February 17, 2007
More on pigeons and search
I have written previously that using “keywordese”, the language of keywords used to query search engines today, is like using a “grunting pidgin language” instead of a human natural language to communicate our intent to the search engine. This also explained the joke on our Powerset Series A Funding Party t-shirts with the grunting pigeon.
In an unexpected confirmation of the connection between pigeons and keyword search technology, a reader pointed out to me an article on Google’s website about Google’s PigeonRank technology. 
This technology employs huge arrays of pigeons that are trained to peck at pages that are more likely to be high quality results. Although each pigeon is fallible, the wisdom of the crowds means that the results of the whole coop can have high quality.
So far, the PigeonRank technology appears to be applied only to rankings, not to query languages. But it is possible that such work is happening in secret.
Posted by barney on February 17, 2007 at 1:47 pm | No Comments
February 14, 2007
Powerset Series A Funding Party
Powerset had party last Saturday night to celebrate our Series A funding! The party took place at Frisson, a trendy bar/restaurant in San Francisco’s financial district. We wound up with perhaps 500 people attending, completely filling up the space (and all available parking for blocks around) for most of the evening.
Party supported by our sponsors and investors
While the event was lavish and brought back memories of the heady dotcom boom days, when some companies spent a significant portion of their funding on their launch parties, we actually were fortunate to have the cost subsidized by our investors and partners. I want to thank them here.
continue reading the Powerset Series A Funding Party
Posted by barney on February 14, 2007 at 11:57 pm | No Comments
February 4, 2007
Barney on Cooking With Geeks (Podcast)
I was invited a few weeks ago to attend an experimental dinner event called “Cooking with Geeks”. The idea was to combine a salon with a cooking lesson and podcast it to the world. The Cooking With Geeks podcast is now available (the previous link is to part 1, after which you can watch part2).
Here’s the writeup from the CWG website:
We got a group of geeks together, had a great chef come in and teach us how to cook, handed out some wine, and kicked off an interesting conversation. Come on along for a San Francisco geek dinner.
Geeks involved are: Barney Pell, CEO, Powerset; Mary Hodder, CEO, Dabble; Henri Poole, founder/director, Civic Actions; Kathleen Lyman, CEO, LaunchMedia; Steve Gillmor. Our co-hosts were Robert Scoble [of Scobleizer fame] and Fred Davis, co-founder of Wired Magazine. Videographers are Eddie Codel and Glenn Gullmes. Chef is Rozana Ogneva of www.AreYouBeingServedCatering.com. Our host is Jeannine Barnard.
I knew some of these folks before, in particular Mary Hodder is a friend of mine. I didn’t know just how expert Mary was about food. The food itself was delicious and we all gave our compliments to the chef. In addition to food, we covered several interesting (to us) topics. Here are a few that I remember after a month (I haven’t watched the videos yet).
- I brought up the question of whether the MySpace generation would grow up to regret sharing all their personal information, and shared my view that more likely they would come into power and reshape the mainstream perspective on private/public information so that is is no big deal.
- We had an unexpectedly long discussion about Powerset (in Part 2) with several good perspectives shared by the other guests.
- Mary talked about trends in personal video creation, mixing, and sharing.
- Fred talked about the early history of Wired magazine, and his later startup companies.
- And we learned about the long history of publishing in the computer industry.
I enjoyed the event and look forward to doing this again.
For folks who don’t live in the Bay Area, I think this dinner gives a pretty typical glimpse into how folks here in the tech industry combine work and play in social contexts. It captures pretty well the way that everyone is passionate about ideas, technology, and startup companies.
Posted by barney on February 4, 2007 at 10:01 pm | No Comments