Posted by jason@kottke.org on under pepsi logo, billis, sime, time effort, back to the future, pepsi, coca cola, 10 years, decades, feelings, colors, logos | 
What do I think about the new Pepsi logo? Eh. Companies spend way too much time, effort, and money building up feelings about logos -- like decades and billions of dollars -- and then they just go and change it all. Of course the new logo and colors are similar to the old ones and it's variations on a theme but the new designs feel like someone's idea of what packaging is going to look like 10 years from now, an approach that never seems to work out well (see Back to the Future II). Coca-Cola had such success refreshing their brand with a simple take on their classic look and logo, why can't Pepsi do the same with this classic look?
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Tagi: pepsi logo, billis, sime, time effort, back to the future, pepsi, coca cola, 10 years, decades, feelings, colors, logos
Posted by jason@kottke.org on under pepsi logo, billis, sime, time effort, back to the future, pepsi, coca cola, 10 years, decades, feelings, colors, logos |
What do I think about the new Pepsi logo? Eh. Companies spend way too much time, effort, and money building up feelings about logos -- like decades and billions of dollars -- and then they just go and change it all. Of course the new logo and colors are similar to the old ones and it's variations on a theme but the new designs feel like someone's idea of what packaging is going to look like 10 years from now, an approach that never seems to work out well (see Back to the Future II). Coca-Cola had such success refreshing their brand with a simple take on their classic look and logo, why can't Pepsi do the same with this classic look?
(
link)
Tagi: pepsi logo, billis, sime, time effort, back to the future, pepsi, coca cola, 10 years, decades, feelings, colors, logos
Posted by Jason Kottke on under philosopher ludwig wittgenstein, ludwig wittgenstein, pictures of puppies, dogs and puppies, pictures of dogs, steven levy, capital of arkansas, search algorithm, billis, google, baseball games, bio warfare, singhal, pooches, millis, frt, hot dog, boiling |
Steven Levy on how Google's search algorithm has changed over the years.
Take, for instance, the way Google's engine learns which words are synonyms. "We discovered a nifty thing very early on," Singhal says. "People change words in their queries. So someone would say, 'pictures of dogs,' and then they'd say, 'pictures of puppies.' So that told us that maybe 'dogs' and 'puppies' were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it's hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance."
But there were obstacles. Google's synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. "Hot dog" would be found in searches that also contained "bread" and "mustard" and "baseball games" -- not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what "hot dog" -- and millions of other terms -- meant. "Today, if you type 'Gandhi bio,' we know that bio means biography," Singhal says. "And if you type 'bio warfare,' it means biological."
Or in simpler terms, here's a snippet of a conversation that Google might have with itself:
A rock is a rock. It's also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it "rokc" and it's still a rock. But put "little" in front of it and it's the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around.
Tags: Google PageRank search Steven Levy
Tagi: philosopher ludwig wittgenstein, ludwig wittgenstein, pictures of puppies, dogs and puppies, pictures of dogs, steven levy, capital of arkansas, search algorithm, billis, google, baseball games, bio warfare, singhal, pooches, millis, frt, hot dog, boiling
Posted by on under encyclopaedia britannica, gigantic life, mass audiences, system productivity, facebook, billis, google, material inputs, slow pace, web savvy, active web, millis, comex, scarce resources, naught, biodiversity, mass media, dinosaurs, abundance, broadcaster |
John Naughton's feature in today's Observer, "The internet: Everything you ever need to know," is a fantastic read and a marvel of economy, managing to pack nine very big ideas into 15 minutes' reading. This is the kind of primer you want to slide under your boss's door. 4 THINK ECOLOGY, NOT ECONOMICS As an analytical framework, economics can come unstuck when dealing with the net. Because while economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, the online world is distinguished by abundance. Similarly, ecology (the study of natural systems) specialises in abundance, and it can be useful to look at what's happening in the media through the eyes of an ecologist. Since the web went mainstream in 1993, our media "ecosystem", if you like, has become immeasurably more complex. The old, industrialised, mass-media ecosystem was characterised by declining rates of growth; relatively small numbers of powerful, profitable, slow-moving publishers and broadcasters; mass audiences consisting mainly of passive consumers of centrally produced content; relatively few communication channels, and a slow pace of change. The new ecosystem is expanding rapidly: it has millions of publishers; billions of active, web-savvy, highly informed readers, listeners and viewers; innumerable communication channels, and a dizzying rate of change. To an ecologist, this looks like an ecosystem whose biodiversity has expanded radically. It's as if a world in which large organisms like dinosaurs (think Time Warner, Encyclopaedia Britannica) had trudged slowly across the landscape exchanging information in large, discrete units, but life was now morphing into an ecosystem in which billions of smaller species consume, transform, aggregate or break down and exchange information goods in much smaller units - and in which new gigantic life-forms (think Google, Facebook) are emerging. In the natural world, increased biodiversity is closely correlated with higher whole-system productivity - ie the rate at which energy and material inputs are translated into growth. Could it be that this is also happening in the information sphere? And if it is, who will benefit in the long term? The internet: Everything you ever need to know Future of news and business New York Times headline writer allergic to the word "liar" - Boing ... Britain's Business Secretary wants to turn the nation's back on ......
Tagi: encyclopaedia britannica, gigantic life, mass audiences, system productivity, facebook, billis, google, material inputs, slow pace, web savvy, active web, millis, comex, scarce resources, naught, biodiversity, mass media, dinosaurs, abundance, broadcaster
Posted by on under rich skrenta, venture investors, billis, secd, cier, search market, google, cofounder, beta testers, startups, launch, milli, market share, topix, entrepreneur, ace, few days, ceo, blekko, angel |
It takes a crazier than average entrepreneur to go after the search market. There's an entrenched player, Google, with 65% market share. Google is so powerful the second player, Yahoo, just bailed out of the market. And third place Microsoft is throwing billions of dollars around just to get in the game. We've seen Wikia, Cuil and other well backed startups try and fail at search. Now
Blekko is preparing to launch. Will they find success where everyone else has failed? They've been working on Blekko for 2.5 years now - we
first covered them in January 2008. Cofounder and CEO
Rich Skrenta had just left his previous company, Topix. Blekko has raised three rounds of financing since then, totaling
$20 million, from some of the most respected angel and venture investors in Silicon Valley. Blekko remain in private alpha, although I've had the chance to test the engine over the last few days. They will shortly begin letting a few beta testers onto the site, and a full launch will happen later this summer.
Tagi: rich skrenta, venture investors, billis, secd, cier, search market, google, cofounder, beta testers, startups, launch, milli, market share, topix, entrepreneur, ace, few days, ceo, blekko, angel
