Links

Why we love rounded corners.

Coloured soap bubbles.

Some interesting ads on Google video: FotoPrix: perfect pictures for an imperfect world. Nike ad in Lisbon. Honda car assembly (a classic). Google Video also has Google Current, which is a newsreel about Google’s top searches. But the find was a 5-hour Google factory tour.

Google may acquire Riya. Riya can recognise faces and lettering in your pictures.

The ultimate irony. Amazon has written an API that invokes humans.

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call – the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this Artificial Artificial Intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

What economists can learn from currency traders.

Bill Gates in a Coca Cola ad. In August 2005, Bill Gates starred in a Coca Cola commercial. He wanders in the halls of Microsoft late one night looking for someone to loan him change for the Coke machine. “I’ll pay you back,” he promises.

Talent wars. The interesting part was the first three paragraphs.

Flying on the Delta Shuttle with Bill Gates 12 years ago, I asked, “What Microsoft competitor worries you most?”

“Goldman Sachs.” I gave Gates a startled look. Was Microsoft about to try the investment banking business? “Software,” he said, “is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war, or we won’t have a future. I don’t worry about Lotus or IBM, because the smartest guys would rather come to work for Microsoft. Our competitors for IQ are investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.”

I spent five days traveling the country with Gates, and he must have talked about IQ a hundred times. Getting the brightest bulbs to work at Microsoft has always been his obsession. It’s paid off. Microsoft does close to $40 billion in sales and has some 60,000 employees. That’s a whopping $650,000-plus of revenue per employee, topping IBM’s sales per employee twofold.

Along comes Google, with its revenue run rate of $6 billion and about 4,000 employees. Google’s sales per employee are $1.5 million, or 2.3 times that of Microsoft. This is like comparing Babe Ruth to Home Run Baker. Google now beats Microsoft in the IQ war.

Film songs by Bombay Jayshree. Vaseegara, Narumugaye and Ondra Renda being my favourites.

Try this: search for any song and listen online.

What Lies Beneath New York.