Damien Mulley

Salim showed us around Yahoo! Brickhouse and also Yahoo!’s HQ in Sunnyvale (We couldn’t find Buffy anywhere) during Paddy’s Valley and the overall impression I got and I think others got too was that Yahoo! is a people company. They like people more and seem to understand them more than their competitors. When you think of Google, you think of them trying to remove people from every process and replacing them with an algorithm but with Yahoo! they seem to acquire companies and let them be, let them work the way they always work and help them where they can. Delicious and Flickr are fine examples. Owned by Yahoo! though we never really are forced to acknowledge this.

There’s been a lot of change in Yahoo! in the past few months with Jerry Yang coming back in and changing things around and a lot of dead wood has been removed. John Furrier thinks something is big on the way and Techcrunch reported that there could be a cull of 20% on the way. Google however is still giving us the best search experience around and their ad system (which I think is getting worse, not better) is still the best out there. According to the FT blog, the ad revenue generated from Google last quarter was more than Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft‘s ad revenue combined yet Yahoo! properties get more traffic.

Yahoo! to me is the warmer, more friendly, tech company compared to Microsoft and much warmer than the entirely sterile Google. It would make sense to me for Yahoo! to work on all their sites and services that are very people centric. Yahoo! Answers shows how good they can be. There seems to be talk coming out of Yahoo! about them opening up their services. It would be great to see APIs for everything they have and allow people to create clever Mashups and of course give them an option of selling ads on these new services or if these services charge then have Yahoo! work as the merchant for the transactions. John Furrier also thinks they should join Open Social. They should be doing something on the social side and not letting Facebook et al get all the attention. Of all companies and with their mixed bag of offerings, they could do very well on the social side, either by opening up all their services so any social network can tie into them or create a platform for all their services. It seems odd that they are not there yet.

I have a fondness for Yahoo! as when I started surfing the net, they were the kings and it would be nice to see them make some kind of comeback while making the web better for me to traverse. There needs to be competition in the search space and in the ad space, maybe Yahoo! can get things sorted and compete in there.

Fred Wilson is not at all impressed by the iPod Touch and thinks more highly of the standard iPod models. Me, I like the idea of the touch and like the idea more of the iPhone. I bought an iPhone in December in Palo Alto and it was a while before I really started to use it*. Since I started using it though, I’ve really started to like it and it is without exception the best way to experience the Internet on a phone or Internet table type device. Safari and touch screen is a total joy. Over Christmas I also played with the new Nokia N81 and in comparison it’s total junk. So is the N95 and it’s 14+ buttons. I’m not the biggest Apple fan but they’ve kicked the ass of the mobile manufaturers with this and it might make them all cop on and use a bit of imagination and stop letting engineers design the outside and interfaces. I too was sceptical at first about it, especially because of the way you input text, but the more you use it, the better it gets. Because of it’s jailbroken too I can put a hell of a lot of applications on it, that Apple would say no to. Sorry Steve. It’s my phone, let me hack it.

The camera isn’t great but it’s not entirely crap either. Yes the N95 and most other phones have better cameras but for what I want, it does the job. Looking at photos and synching it with the computer too are amazingly easy. Shame it can’t be said for their competitors.

Of course the iPhone I got can’t be software unlocked to get it on the networks over here and I wasn’t going to spend 80 quid more on turbosim to do so. So right now I only use it at home and in hotspot areas to surf the net and everywhere else it’s pretty much just an iPod, though video works so well on it. I watched the latest episode of The Wire on it on the train on Friday. But it seems hope is at hand as someone is after hardware unlocking the version of the iPhone I have and I expect a software unlock to become available soon enough. Happy days. I think it would take off a lot more in Europe if it wasn’t for the insane pricing and contracts that you have to lock yourself into, in order to get it officially working over here. Madness.

*Zaniac actually unboxed the phone for me and helped me jailbreak it. Watch the very excited video he made. Warning, extreme Apple loveathon.

(note as of publishing this, Patrick’s site is down, oops)

Patrick Collison has created an app for the iPhone and with it that stupid debate about laptops in schools and maybe even the broadband in schools debate can be killed off. It will also be the best pubquiz hack ever too. For Patrick has created an offline version of Wikipedia with a search engine sitting on top of it.

Handy if you’re not in a WiFi area which in Ireland is a lot of places. Why not give all the kids one of these instead of a laptop, since it’s an iPod and a phone too? They’ll always have it with them then. 2 Million articles of knowledge right there for them.

I know I’ll find it handy. And not just for pub quizzes. The install file is BIG. 2 gigs big because afterall it is the whole of Wikipedia really, compressed down. Don’t hammer his site too much. 🙂