Missing Mary Road

so a very jerry mcguirish type email has leaked out on the web from brad garlinghouse, a senior VP at Yahoo!. he’s written up something that’s been termed the peanut butter memo and it is somehow managed to roam around the web and show up in my feeds. techcrunch has the low down.

The document is a lighting rod, and Garlinghouse must have known of the high risk of it being made public. However, the document is so critical of current leadership at Yahoo that it was clearly not written to be voluntarily leaked. This is Yahoo’s dirty laundry spread all over the world for everyone to see, and it voices a frustration that suggests CEO Terry Semel’s chief lieutenants are restless and frustrated.

I am fortunate to have been a part of dramatic change for the Company. And our successes speak for themselves. More users than ever, more engaging than ever and more profitable than ever!

I proudly bleed purple and, yellow everyday! And like so many people here, I love this company

But all is not well. Last Thursday’s NY Times article was a blessing in the disguise of a painful public flogging. While it lacked accurate details, its conclusions rang true, and thus was a much needed wake up call. But also a call to action. A clear statement with which I, and far too many Yahoo’s, agreed. And thankfully a reminder. A reminder that the measure of any person is not in how many times he or she falls down – but rather the spirit and resolve used to get back up. The same is now true of our Company.

It’s time for us to get back up.

click here to read the whole thing in it’s entirety. must’ve taken balls to write up.

eWEEK reports that Bill Gates told PBS talk show host Charlie Rose and a Stanford University audience at TechNet Wednesday that ‘We’re at the beginning of something important again’ in the development of technology — just as in the 1980s with the advent of the PC. He also discussed the growing Microsoft-Google competition, world health issues, how to give lots of money away to the benefit of mankind, and whether he’ll return to Harvard to finish his studies.” From the article: “On whether there’s another idea today that is as powerful as the idea of the personal computer in the 1970s: ‘If I knew medicine like I do computers, I would like to be able to control the [human] immune system, to fight against the onset of disease on a world level … but I think the idea of the PC still would have topped that.

via slashdot.

last year i blogged quite a bit about a company called riya. personal disclaimer, one of the senior management staff is a very good friend of mine.
they have managed to come a long way from facial recognition and the likes. funny i use the word like there, because they just launched an entirely new website called Like.com, using the same recognition technology they used for faces and bringing technology and shopping together a whole new level.

they also got reviewed very well exclusively by the wall street journal. with the technology that they have, you can browse through images for shopping that you may wish to do, find a product, do similarity searches for colour, patterns, price and brands for articles ranging from watches to handbags to shoes to jewellery with hundreds of vendors.

personally i had a bit of an issue with the sorting capabilities but i’m sure that sort of thing can be tweaked over time. the technology behind it is fabulous and my wife seems to love it. she spent about ten minutes on it and said that she would definitely use it, specifically because as a shopper, the amount of time spent on finding an item in store for colour, pattern and looks is greatly reduced with this website and if that convenience offered takes a bit of a hit in shipping, then it’s well worth the reduced effort not spent in trying to find the actual item you want.

i hope there will be canadian vendors on there as well soon.

give it a try and see how you like it. be sure to post feedback and reviews here.

before i end this post, i also have to mention that riya and like.com are both run by a fascinating team of people and one of the things that impresses me the most about it is that they are one of the most transparent companies that i have seen operating. the CEO of the company regularly updates his blog about the company and what his problems are and how he is planning on solving them. and i give him due credit for that.

how many times in a day do you see these logo’s?

see if you can guess the right ones.

Meet Peter. Peter is a 79-year-old English retiree. Back in WW II he served as a radar technician. He is now an international star.One year ago, this would not have been possible, but the world has changed. In the past 12 months, thousands of ordinary people have become famous. Famous people have been embarrassed. Huge sums of money have changed hands. Lots and lots of Mentos have been dropped into Diet Coke. The rules are different now, and one website changed them: YouTube.

It’s been an interesting year in technology. Nintendo invented a video game you control with a magic wand. A new kind of car traveled 3,145 miles on a single gallon of gas. A robot learned to ride a bike. Somebody came up with a nanofabric umbrella that doesn’t stay wet. But only YouTube created a new way for millions of people to entertain, educate, shock, rock and grok one another on a scale we’ve never seen before. That’s why it’s Time’s Invention of the Year for 2006.

But if YouTube is the Invention of the Year, who exactly invented it?

before google came around, the only other funny six letter word with two g’s and two o’s was googly. now google has taken that role, and taken it well. and the word is on everyones lip and searching (on google.com) is now referred to as googling. the google blog explains the legal problems that this stirs up and how you can google someone, and how you can’t.