TreeWorks Blog

The new MTV.com website

It is obviously some people worked hard to make it and some are still working to maintain it.
It’s just rarely have I seen a website that lodges a so fierce civil war. Meaning that all that beautifully colored content is fighting for my attention. I rephrase: is trampling for mt attention. From the smallest boxes to the video player that start playing by themselves, they are climbing each other’s heads, they are spitting, swearing and they are calling me on a thousands voices, with a thousands offers, each hoping it will stop for a moment my eyes. I feel as if I were passing a tunnel of Arabian sellers that have seen my dollars out of my jeans’ pocket.
And I don’t know where to look anymore and what to do, and I forgot why I had came here and I want to leave.
It’s just that my computer answers slowly the commands, because this website sucks up all my resources. Help!

Oh, before I forget… It also has a little animated intro. Very retro…

I was reading this thing on CNN about the name confusion between YouTube and Utube, the latter being the website of a pipe producer. After taking a look on Utube.com what do I see on the upper side, besides very elegant integrated into the corporate design:
————–
Free Ringtones Shakira Dating Black Jack Casino Games Car Stuff Cheap Trip
Sprint Ringtones Cruise Vacation Poker Concerts Online School Dating Mp3 Ringtones
Verizon Ringtones Ringtones Personals Louis Vuitton Slot Machines Shoes Film School
Cingular Ringtones Extreme Travel Gambling Snowboarding Nissan Cars Tai Chi MORE >>>
————–
Pay-per-click links for the most interesting products for the YouTube generation.
A new revenue stream. And since there are a lot of absent-minded on this world, I bet it is not at all neglectful.

I admit I have always liked combinations. Commutations, arrangements and pure mathematical stuff. If you feel like reading there is more on my personal blog: A puerile-aesthetics theory of the permutational diversity for me (in Romanian).

I spent 40 minutes yesterday reading ads invented with TheAdGenerator. I came across this thing on TechCrunch. A kid’s degree’s project. One takes semantic structures used in ads of our days, places the values of the moment, decorates it with pics taken from Flickr – chosen based on the similar tags and one has the ad. Now honestly speaking, they are not all good, but at least 100 per minute may be generated (that depends also on the connection). Can a copyrighter brag with such a prolificity?

What does that have to do with what we are doing? Well, first of all there is a nice example of algorithmic of what may seem indefinable – human creativity at work. Of course, human creativity means much more in this area – coherent strategy, positioning etc, but we can imagine that after these have been defined, a computer can elaborate 1000 propositions using the brand values selected, from which the discussion can start.

Second of all, it is a clear example of commodity brought by the technology – which before seemed a very rare thing can now be transformed into a routine action. And then you have to come up with a new secret sauce and other twenty condiments. Luckily Gödel proved that there are non-algorithmic zones of mathematics. When it will all be algorithmised, we should start inventing new theorems. BTW, a pretty cool stuff about the “mathematical ideas mining” is in Greg Egan’s Diaspora. Genial author! A must read for info geeks.

PS. There is also a blog of the generators. And there is not much time left before a generator of generators appears. Wait, can it be invented a generator of foods, for instance? Select different ingredients and random condiments, after a table of similarities, of taste-associations etc and then generate a finite number of steps (thermical treatments, blending, chopping, boiling, grilling, freezing) and there you have the finite product. With three “solution horizons”: edible dish, tasty dish and divine dish.

I told to myself we should launch a blog about the online (together with the colleagues, but after testing a little the market, together with other bloggers seems a good initiative too; let’s see if it will sustain itself by interesting content).

It will be more than a collaborative blog: an open-source! Meaning everybody who knows online (from .ro or .com/.net) may write their opinions, announce things and so on. Of course, not exactly like “the well-known company X, with a galactic knowhow has just launched the product that will conquer google/yahoo/microsoft and will change the paradigm in web 999.0″ unless it is really like this :))

But enough already with the introduction! The blog is here:

GANDESTE.NET

For the moment it only contains daily sum-ups of the most important pieces of news, plus a few opinions of Livia (who is the mother of blog ), but we are hoping to fill it with tones of stuff on the long road.

So who’s in?

By the way, who feels like answering the questionnaire but is not on the initially list, is free to do so. And sorry for the omission.

* “gandeste” means “think” in Romanian and the blog will be also written in Romanian.

It may be (very) old news for some, but I still can’t help it. Now take a look at what a quality add means: you take a super premium product, an icon (James Brown), an in fashion actor  (Clive Owen), an emblematic bastard (Garry Oldman) and a new-wave director (Tony Scot). You add a serious budget, give them almost ten minutes while they can do anything, adding the humor; let’s not forget the humor.

The result: BMW Short Movie

The introduction of advertising in the high-value content is the future. The ad break is dead. Or almost. Of course, this kind of things with an extraordinary viral potential can be sustained only by mega brands. That when we’re talking superstars. But there has to be other cheaper ways of generating quality content, don’t they? Video websites prove it every day.

The series is called The Hire and the 8 movies have been produces in 2001-2002 with a lot of actors and very well-known directors (details). I am convinced that broadband and transferring entertainment to IP will get more and more similar initiatives.

2006 has just passe. It was the year of the Rooster blog, like the Chinese would say. Now there comes next the year of the iVideo dragoon. And maybe the year of the Wee Monkey, on the entertainment side.

Actually, let’s wait and see the surprises from Apple in January. I would be tented by a new mobile phone, but I am a little skeptical on this side: too many different standards (GSM, CDMA, DoCoMo), entire areas where phones are sold through carriers (in Japan they don’t even have the name of the producer on them), the market much more mature compared to the one of the mp3 players. But I am skipping the point.

I wish you a very cool year. And may you have time for you. I was thinking these days that because of the hurry it seems that even our joys and sorrows are superficial.

So have fun, people. It’s all about fun, isn’t it? Speaking of that, who feels like going to the Genesis concert in Budapest in June?

And do not forget: People don’t buy drills because they need drills; they do it because they need holes. It’s not about building a perfect drill.

The first 15 Romanian banks, having 89.5% of the market, got an average of 64.73 points for online presence (the maximum being 100).

Who is offering a lot of information, who has RSS Feed, who proposes a fidelity package for the young generation, who has a newsletter, who’s the one with most pages, who has mobile banking, who gives dictionary or tutorials? We arrived at the conclusion that BRD has the best online presence.

The things that propelled some banks up to the first places can be read not only here, but also in the press: Banii Nostri, Bank News and Cotidianul.

I took a look at the previous post and I realized that it can also be read in the hype/firemen-ish code. Behold Grid Computing!

Look at this paragraph from (the famous, but too little read) What is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly:

Operations must become a core competency. Google’s or Yahoo!’s expertise in product development must be matched by an expertise in daily operations. So fundamental is the shift from software as artifact to software as service that the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis. Google must continuously crawl the web and update its indices, continuously filter out link spam and other attempts to influence its results, continuously and dynamically respond to hundreds of millions of asynchronous user queries, simultaneously matching them with context-appropriate advertisements. It’s no accident that Google’s system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even more closely guarded secrets than their search algorithms. Google’s success at automating these processes is a key part of their cost advantage over competitors.

It’s also no accident that scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and now Ruby, play such a large role at web 2.0 companies. Perl was famously described by Hassan Schroeder, Sun’s first webmaster, as “the duct tape of the internet.” Dynamic languages (often called scripting languages and looked down on by the software engineers of the era of software artifacts) are the tool of choice for system and network administrators, as well as application developers building dynamic systems that require constant change.

If we admit that the phase of software as an artifact has passed away and its place has been taken by the software as a service, is obviously that on the hardware side more-more flexibility is needed. Practically, this grid computing thing does exactly this: includes the hardware into the application.

We are now working at a project for upgrading some systems in the grid computing paradigm. This paradigm goes really well with the web 2.0 philosophy. For instance, Google got to top at the same time as the wave of computing as commodity. That was the moment when the cost of the usual hardware got to be so low that, by placing them together,it got to replace the supercomputers. And maybe the most important technological advantage of Google is the big capacity of storing/processing plus high availability: that being the Google OS. The ensemble of computers from data centers plus the software that coordinates the leviathan.

On the other side this advantage is kind of passing. We now have grid computing. For which the type of hard you are placing is no longer important. The most known grid service is from Amazon (Elastic), but there are others too. The idea is that every smart little firm or a group of smart kids can now do cool stuff and scale the resources in the mean time with the success. As you probably know the big problem is that of scaling at big numbers of requests/users/processed data. Of course, the problems of grinding big numbers do not completely disappear.

But I should not drag it out: the idea is that in times in which the power of computing will be delivered just like electric power, the innovative idea and its execution are going to count more. You do not have to think at the costs of a hydro power station until you get with the workshop at the dimensions of a big factory and you want to reduce the operation costs.

I’ve been at Netoo #3 yesterday. It was cool. We’ve talked about corporate blogs.

My point as the representative of a very custom services firm was that blogs have a signaling role and an important part in the human relations.They prepare the ground for discussion and establish the value compatibility with prospects.

What are the tools we use here at TW?

1. Knowledge base - Very important. Daily use. Based on wiki. We place there all the cool stuff we discover. But also cabs phone numbers. And work procedures. And documents. And standard emails. And working rules. It is cool that one can separate everything on name spaces, categories, subcategories. And that you can give full access to everybody without fearing that a document might be deleted. Because you can see the history of the document. And if you want you might use it for discussion on a certain subject.

2. Time/project tracking - A customed services firm counts the taxed hours. And calculates the progress of a project. And when the clients are stable ones and the evaluations of costs are made at the end of the month it is important to offer them a nice tracking and not, like they do in some restaurants, a piece of paper saying “15 persons table - 7 millions”. And it is good for the company too. Because one can calculate efficiencies, peoples’ occupying scale, client’s profitability, history of the activity of a team member or a department. We did this thing ourselves. And maybe we will also launch it next year as a product. It really makes sense.

3. CRM - We also did our mini-CRM. Unfortunately, we do not use too often. Probably because the CRM works in companies with many clients and with a relatively reduced value. In retail, for instance. Anyway, maybe we go public with this one too.

I now it has a cool function for monitoring the interaction of the user with the website. Meaning, if you send an email to someone, you can find out if it has been opened, how many times, if it has been forwarded, place some cookies and it will tell you if it has been re-opened, if the person entered the website, how many times and when. This works out fine for filtering the prospects. For example, you are a company that sells automobiles, you have a clients database, you send everyone an email to announce a new model. Then you can see who grabs the bite: who enters the website, who returns on the website, who checks out the prices. Who forwards the email and whether the persons who got the forwarded message enter the site. After that you can choose the most promising prospects. Offer them a test ride or some discounts.

4. Blog - Because we want to tell what we are doing here, how we see the things in this industry and the ideas that come our mind. Keep in contact with our clients. And bring new ones. Go out for a beer with them and discuss things. Because in big long term project, the relationship really counts. Maybe most of all things.