Kevin’s Blog

There’s a new startup called Jott.

Basically, you call a number, they transcribe what you say and then send it to you in an email. Unfortunately, the messages you leave are transcribed by humans! (privacy, scale issues)

Here’s what Jott’s CEO has to say about it:

jotts are completely anonymized to transcribers. They do not know your account name or other information.

Thanks,
John
CEO, Jott.com

Perhaps they should just reroute calls through Vista’s voice recognition. It’s probably the first widely available voice recognition implementation that’s up to the task.

1. Friday - went eating with Christophe of Google-reimbursement fame. Awesome ancillary activities followed.
   
   2. Today - presented Infomush at Google. Thanks to team SMHACK, Infomush pulled off a quantum leap in clustering quality just as we passed over Google’s door jam. (I also won a game of foosball — only using my good un-technically-broken arm. Of course I took the opportunity to raise he roof for Infomush.)
   
   BTW, SMHACK is our initials backwards: Kevin Chiu, Andy Hou, Michael Skinner.
   
   Hmmm, Christophe also finally learned what Act 2 of Infomush is, at least the first scene of Act 2. Taj helped prod the revelation on by guessing it was “social.” I guess this means we’ll just have to implement it faster than planned.

Many sites that rely on ads as a source of revenue place them in locations that can trick a visitor in to thinking the ad is part of a website intra-link or, in other words, a link to another part of the same site. The thin horizontal Google Ad strip that looks like a navigation bar is particular suited to this strategy for this. The AdBrite ads are possibly the best, most annoying version of these stealth ads - they replace several words in the page with links to advertisers’ pages.

However, you may notice that I host no such deceptive ads. That’s because I know what it feels like to click an add thinking that I’ll be brought to a page that was intentionally linked to by the author. I get frustrated with the page author for placing such a deceptive ad.

On the other hand, I am aware that certain individuals enjoy rewarding bloggers for a good article by clicking ads on the authors site, so I actually do leave one up, it’s just somewhere that isn’t irritating or deceptive.

In the entire lifetime of this blog, I have made 31 cents. As you can see, I’m not exactly in it for the money. I just want those few people looking to support quality blogging a chance to do so.

I think Microsoft could use some help in the marketing department.



Hmm, there’s something wrong here. Typically, advertisers on tech website are gender neutral. Why does Microsoft want to tell people their pregnant?



In case your HTML is a bit rusty, I’ll give you a hint. There’s a syntax error near the end.

And, why don’t the lines line up with the line numbers in the left gutter? Check out line 30. Smells like a Photoshop.

I visited the business school for a seminar today that was posted on the CS mailing list.

I ended up shaking hands with the CEO of Starbucks.

Business is interesting.