1, spell-check 0.  And as Google Instant likes to point out, I didn't even have to press enter.

Testing

If all is correct this post should publish at precisely 2AM EST and should not be picked up by Twitterfeed

Verizon expected to eat up AT&T iPhone sales; iPhone expected to eat up Verizon bandwidth?

Gene Munster must have one of the more fun analyst jobs on Wall Street; as Piper Jaffrey's senior Internet research analyst he has become the go to guy for speculation on how many [name your favorite iDevice] Apple is going to sell in the next period.  He has to be one of the few research analysts that have actual consumers reading their research.  It's interesting then that he forecasts Verizon to sell only 2.5MM iPhones in 2011; that's compared to 5.2MM iPhones that AT&T sold in the third quarter 2010 alone.  

Let's take Gene's assumption that Verizon doesn't start selling the iPhone until "midway through the March quarter."  That means roughly 2/3 of the year remain, with the holiday season being the peak season anyways, so let's say they could have sold 25% more if they started selling Jan 1.  That's a run rate of barely 3M vs >20M for AT&T.  Other analysts are betting even lower.

Explanations of how these numbers are derived are vague (and being a former management consultant whose job was sometimes to size markets I know that these calculations are often more than a bit hand-wavy), but one thing I am willing to bet on: Verizon could make them higher if they wanted to - but they don't.

A lot of people forget that AT&T didn't used to have the worst service until they started carrying the iPhone and their networks became overburdened.  They've already caught up to Verizon in capital expenditures per subscriber, and yet it hasn't helped their image (and arguably their coverage) at all.  If I'm Verizon, I'm simultaneously thrilled and terrified by the prospect of millions of bandwidth guzzling iPhone users on my network.  I'm going to do everything I can do manage expectations and do a gradual iPhone ramp-up to test whether my network really is as good as I think it is before I go all out in promoting the iPhone.    Since carriers have a lot of control over what phones get sold through their network via relative levels of pricing and promotion levels, Verizon has the ability to do this.  It might seem foolish to all the iPhone lovers out there who are dying to move to Verizon, but from Verizon's perspective they are doing the right thing.  They've built their brand on "It's the network," not "It's the phone," and no device, not even the iPhone, is worth risking that.

One thing's for sure - it's a good time to be in the backhaul business!

How Google Helped Israel Put Out the Fire

Is there anything Google doesn't touch today?  According to the Hebrew version of Ha'aretz, when Bibi Netanyahu decided to seek foreign aid in putting out the largest and deadliest fire in Israel's history, his military attaché "used Google" to find Evergreen, the private company which operates the Supertanker.

The English version of the same article omitted this detail.

On a personal note, the tragedy of this fire which claimed 42 lives and destroyed over 7% of Israel's forested land in mere days, weighed heavily on me during this Hanukah.  This year, instead of the holiday being about celebrating the light of the eternal flame that our ancestors lit after vanquishing the Greeks from our lands, it was about cheering as Greek - and other - fire-fighting planes helped us extinguish flames that had gone out of control.  It was hard to miss this tragic and bittersweet irony.

Facebook Messaging: Do You Really Want to Use a Messaging System Based on a Focus Group of Teenagers?

Seems everybody is predicting that Facebook Messaging is going to revolutionize communication (http://nyti.ms/dz3qtF, http://tcrn.ch/9STaBp, http://wapo.st/cwD3OJ, etc.). So I figured I'd throw my predicting hat into the ring and say, "Meh." There are three reasons for this: Facebook's choice of focus group for developing the new product; Facebook's prior design failures in building messaging systems; and the inherent conflict b/w Facebook's "social," sharing communication model and email's private, recipient-only model. And finally, for anyone who would underestimate the difficulties of making grand change to people's methods of communication, I have two words for you: Google Wave.

The product may be revolutionary if you are a modern teenager, Zuckerberg's apparent focus group for the project (if I read another article quoting Zuckerberg as saying that the idea for Messaging "came out of talking to current teenagers" ...). But for the rest of us? Do folks in the real world really want to use a product designed with the communication styles of high schoolers in mind? (and I'm not going to try to mock those communication styles since I'll probably just get it wrong, but we all went to high school once and how many of us want that experience rehashed in our inboxes every day? The occasional Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller screening should be enough to remind us that *those are not days we want to go back to*)

At the same time, every one of Facebook's attempts at a communications fool so far has been to my taste unbelievably kludgy (think about the existing Facebook Messaging and IM systems compared to their competitors, or Michael Arrington's comment that the previous iteration of Facebook Messaging was "completely unusable as a personal or business productivity tool"). Even the demos of the new Messaging demos I've seen continue much of this kludgy-ness, and my predictions of adoption by the post-high school crowd are extremely low. Do I really want all of my communication to be sorted exclusively by who it's with? And subject lines may be an unnecessary formality in rare cases, but generally they serve to let me know what the rest of the message - and the entire conversation thread - is about, and to separate conversations accordingly.

Finally, there is an inherent conflict of interest b/w the use of private messaging systems like email, in which conversations are designed to be seen only by their recipients, and the kind of public conversations that Twitter and Facebook (through wall posts) encourage. Facebook wants all your conversations to be out there in the open, wants as much public sharing as possible, and email fundamentally represents the opposite of that. Therefore it's hard to see a company like Facebook seriously committing to the development of a private messaging system of any kind, over the long term.

But then again maybe at 31 I'm just an old fogey who doesn't "get it" when it comes to "modern messaging" (as Zuckerberg puts it). I just requested my Messaging invite and may end up eating my words if it promises to be the biggest revolution in modern communication since Twitter. But somehow I doubt it. Communication paradigm shifts happen organically, not by declaration from on high. Just think back to last year when to buzz was all about Wave, another promised revolution in social communication. We all know how that went ...

The Disadvantage of the Touch Screen Keyboard is Not That It Lacks Keys

After two weeks w/ the iPhone, I thought "Anyone who is worried about not having a keyboard b/c they don't think they'll be able to type just hasn't tried it before."  After 24 hours w/ the T-Mobile/Google/HTC G2 I still agree with that statement, but realized that it misses the point.  The problem w/ typing on the iPhone (or any other phone w/o a physical keyboard) isn't the typing per se ... it's that the keyboard takes up half the screen!  I was perplexed by the decision to include a physical keyboard on the G2 initially, until I started using it and reallized that for applications requiring text imput (which includes web browsing, maps, SMS, twitter, and most other social applications in addition to email) it makes the effective screen size much bigger than the iPhone - or even the mammoth 4.3" Droid X phone.

So, while for short bits of text or applications in which key input is secondary or limited to a lesser number of keys, such as dialing, I use the on screen keyboard with no problem, for longer text writing (including this and my last post), I use the slide out keyboard.  The extra weight is slightly annoying, but I'm willing to put up with it for the best of both input worlds.

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Some thoughts for the future:
- I wouldn't be surprised if in the next generation or two of phones we saw phones w/ a slide-out second screen instead of a slide out keyboard, where the OS automatically moved the keyboard to the second screen in typing applications.
- In Korean this probably won't be as much of a problem due to the uniquely fast method of inputting the Hangul alphabet on a feature phone keyboard

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The Problem w/ Attacking 'Fair and Balanced'

Everybody thinks that they, personally, are fair and balanced.  People who don't are exceptionally intellectual and/or reflective.  Don't believe me?  Try telling a friend that you think that they are unfair and judgmental.  See how far you get.

Therefore it's logical that when someone hears an opinion that they agree with, they will most likely think that it to is fair and balanced, and likewise whomever said it.  Otherwise the cognitive dissonance in holding said opinion would be too great.

And herein lies the problem with the complaints that liberals make about Fox News claiming to be Fair and Balanced: they're preaching to the choir.  Only people who disagree with Fox News will disagree w/ their slogan, while people who like Fox are going to defend them.

And I say this as one who tends towards the liberal and thinks Fox News is full of sh!t.

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Btw if you think the current media situation is untenable and represents the demise of democracy as we know it, you'd do well to read this:  http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/10/26/2009-10-26_unbalanced_even_for_abe.html. I'd say we're slightly better off now from a media perspective and that our democracy has survived just fine in the last 150 years ...

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