Category: Fail

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How movies and television (almost) ruined my experience of traveling to American cities

In my life, I've traveled to two American cities on different occasions: New York and San Francisco. When I got there, a funny thing happened - it was nothing like I expected. Actually, it was a total buzzkill! I was filled with great expectations, but the cities displayed themselves in the plainest way possible. I can't believe how ridiculously common everything looked! When you travel to exotic places like Asia or Africa, you're in for a bit of a culture shock, and that's already fascinating enough. But cities in the United States, well, they're not that different from European cities, we're part of the same civilization anyways. Just cities like any other.

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written 6:08 CET on chronolog
2797 views   •   1 like   •   Like   •   
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Did Google just admit Apple's Siri is the future of search?

I don't know if you saw The evolution of Google search video, which they've published a few days ago. You should, it's a cool movie, portraying the history of search and Google's vision of its future. But something went wrong. One of the punchlines of the video was a story from one of the engineers, who said that next-generation search engines will be able to answer complex questions such as the following:

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written 16:21 CET on chronolog
6135 views   •   1 like   •   Like   •   
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Facebook vs. Twitter, Part 3: The phase of unification

I started writing about Facebook and Twitter because I saw these two services as the most impressive players of the social age. I received a lot of comments about the two of them not being comparable, which I disagree. They are the biggest global Web 2.0 platforms (LinkedIn successfully went public and has a lot of users, but it's hardly a platform) and two of the ten most visited websites in the world. They are social trend-setters, both super advanced on technical and conceptual levels. They are a lot, but with the latest sets of patches, they are also becoming a lot alike.

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written 9:22 CET on chronolog
2792 views   •   1 like   •   Like   •   
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Can you believe Watson got the question about Slovenia wrong on Jeopardy?

Slovenia made it to the spotlight again, for the first time after the soccer world cup (when Slovenia was trending topic on Twitter and top search on Google). This time, it happened because IBM's supercomputer Watson competed against human champions in the famous TV show Jeopardy. IBM's computers are known to destroy people in various challenges, Deep Blue beat the world champion Garry Kasparov in a chess tournament in 1997. But chess is simple for computers to play, because it is pure logic and mathematics – the capability of a player is determined by the number of operations and actions it can calculate in advance. But a quiz is a totally different story, where the biggest challenge is semantics – understanding the meaning of words.

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written 8:33 CET on chronolog
4159 views   •   2 likes   •   Like   •   
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Windows-branded computers on TV. Entering a new market or product placement fail?

Lately I've been noticing a lot of television shows that used computers with a Windows logo on their back. Classic product placement, where advertising blends with an event, movie or a TV show. The master of product placement in the mentioned segment is currently Apple, who also has suitable products for most occasions – beautiful and recognizable laptop and desktop computers. But Microsoft doesn't make computers at all. It does make some hardware (Xbox, Zune), but its focus is mostly on software (and lately on consumer electronics), so why the hell would they want to advertise something that doesn't even exist? Have they lost their mind or are they entering yet another market?

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written 19:02 CET on chronolog
5165 views   •   7 comments  •   Like   •   
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Google 2.0, take infinity: Google Me

The past few months have been loaded with expectations and speculations about the new social service from Google that will be introduced soon: Google Me. Facebook is currently dominating the social market, with 500 million registered users and an expected 2 billion dollars of revenue in 2010. It's satellites, mostly in the form of social gaming providers, are also gaining momentum, e.g. Zynga, the most successful of the pack, could generate $500 million in revenue this year. Even though Google's revenue is still much much greater, more than $20 billion a year to be exact, this does not change the fact the future of the World Wide Web lies in social – and Google obviously wants to be a part of that.

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written 19:17 CET on chronolog
2234 views   •   3 likes   •   7 comments  •   Like   •   
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The Web is going rogue. The Web is going mainstream.

Times are changing, and the World Wide Web isn't any different. You've probably already noticed your mother on Facebook and it's not too hard to understand that interests of specific generations can be a bit different. The same goes for young people, who are obviously growing up in a world of their own, a confusing world overwhelmed with infinite amounts of information.

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written 18:16 CET on chronolog
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