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Category: Innovation (page 2 of 8)

June 24, 2012

“If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Six years ago Friday, I launched BloodhoundBlog with the words cited in the headline:

In a subsistence culture, the work of the mind is precious and literally unsupportable. We are by now so rich that millions of people can create intellectual resources that they give away, in turn to be remarketed by others. This may or may not work in the long run for companies tapping into and amplifying open-source-like works of the mind. Consider that aggregator software levels the playing field for small players. The interesting thing is what it will do to companies whose entire business model is based on scarcity and hoarding. If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?

I’ve hit that theme again and again over the years: How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free?

Stewart Brand said “information wants to be free”. This has intellectual property implications far beyond ordinary information. But with respect to that ordinary information — news, opinion, fiction, poetry, almost all music, etc. — the war is over. Hoarding lost. The challenge amidst this vast abundance is not getting people to pay for your information — but simply getting them to pay attention to it.

The daily newspaper has no hope whatever of nicking me for fifty cents. The question that will decide if there is even to be a newspaper is, can they hold onto my eyes for as long as fifty seconds? And will someone pay for those eyes in the random hope of piercing my vast indifference to advertising?

It comes down to career advice, I think, for the newspaperati and for all of us: How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free? Maybe not the same work, but so close that any differences become academic. And: If you’re committed to sharing information even in a marketplace where ordinary information is so abundant as to be without monetary value, what are you going to do to make a living?

At Forbes magazine, Susannah Read more

June 13, 2012

Internet savvy Phoenix real estate broker seeks a buyer, a partner, an investor or a job.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A note to the Bloodhounds: I want to come in from the cold. If you know of a biggish Phoenix brokerage that could use my skills and assets, I’d appreciate the referral. –GSS

I own a very small boutique real estate brokerage — good reputation, strong good will, clean books, and colossal internet power — but I am ready to move on to something else. Stripped to the essence, this is what I have to offer:

  • A very strong internet presence consisting of several hundred-thousand web pages on a number of domains. I have several custom-built automated IDX sites, and I can throw 300,000+ backlinks at any web page, raising any web site’s standings in the Search Engine Results Pages virtually overnight.
  • A FlexMLS-based IDX real estate search site that scores on the first page of Google for a number of very-high-value search terms.
  • Me: A sales professional with a deep background in print and internet marketing and strong systems, applications and API programming skills. I built all of the web sites discussed below, and I have a lot of experience building workable IDX/VOW RETS solutions from the FlexMLS database. I have high-level relationships with real estate industry technical professionals and vendors, and I can present comfortably to groups from 50 to 50,000 people.

In short, I have a freight train’s worth of internet power being pulled by a mule-powered real estate business. The interent presence I bring to the table would be of substantially greater benefit to a much larger brokerage. Here is a summary of my internet assets:

  • BloodhoundRealty.com — Main brokerage lead-generation site. It’s built as a WordPress weblog at the top level, but it subsumes thousands of pages, including separate web pages for every community and subdivision in Metropolitan Phoenix. The idea is to capture long-tail searches and upstream them into qualified leads. I have technology, so far not implemented, to effect the same kind of long-tail search-capture for every street address in Metropolitan Phoenix, taking those searches back from the national Realty.bot sites like Zillow.com, Trulia.com and Realtor.com.
  • FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com — The most robust MLS search in Metropolitan Phoenix, and one of the strongest Read more
March 2, 2012

DocuSign graduates: The ultimate signature bot is about to become a full-blown point-of-purchase.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What’s the real difference between a broker and a salesperson? Whatever his or her license status, the broker is one who knows the deal ain’t done until you’ve got the money. Starting in April, DocuSign is going to make a broker’s life a lot easier:

DocuSign’s upcoming April release ushers in a new era for the global standard for eSignature with the introduction of Payment Processing. Once available, you will be able to close the deal and collect the cash with DocuSign in one step to further accelerate transaction times, increase speed to revenue, reduce costs and enhance your customers’ experience.

It’s PayPal, and the charges are plausibly reversible, so it’s not perfect money. But this is document-as-storefront, a whole new way for paper-pusher to sell.

Note to the vendorslut mafia: I gain nothing by chastising you for your unbounded mediocrity, which is why I’ve stopped paying attention entirely to your artifacts of ineptitude. But take careful note: DocuSign knows how to deliver the goods. They are in a constant added-value mode, with the result that no less-motivated competitor can even come close to them. It’s not just the features, it’s how they are implemented — software-as-a-service in both directions, with a REST API coming in the new release.

February 21, 2012

Lunchtime links: Will the robo-signing settlement fail? Will Western Civ collapse to ruins? Who cares? Sheldon Cooper lives!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From good friend of the dawgs, Jim Klein, comes this grim reminder of the times we live in: SurvivalRealty.com.

Todd Zywicki finds the robo-signing settlement unsettling.

But despair you nothing: There is a real-life Sheldon Cooper going to high school in Nevada.

Limited lunchtime? Give it all to the third article. It’s the best read, and the most inspiring. The world runs by itself, but your spirit does not. Feed it wisely.

February 9, 2012

Two years ago, when the iPad was introduced, I said: “Google and MicroSoft can’t even copy genius.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Vide licet:

With the iPad and its closed software universe, has Steve Jobs committed an unforced error — unnecessarily created an obvious opening for Google and MicroSoft to compete?

Today, Google says: “If you throw enough crap at the wall, sooner or later something’s gotta stick.”

Today, Microsoft says: “Pigs will eat anything.”

The revolution is not the technology.

This is the revolution: The consumer is now in charge.

Learn to love it — or get liquidated. PT Barnum’s day in the marketplace is done.

February 6, 2012

Debunking Artificial Intelligence — while programming your computer to be almost as smart as your dog.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Everything you’ve been taught about Artificial Intelligence for your whole life is false. AI researchers are not frauds, I don’t think, but they’re exuberant when they talk to reporters, and the reporters are ignorant, thoughtless and brash. In real life, AI is Siri, which can reliably lead you to the nearest closed-down super-market. In your imagination, AI is C-3PO, who can lecture you on Chinese lithography while clobbering you at backgammon.

This is the truth — and telling the truth about AI is as rash as telling the truth about Anthropogenic Global Warming or abortion, an incitation to a frothy wrath: There is no Artificial Intelligence anywhere — nor will there be any time soon, if ever. This is a case where new theory really is required. The theories currently being deployed in AI research will produce ever-more-competent Siris — which achievements will be hailed as “proof” of Artificial Intelligence — but they will never produce any actual intelligence.

Why? Ontology and teleology, of course.

AI fails because it is not actually attempting to model intelligence but simply to mimic the effects of intelligence. In this respect, AI is a cargo cult, and its argument of “proof” is the same as that of any cargo cult: Post hoc, ergo propter hoc — after this, therefore because of this. If the destination turned out to be a super-market, even if it’s a bankrupt super-market, then Siri is “intelligent.”

Just that much is an error of identification. When you play chess against your iPhone, this is not “man versus machine,” it’s you versus a team of programmers — and they’re cheating, which is how they win. If you could pop out to do 50,000 pre-programmed calculations per move, you’d kick their program’s ass.

It is that error of identification that produces all the absurd AI claims in the popular media: Someone is doing something differently! It must be a miracle! So far, there is nothing in AI that cannot be adequately explained as human ratiocination. The fact that software is written in advance does not mean that the process is driven by anything other than human intelligence. The Read more

February 5, 2012

Building the perfect beast: A round-up of my recent technology posts.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Caveat lector! The words you are about to read are unvetted, unhomogenized and unlicensed. One of my longer-term projects is to write essays on reasons why you should dismiss the things I have to say. I’ve only done two so far: You should dismiss me because I don’t care if you do and because I can see right through you. There are zillions more reasons, whether I get to them or not, but the one that matters most, in this context, is this one:

I am completely without credentials.

That’s a statement I could quibble with, but I don’t want to. There is no limit to the caviling to be found on that road, and I don’t care, anyway. I am writing about tools that could and should exist, and if you want to dismiss what I have to say because I don’t fit your profile of a nerd — so much the worse for you. The world is awash in a billion blends of stupid, and credentialism is hardly the worst of the bunch. Looking outside yourself for your intellectual self-defense is the parent of that error, though, and that one is deadly.

Whatever. I think these ideas are fun. I’m looking at a much bigger picture, philosophically, but the technology I’m talking about here is a way of effecting those larger ideas in everyday life. You might plead for better organization — and, truly, there is a book scattered around in this stuff — but I believe reading these essays will repay your effort.

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There’s more. Here are the essays I wrote about the iPad, at the time of its introduction. Entries #2 and #8 are the best of the bunch, in my opinion.

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That’s a lot of reading, I know, but what else are you going to do with your time — watch football?

February 1, 2012

Q: Your smartphone has just been stolen. What should happen next? A: Your phone should get the cops on the horn and lead them to the thief.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the truth of your life: Your so-called smartphone is pretty damned dumb. For one thing, it’s always interrupting your work with phone calls, wiping out whatever screen you happen to be working on. It does this because Steve Jobs, genius though he was, never quite wrapped his head around the idea of the cell-phone function as just another arrow in the quiver of your smartphone’s capabilities. What you actually want, when your phone rings while you are working at something else, is notice that you can drop everything to take the call — or not — without the phone making that decision for you.

I can do more: There is no reason for caller ID to be as stupid as it is. I want Heidi, of course, a full-blown database look-up when a new caller shows up on my phone. But lacking that, a truly smart smartphone would at least Google the number and display whatever information that search suggests about the caller.

But once we’ve gone that far, we get to an important question: Why is your smartphone shipping phone calls to you as phone calls? Data is data, and there is no longer any hardware or software reason to transmit phone calls by Ma Bell’s antiquated protocols. There may be cost or efficiency reasons, but it remains that a file-server-based “switchboard” could be a whole lot smarter than present-day cell-phone vendors seem to be. A lot of the Constance the Connector ideas would be best implemented on a truly smart phone system — one that pre-manages your calls before anything in your pocket sets off a racket.

But here is an entirely new way of thinking about smartphones, one that lets me solve a problem Jim Klein threw my way way back in the last century: Your phone can manage your online security better than any other means devised so far. With the right hardware and software, your phone, together with Sarah and Constance, can manage all of your financial transactions with perfect security and impenetrable encryption. Your phone can identify you — by way of your Constance profile — to Read more

January 29, 2012

How to solve the video multiplexing problem you didn’t know you had.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I love this news story, an exposition of the Supreme Court exposing its irrelevance:

In an entertaining hour-long episode, Supreme Court justices on Tuesday considered the government’s power to regulate expletives and nudity on the airwaves.

Why is this amusing to me? Because along with many other twentieth-century electromagnetic phenomena, broadcast television is dead.

Every word in that claim is important. “Television” — meaning audio/visual content primarily intended to entertain — is still with us, although it is likely to merge with other forms of on-line content.

But “broadcast television” — TV transmitted over the airwaves, one sender, many recipients — is a dead-letter today, and it will be progressively less important — and progressively less profitable — with every passing year.

The reason is simple: The future of entertainment is iPad-style video:

The iPad is the ultimate perfect television. On-demand. Stop and start at will. Goes with you when mom says you have to go to soccer practice. The iPad is the perfect entertainment-consumption device: Personal, portable, programmable — and infinitely extensible.

You may watch this video content on a device as small as your phone or your wrist-watch or on one as big as your living room wall, but this is the future of video in your life.

Broadcast — one-size-fits-all, limited-choices, isolated in a frozen time-schedule, can’t stop it, can’t rewind it, no easy way to research or cross-reference it, stuck on one very stupid device, hag-ridden with commercials — all of that is dead. It was a kludgey business model when it was the best we could do. By now, it’s a dinosaur — so we should expect it to endure a loud but inescapable death.

Note, too, that your cable company’s very-stupid on-demand service is also headed for the morgue, as are slightly better on-demand services like Netflix. The future of entertainment video is your friendly neighborhood search engine — augmented by the kinds of software services I have been describing lately.

The reality of your life is that you are going to watch what you want, when you want, on whatever device you choose — and you are going to have many more devices to Read more

January 29, 2012

iPad observation #2: Find a bigger dead-pool: The iPad eats everything.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top. This is me, writing just after the introduction of the iPad — two very short years ago. At the time I wrote these essays, every so-called “expert” on the nets was insisting that the iPad was an unforced error. I was right, they were wrong. But I’ve been right about a lot more than I’ve seen in the marketplace so far. Note this, for example: “I hate the remote controls for electronic devices, and one thing we should insist on, going forward, is that every wired device in our lives should be IP-addressable and fully-controllable by internet connection.” It’s interesting to revisit these ideas now, to see where we’ve gotten — and to see how far we still have to come. –GSS

 

Real life at my house: We actually like to watch television, if watching TV means watching DVDs (lately almost entirely Netflix DVDs) or watching selected cable shows. This usually happens very late in the evening, usually when we’re pretty much exhausted.

But: TV at home used to be TV with laptops. Now it’s TV with iPhone. In six months, it will be TV with iPads — or just iPads on the sofa.

Take careful note:

Broadcast television is dead, as is broadcast radio. Let’s free up the bandwidth now. The iPad is the ultimate perfect television. On-demand. Stop and start at will. Goes with you when mom says you have to go to soccer practice. The iPad is the perfect entertainment-consumption device: Personal, portable, programmable — and infinitely extensible.

As was inferable from my first observation in this series of posts, the annual Christmastime frenzy of cheap-shit electronic children’s “educational” toys is dead. Anything that anyone in your home does while laying stomach-down on the carpet will be done on the iPad.

As I pointed out the other day, Microsoft, Amazon and many, many other hi-tech vendors are dead. (I have a quality/integrity argument to make about this, as well, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.)

Despite the iBook store, books are dead. I love literature and I love the drama, but you don’t have to spend seventy-five bucks Read more

January 24, 2012

Google discovers what computing is actually for: “In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Across all products is important. Across all devices is vital.

Drudge and the privacy geeks are going typically apeshit, but Google is playing my tune:

“If you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services,” Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering wrote in a blog post.

How might that work?

For instance, a user who has watched YouTube videos of the Washington Wizards might suddenly see basketball ticket ads appear in his or her Gmail accounts.

That person may also be reminded of a business trip to Washington on Google Calendar and asked whether he or she wants to notify friends who live in the area, information Google would cull from online contacts or its social network Google+.

Hell, yeah! Those are the kinds of jobs I want from Sarah, your software secretary, but I can show you a very cool Constance the Connector connection here, as well.

How about I start a music service that seeks to sell you music that you will probably like and don’t already own. “Don’t already own” is an easy database from iTunes or whatever. But “will probably like” requires analysis — algorithm as art — and that’s what makes my business model work. To you-as-end-user, it feels like I know you, like we’re high-school buddies whose friendship is built around grooving to the same tunes.

How could I do that? Let me see your YouTube history, not just what you picked but how many times your replayed particular songs. Let me see your Amazon.com shopping history — especially the things you come back to again and again but don’t buy. I don’t need to know you. You already know you better than anyone else ever could.

That’s what we’re actually talking about, you collecting facts about yourself for future reference. Like a bad comic, Google can make anything sound dirty, but there is nothing wrong with you getting more of what you want — better, faster and cheaper.

Do you understand? Your fears, assuming they are real, are misplaced. The U.S. Government now has the lawful authority to assassinate you at will in Read more

January 24, 2012

Product idea: Constance the Connector.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s been a few weeks since I started talking about Constance, and since then I’ve come up with a completely different way of thinking about operating systems. There are three players who could profit from my thinking — Apple, Google and Amazon — and I would be more than happy to share my thoughts to the first one of those three who salutes.

Meanwhile, I give you Constance, which is in some ways the logical counterpart to Heidi, the self-maintaining CRM system I started talking about last August. Constance the Connector is a server-based service that maintains your handle — a topic we have discussed before.

So: Here are ways you can know of me:

  • By name
  • By street address
  • By phone number
  • By email address
  • By Twitter handle
  • By social media profile
  • etc.

For now, if you want to address me by one of those means, you have to know the specific proper noun to be used — my actual name or my current email address. You are responsible for maintaining that information, and everyone who wants to make contact with me must do the same redundant and error-prone maintenance.

A Heidi-like CRM can do some of the maintenance by means of assiduous, arduous data-base mining. But if I don’t make my new street address public somewhere, your of-course-I-haven’t-forgotten-about-you greeting card is going to bounce.

There’s more: The way things work now, I have no control over who addresses me or how. I’m not just bitching about spam. I want cold-calling salespeople to go straight to voicemail — and when I have determined that I don’t want to hear from a particular caller again, I want never to hear from that person ever again.

So think of me this way, instead: @gswann. That’s my handle: @gswann. Sending em an email? Send it to @gswann. Want to try to get me on the phone? Dial @gswann. Snailmail? Send it to @gswann, you dinosaur. Want to pull my LinkedIn profile? It’s @gswann.

That much is just the handle idea — but with a twist. What we’re doing with the handle @gswann is sending a request to the Constance server for the current mission-critical contact information associated Read more

January 12, 2012

Paging Sarah: “If there is a lesson in this story, it is to make sure your cell phone is off when attending a concert.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Suppressing your phone’s ringer at the symphony is a Sarah job.

If we start with the presumption that a smartphone/tablet/laptop/desktop operating system, ideally, exists in a sort of client/server symbiosis with servers in the cloud — and hence with all servers in the cloud, by concatenation (that is, by XMLation) — then your phone should be aware of appropriate phone protocol wherever and whenever it might find itself. You should not ever have to tell it not to ring in a concert hall.

I’ll get to Constance when I can, but I don’t think anyone here is all that interested. How do I know? Because the paragraph just above this one describes a revolutionary computing paradigm, one that exists nowhere right now. More fool I. It’s raining soup and not one of us has a spoon.

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January 3, 2012

Product (category) idea: Antoinette the anticipator.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I first thought of the idea of an anticipator as hardware, I kid you not. The early 1980s? Software was dear in those days, but early computer-on-a-chip chips were cheap and abundant. There still would have been a software component to an anticipator, of course, but not much.

Here’s what I thought about then: Anything that could be monitored by signal processing — as, for example, the communication between a micro-computer and its peripheral devices — could have an anticipator in-line, monitoring all the signal traffic back and fourth. By maintaining a probabilistic database of past events, the anticipator could, over time, evolve strategies for anticipating resources likely to be called for in the near future, and, using otherwise dead time on the computer’s data bus, cache that data in advance, eliminating time lost on fetch requests made in real time.

Wow! How kludgey our world used to be! In the bad old days, there were pre-fetch routines built into operating systems, but they were a brute-force solution to a vast array of very small, fussy problems. An anticipator would strive to be optimally efficient and mission critical by dealing only with the specific data most likely to be requested.

An example? If a font required for a document is not stored on your printer, the printer must fetch the outline data from your hard disk. It’s a small job, on its own, but you could maximize your productivity from the printer if those fetch calls in real-time were ameliorated by intelligent pre-fetching. The anticipator could both maintain the most-often used outlines in the printer’s memory as well as anticipating exceptions to the everyday rules — for example, by keeping the boss’s favorite Christmas font on the printer from Thanksgiving through Christmas. That implies real secretarial smarts, but it’s simply probabilistic database mining being perfected over time.

So what about now?

Antoinette the anticipator harkens back to Heidi and Sarah, and to Constance, which I haven’t gotten to yet.

Imagine an anticipator function in Sarah that, when Sarah figures out that you are going to be late for a meeting, sends out all the appropriate notices, all Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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