Productification

Making use of LifeStream and Microblogging in Local Search

All of us are creating fountains of ambient data, from our phones, our web surfing, our offline purchasing, our interactions with tollbooths, you name it. Combine that ambient data (the imprint we leave on the digital world from our actions) with declarative data (what we proactively say we are doing right now) and you’ve got a major, delicious, wonderful, massive search problem, er, opportunity

Again from John’s post, applying the above to the Local Search industry, there is a huge opportunity for companies to incorporate lifestreaming and microblogging in their existing system. Currently, sites like YellowPages.com, CitySearch, Yelp, etc are focused on reviews and ratings left explicitly by their users. But why not aggregate the updates from my social network about the restaurant I am looking at. Web Publishers have started doing this per topic, look at HuffingtonPost topic pages and you’ll see realtime conversations about that topic (summize widget).

So what’s stopping the local guys from innovating here?

Search on conversations

Very soon, we will be able to ask Search a very basic and extraordinarily important question that I can best summarize as this: What are people saying about (my query) right now?

John Battelle wrote a post where he talks about a new evolution of Search, where the system would return everything that people are saying about the “topic” of your search. A search engine that can let you search the conversations that are happening on the web - realtime. A search engine that can inform you about interactions of your social network with what you are searching for (e.g. Canon EOS camera).

Where is that Search engine? Is it an extension of BackType or much more than that?

Solr 1.3 comes with Search enhancements

Grant Ingersoll has published a new article on IBM developer works that talks about new features in Solr 1.3.

1. “Did you mean” Spellchecking
2. Finding similar pages (More like this)
3. Editorial results placement - Ability to specify that a particular document (or documents) appear at a particular place in the search results.
4. Distributed Search - Solr adds distributed search capabilities that has the ability to scale the index size by spliting up the documents across several machines (shards)
5. Performance Gains - ~5x improvement in indexing speed

Solr is starting to get more mature as it starts adding feature / functionality that modern information access applications need. I have spent a lot of time integrating and enhancing product offerings that used Lucene as the underlying engine to provide search. Now, it’s great to see Solr project moving forward with some thrust.

Companies that use Lucene in their applications and products should definitely start evalutaing Solr and how they can take advantage of it.

Microsoft BizSpark - another tool in Entrepreneur’s belt

Microsoft announced today an initiative that offers startups, software and services that helps them get off the ground quickly.

The program targets early stage software startups, with resources including access to Microsoft platform software and development tools with no upfront costs. The program will also provide access to technical support and marketing visibility from Microsoft, as well as support through a select group of network partners – industry associations, government agencies, university incubators and investors – chartered with advancing entrepreneurialism.

For a startup to be eligible for the program, it must fulfill these criteria:

1. It’s a privately held company

2. It has been in business for less than 3 years

3. Generates less than $1 million per year in revenue

4. Has to be a software startup

What do they get from it?

a. Software along with Licenses for development (Windows, Visual Studio, Office, etc)

b. Access to Azure - Microsoft’s Cloud Computing platform

Microsoft’s announcement encourages innovation. There are already a gazzillion things that entrepreneurs have to do to create a successful business out of an idea - at least infrastructure hurdles can be removed out of that process.

The bigger question is (as pointed out here and here) - Will this initiative help change the mindset of entrepreneurs and have them look at Microsoft Technologies for their business?

Scriptify your Django deployments using Fabric

Anyone who has worked on a decent size product where Django is serving as the web front, understands how monotonous the update / deployment procedure gets. Especially, when you have more than a couple of servers serving your user base. And if you are one of the companies who have embraced the cloud computing platform (Amazon Web Services), then you already have an appreciation for the problem.

Fabric is one such tool that helps in solving that problem.

Fabric is a tool that, at its core, logs into a number of hosts with SSH, and executes a set of commands, and possibly uploads or downloads files.

Check out Will Larsen’s post on how you can use Fabric. He has done a great job of explaining it.

Gathering and Managing Customer Feedback with UserVoice

In the current software arena, more and more companies are moving towards SaaS (Software as a Service) model where the application is hosted as a service provided to customers over the Internet. For some companies moving to a SaaS offering also implies leaving behind the traditional methods of acquiring new customers, maintaining and listening to existing customers.

When a product is offered as a service over the net, users from anywhere can become customers and it becomes a challenge to individually get feedback from these customers. No longer it is economical and practical to meet face to face with customers and understand a.) why they are using the service and b) how can the product be shaped to meet the market’s needs.

How does a company listen to it’s customer and incorporate that feedback into the product development process as well as keeps it’s customers informed?

There are conventional methods like email, forums and survey forms. These methods require significant effort in collecting, organizing and presenting information coming from various sources.

Another school of thought proposes to read the requests and throw them away. The argument here is that the most important requests / suggestions will keep popping up and those (along with your product vision) will be the guiding mechanism for product enhancements.

Gathering feedback and collecting that feedback is very important to product organizations. The biggest payback of collecting user feedback becomes evident during the product discovery phase. This data help executives makes an informed decision as to which product to pursue and why, thus bringing products to market that their customers would love to use.

Recently, I came across a service, UserVoice that provides a consumer feedback utility for communicating with customers. UserVoice presents a very simple interface to allow users leave feedback and suggestions. The model seems very similar to Digg, where users either create a new request or vote for an existing request. The feedback is organized by popularity, where requests with higher votes bubble up. It’s a simple concept, but delivered in a very intuitive and effective way.

UserVoice reduces request redundancy by providing matches of existing requests as users type in the feedback box. In addition every user is given a fixed number of votes (they call it weights) they can use, that makes users wisely use their allocated votes. The votes get recycled as the company marks requests as completed. Users can also get more votes by providing their demographic information.

Overall, it seems a very simple and effective way to gather and record feedback, requests and suggestions from customers.