Perfidious Google Maps

Over the weekend, I find myself at the intersection of Mathilda and Maude in Sunnyvale and I decide I need to go to a Walgreens or Longs or something. So I duly type in “pharmacy” into my Jesus Phone Google Maps and what does it show me?

There’s a Walgreen just off Fair Oaks. The location looks a little dubious, why would there be a Walgreen just off the main road, but maybe it covers an entire block. I haven’t ever seen a Walgreen at the location indicated, but maybe I haven’t been paying attention. So off I go to this location, and of course there is no Walgreen at this place. Quite annoying, to say the least. I assume that perhaps Google Maps is confused and get on with the rest of my life. On a whim, I pull up Google on my iPhone the next day and search for pharmacies in sunnyvale, and I find that Google search on the iPhone also thinks there’s a pharmacy at that location. Only it’s a Longs. And here’s what’s really cool about this. The address says El Camino Real, but the location on the map says Fair Oaks and just north of Maude. WTF? Seriously, WTF?

Thoughts About the Nobel Peace Prize and Obama

I’m not sure that awarding the prize to Obama devalues it any more than it has already been devalued by being awarded to Kissinger and Arafat.

First they gave the prize to the guy who lost to G.W. Bush. Now they’re giving it to the guy who succeeded him. Next year, give it to W’s parents and Jeb and they will have made their point abundantly clear. Talk about your soft bigotry of low expectations.

What, did the world suddenly run out of polio-eliminating and poverty-alleviating organizations?

As my friend Ravi says, they should have given Obama the Literature Prize instead, for the artful and innovative use of language to try and create world peace.

Obama’s Secret Muslim Handshake: Revealed!

All along you liberals thought it was just a right-wing canard that Obama was a secret Muslim trying surreptitiously to take away our precious Christianness and convert us all into Meccaward-praying, non-interest-charging, Ramadan-month-long-fasting, oil-drilling, loose-fitting-clothing wearing believers in a different way?

Muslims around the world are rejoicing, and he even gave his likeness to a Quran give-away promotion. He’s obviously planning on starting with converting us multiple-God believing Hindus before he charms his way across America. Found on Airport Road in Bangalore:

Obama's Secret Muslim Handshake

Arnie Pulls a Kim Jong Il

Yet again a foreign state-head with a liking for Hollywood action movies has imprisoned a citizen of the free world on what the victim claims are made-up charges. We tried to send our ex-President to rescue the poor sod, but he was unreasonably frisked and detained at the airport and never made it off the ground. The bastards! They thought of everything. Perhaps we should send Shah Rukh (his name is Khan!) to distract the prison guards with his dancing while Mr Jon sashays away to freedom.

Pricing Win

You can buy 1 of these for $3, or you can buy 15 of them for $42…$45…$48. Are those your giant sized balls of steel, or are you just happy to see me?

Tsuya 1pcs US$ 3, Tsuya 15 pcs US$ 48

The Annals of Error Reporting

This has to be a wonderful new addition to the mostly ugly error reports created by software. Any time software admits to being embarrassed is a good time.

Explaining Humpty Dumpty

Today’s Hindu performs yeoman service by explaining to us the meaning of Humpty Dumpty as in the sentence,

The turmoil and discontent in the Bharatiya Janata Party deepened further on Monday as Arun Shourie, senior leader and MP, made an all-out attack on party president Rajnath Singh, calling him “Alice in Blunderland” and describing the party leadership as “Humpty Dumpty.”

Most newspapers would have left that there. Not Neena Vyas. Using that expensive education to good effect, she explains:

The reference to “Humpty Dumpty” was from Through the Looking-Glass, a sequel by Lewis Carroll to Alice in Wonderland. Just as Alice expected Humpty Dumpty to fall at any time, in the BJP, almost at all levels, leaders are expecting the “fall” of Mr. Rajnath Singh, whose tenure comes to an end in January 2010.

One might conclude that:

1. The readers of The Hindu need to be explained references to Humpty Dumpty. They can read a newspaper that casually uses words like “turmoil” and “discontent,” but find themselves stumped with the most elementary nursery rhyme reference
2. Neena Vyas used the most elementary trick in the high school student’s book  of filling up the paragraphs when on deadline.

One wonders why she didn’t go on to tell us that Mr Shourie smiled like a Cheshire cat throughout the interview.

In Which The Ever Expanding Blandings Media Empire Expands Just That Bit More

The Pelican Club is live and blogging. We recommend it highly.

Microsoft – Yahoo: Thoughts

My first thought on Microsoft-Yahoo was that Yahoo seemed to have gotten the worse end of the deal. They seemed to have ceded search to Microsoft, got little to no revenue upside but certainly boosted their bottom line. Indeed Lex at the FT seems to agree. Negotiating with no leverage is a bitch. But having slept over it, I am beginning to see why Yahoo had to do what they did.

When I think about Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, they seem to have fundamentally different business foci, Microsoft and Google on one side and Yahoo on the other. Google focuses on helping consumers find what they want. In the process if advertisers have to be inconvenienced, so be it. It’s a curious business that doesn’t mind pissing off the people who pay the bills, but Google does it. This is why the Google marketplace and the Google algorithms have to be opaque, transparency would tilt the balance between the advertiser and the consumer and Google can have none of it. Microsoft is like Google in many ways. They are relatively new to advertising-based business models and would be quite happy to take the side of consumers over advertisers, it is individual consumers who helped them build their core business anyway.

Yahoo is in a different place. While they started out as a Google-like company, the downturn of 2001 forced them to think more about their advertisers. Cash was in short supply and so Yahoo changed the way they thought about their business and ensured that they were as advertiser-friendly as they could be. This worked wonders for Yahoo and they emerged from the downturn looking better than the rest of the dot-coms. The Overture search marketplace was a perfect match for them, it rewarded advertisers willing to pay the most and didn’t consider relevance, advertiser quality or any other metric that Google adds to their auction mix. But of course that made Yahoo search a terrible business, search cannot be won unless you have a consumer focus, in this way it is different from other publishing.

When a consumer searches for a car, she would hate it if the results included advertisements for Tylenol. It wouldn’t matter that Tylenol had research that revealed that 80% of all car-buyers needed a Tylenol within a day of commencing their search. But this does not apply to a page on autos.yahoo.com. Yahoo can show any banner/display ads it wants on those pages so long as the ads perform well for the advertiser and the advertiser is willing to pay for the impression. Yahoo does not risk alienating its consumers by showing irrelevant ads alongside its content (so long as the ads are not objectionable in content or overwhelming in number). So long as Yahoo owned and operated a search advertising exchange, they were in constant internal conflict, the search exchange required Yahoo to prefer its consumers over its advertisers, the advertising business side required Yahoo to prefer its advertisers. This could not hold.

The current deal breaks the dichotomy for Yahoo. All of Yahoo can now focus on helping their customers get the best advertising deal on the Internet across search, display and any other platforms that Yahoo is/will be on. By jettisonning the exchange, Yahoo’s sales team is free to treat the search exchange as just another platform on which clicks and impressions may be bought and consumer data may be gathered. They can even help their customers integrate their display purchase with advertiser click-streams driven from, gasp, Google.

It is in this way that what appears to be a financially weak deal for Yahoo could turn out to be a strategically great deal.

Next up: Google is attempting to create an advertiser-focused exchange on Doubleclick. Our new-found theory indicates that this cannot be the roaring success that it could be, Google will be as internally conflicted as Yahoo was. Yahoo will win that battle with Rightmedia on its side.

New Yorker Moment of Zen

How better to ensure that your quote gets published in the New Yorker than, 6 months after the end of the Bush administration, to get a random dig in about him? Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the mass extinction of animals around us and is talking to Al Hicks about what was happening to bats in the northeast US:

… dead bats everywhere … animals looked as if they had been dunked … in talcum powder … [sent] the photographs to … bat specialists … [n]one of them could explain it…

So far so good. But then Al Hicks gets into gear, almost immediately:

“We were thinking, Oh boy we hope this just goes away,” he told me, “It was like the Bush administration. And, like the Bush administration, it just wouldn’t go away”

What the hell? I hated the Bush administration as much as the next guy, but isn’t it a little late to be getting in gratuitous digs? But all that aside, I do highly recommend the article itself, like every Kolbert article in recent memory, she does a wonderful job of writing about the very real impact that humans have, inadvertently or otherwise, on the ecology around us. Unfortunately online access to the article for subscribers only, the rest of you have to buy the paper version or ask a friend for a photocopy.

Of course, if, like some people I know, you hate the New Yorker length essays and would rather read the Economist’s shorter edition just wait another 50 years or so at which point all the extinction will raise them out of their conservative slumber and write a quick page and a half wringing their hands about the situation and decrying the absence of free market rhetoric in the proposed solutions. Mission Accomplished!