A few things that you can't do in the official app, but you can do in the Teslabot: (1) voice control - send a voice messages/commands to Teslabot, (2) find out whether your car can go to a destination such as San Francisco with the current charge - Teslabot figures out location of the car, distance to the destination, battery range and answers that question, and also the bot is available from your laptop/desktop.
Agree with the author that academia sometimes focusses on a very narrow band of research topics, which might or might not improve end user experience. Also, agree with the author that personalized news has very interesting NLP+Machine Learning problems.
However, I am not convinced that personalized news is what users wants, and whether users want to discover popular news and articles by serendipity, socially, rather than personalization by algorithms. Further, I think personalized news has very limited opportunity for generating significant revenue.
Netflix focusses on movie/tv-series subscription model (streaming+dvds), and they are laser focussed on improving consumer experience in this area. On the other hand, Apple, Google, Amazon focus on other businesses (hardware, advertising, and e-commerce). That's why I think Netflix will survive, and that's why startups survive and thrive: Focus!
(1) Ability to save and tag tweets with urls (kind of Delicious)
(2) Url content inline with the corresponding tweet
(3) Search over all the tweets you could have seen. In other words, you can search over all the tweets of the people you follow.
“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” -- Steve Jobs. RIP.
With Silk, Amazon will be able to see what webpages Kindle Fire readers are reading, and they can mine that data to figure out which web pages are read together. Based on the pages that are read together, Amazon can build interesting web page recommendation system using collaborative filtering techniques.
I use Pig to write many of my Hadoop Mapreduce jobs and test my Pig script on a small dataset using Pig Grunt. Pig 0.9 has a lot more debug information as well.
Check out another similar clojure library called "MR-Kluj" that you can use to write Hadoop MapReduce jobs in Clojure: https://github.com/cheddar/mr-kluj
Apache Mahout is interesting but I still haven't found a strong need to use it. Most of the time I can sample the data that I process in Hadoop, and use R for training machine learning algorithms.
Does any body know of any large scale data mining use of Apache Mahout?
When a deal appears for a business on Groupon, people buy those deals that day and visit that business later on. That's what I meant by "cash up front".
Yes, I agree with you that barrier to entry is very low. However, Groupon has so many businesses lined up (since they have maximum reach) that Groupon can choose the best deal to offer to customers. That's the advantage Groupon has compared to others.
1. Groupon is bringing offline local businesses online. The same way Google brought small advertisers/small businesses online.
2. Groupon could be a useful way for business to get some cash up front for future customers. That cash may help small businesses expand, instead of taking loans to expand.
3. Groupon cost of small businesses could be useful marketing cost since Groupon deal reaches out to many local customers.
Further, this article itself mentions "Note massive competitors like Google, Facebook, Walmart, Opentable, etc. already doing their own versions of daily half-off deals". As people have said "imitation is the best form of flattery". So many Groupon clones show that there is a demand for such a service from both small businesses and consumer sides.
However, some of the accounting practices of Groupon and the way Groupon used recent investment money seems unusual and have raised a lot of eye-brows.
Nicely written essay. I would say future is hard to predict. People in 1960s predicted about space travel but did not predict mobile devices like iphones that have so much compute power with so many apps with location, touch, social, communication features.
140 characters may not have great technology but can be attributed to bring social revolution in so many places.
Ultimately, need is mother of most of innovations. Need leads to demand, which leads to building new solutions.
Yes, especially when there are diamonds in the rough and you want to follow a few gems and leave the rest. Let us know your suggestions about hackerstream. Thanks!