IDEA #60 - Video Search from the Audio
May 31, 2007 | 5 Comments
I’m assuming this has to be happening somewhere. Basically, there should be a video search engine that uses speech-to-text technology (which isn’t perfect, but even if it’s 90% right, that’s better than nothing) and starts indexing videos based on what is being said in the audio. So the software would have to listen/watch every video it’s indexing — which could be a very time consuming task, given the amount of video content out there these days.
Pluggd is doing this for podcasts, so it seems it’d be fairly easy to do this for videos. It’s really neat technology — shows a heatmap in the podcast based on the keyword you’re searching for (so that you can see where in the podcast that topic is being spoken about). My only reservations are what the terms of service are on the video websites.
You could also have this technology see if it recognizes any text or images in the video — thus it might notice a picture of an apple, or a logo, or text that says something.
One problem with this search is that the video might be a comedy, but there’s no way of this technology to know it’s a comedy — it would just know the speech in the audio.
Inspiration for the day: PlentyOfFish.com $500k/mo 1-man operation
May 31, 2007 | 5 Comments
Wow. This is an interview with Marcus Frind. And this is a quick post by him on how he got started (and making $5.63 his first month of AdSense revenues). As of June ‘06, he was making nearly $500k/month in AdSense revenues — and he’s a 1-man operation.
Paris, Britney, Lindsay — Will they ever stop drinking and driving?
May 29, 2007 | 5 Comments
Alright, I will get some new posts up soon with some great web ideas and back to the focus of my blog, but I just read this and needed to vent somewhere. Apparently Lindsay Lohan was arrested this past weekend for suspicion of a DUI — and of course there was cocaine in the car (although the cops say she wasn’t holding it) — anyhow, the case will be arraigned and she may face felony charges. This comes a few months after she was in rehab for drugs.
Meanwhile, Paris Hilton is about to go into jail for her DUI. And months ago, Britney was — well, showing her crotch to the world and getting wasted.
Don’t all these girls make enough money to have a driver every night they want to go out and get wasted? Heck, if the millions aren’t enough, couldn’t they share a driver and have him/her pick two of them up at once, then drop them off at the end of the night? Or, whatever happened to the cabbies?
The real question is, considering the law doesn’t seem to stop them (nor make them care) — will guilt set in once one of them kills someone from one of their future DUI experiences?
And tell me again why companies pay them the big bucks still for endorsement deals, acting deals, etc? Oh right, because America still pays the bucks to see their movies, TV shows, and concerts.
CIHOST are SPAMMERS, UGH!!!
May 25, 2007 | 3 Comments
Update: Only took 3 years, but they finally replied — threatening me to stop defaming them and remove their email addresses. I removed the email addresses, but it’s my first amendment right to speak my mind about my experiences — and they are the ones breaking the law by not being compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Note: This post is only my experience — don’t base a decision on whether to use them or not on my experience, you too can try signing up for their service and see whether you get spammed. Further note: Once CIHOST shows me that they are compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act, I’ll re-update this post and remove this entire update to say, “Update: CIHOST is now CAN-SPAM compliant. Make sure your business is too”.
Lesson to any business owner: Have an unsubscribe link in your email blasts. If someone doesn’t want your mailings, let them go — or else blog posts like this can happen. If you keep mailing them against their will — you’ll no longer be at 0 dissatisfied customers, you’ll be at 1 dissatisfied customer with all of their friends, family, etc, knowing all about their horrid experience with your business.
It is 2007, right? If you were in business for 10 years, which CIHOST apparently has been — wouldn’t you have an unsubscribe link in your spam emails? I have literally been trying for 3 years to get off their spam lists. I have emailed every possible generic email address I could think of.
Right now I have sent them a fax and an email to every person in management at their company — I’m hoping one of the 3 methods I’m assuming for their email syntax is correct. Read more
Shout Out: VERY Funny Ecards Website
May 21, 2007 | 2 Comments
Haha.. I’m laughing my ass off at these clever ecards at someecards.com. Free ecards is a great ad-driven business model (and potentially commissions off real and virtual gifts). Here was one of my past ecards website ideas.
ATTN PEEPING TOMS - Your Own ‘Rear Window’
May 18, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Now you can play the role of James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic movie ‘Rear Window‘ and peak into people’s lives — as they stream them live on the web.
Here is the ultimate Ustream.tv mash-up — prepare to crash your computer 
I feel like my computer just turned into the security room of Target or a casino with all these live cameras.
Joost Deal Plans Exposed - Here’s The Text
May 18, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Wow - great reporting by Pete @ Mashable with this story.
For those that don’t want to copy/paste the hidden stuff from the PDF, here it all is (note: this is all available all over the web — the PDF that is):
March 15 List: Deals we are Pushing to Close
IDEA #59 - Music News and Concert Dates for your Favorite Bands
May 17, 2007 | 11 Comments
This idea is essentially to create a central place you can go and have a completely personalized experience that keeps you informed on music news and concert dates for bands you like — and doesn’t show you the rest (although might give you the option to see news on artists that are similar to the artists you like — which would be culled from Last.fm, because they already do that artist similarity stuff).
Right now I don’t have a central place to see all the news related to music artists/bands that I like. Ditto on when they are coming to my town for a concert (the iConcertCal plugin for iTunes is the closest thing to good for bands I like coming near me to play a concert, but it only taps into what artists are found in my iTunes and it’s a plugin that works in the stand-alone iTunes software).
I have a Last.fm profile — basically the service is an app that runs on my computer and tells their server what music I’m listening to, then Last.fm mines all of that data and stores it — providing me charts/stats on the bands I listen to the most overall, this past week; what songs I’ve listened to the most, etc. It’s a great service and has all that data available in RSS format.
I get my music news from a variety of sources — Pitchfork, VH1, and plenty of music blogs. I’d like any news or blog post that mentions any artist found in my RSS feed (of artists I have ever listened to — or maybe make a threshold of any artist I’ve listened to more than 20 times, to eliminate random artists that I listened to on a whim, or off a soundtrack) to then display in one central screen for me (and provide me an RSS feed of all that news).
I’d like to also see this for concerts — pull in that event/concert data from Last.fm (their event dates are wiki’d by their community, but becoming quite impressive — quite complete), or possibly pull in the dates from MySpace artist pages or Pollstar (although they’ve sued in the past for websites “stealing” their data) — or you can license event data from CelebrityAccess ($30k/yr) or Mojam ($18k/yr).
Right now, band pages on MySpace don’t have a standard format in terms of their URL structure — thus, I’m wondering if someone out there has compiled a giant list that matches up band names (i.e. Pittsburgh DJ “Girl Talk”) with their respective MySpace URL (i.e. ...). That way, you could then grab the full event list for a band (here’s an example events list for the artist Girl Talk) — and then just parse those events. Otherwise, here is an example events list RSS feed from Last.fm.
Monetize this creation much like Last.fm does — ads — new music CD banner ads, apparel, etc — anything for your 13-30 year old demographic.
Oh, and you can display concert tickets for sale/wanted on craigslist (rss search for the artist name in the respective craigslist city subdomain — although looks like they don’t want sites crawling their site like I’m suggesting). Also plugin an affiliate code with listings from eBay and eBay’s Stubhub.
Google Reader - Where’s the Search box?
May 17, 2007 | 19 Comments
Funny observation from Eric Nagel — Google, the company whose name basically means search, doesn’t even have a search box on their Google Reader page. It’d be nice to search for specific keywords in my feeds — or search for something I read 2 weeks ago.
The Largest Social Network In World, Untapped
May 12, 2007 | 8 Comments
I was at Web 2.0 Expo last month in San Fran and during a press interview sit-down session, Tim O’Reilly said something that was a “wow” moment for me — I just had never really thought about it. What he said was that the largest network of social connections are the phone companies.
Think about that — the phone company knows who you call, how often, how long the conversations are … it knows who you text message, how often, etc. From that data, it can start making connections — not only to people, but also to businesses. The data behind the phone companies is vast and untapped — but I think from the outside (you and me), it’s difficult to get access to that kind of data, or become a link between people making phone calls.
Maybe there could be a piece of software that Read more
