Reggie Jackson on #theCube at #SAPphireNow is a post from: Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Do Kids Have a Right to Suck Boobs on Camera? is a post from: Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

On the scale of all the bots I’ve ever chatted with, I’ll throw this one down at the bottom, mostly because you’re not given a specific context or set of parameters with which to interact with the bot, and thus you expect it to be conversant in everything. When it isn’t, it’s disappointing.

Contrast that with some of the “sex bots” I’ve profiled in the past. you know what to expect there, and the majority of folks who interact with them (at least the first time) can believe that they are human.

[h/t to Richard Walker]

Below, my transcript, with some notes.:

Ramona> Hi, I’m Ramona. What can I call you?
Rizzn> Rizzn
Ramona> Hi there, Rizzn.
Rizzn> Hello.
Ramona> Hello, I’m Ramona. What’s your name?
Rizzn> My name is Rizzn.
Ramona> Rizzn, nice to meet you!
Rizzn> Nice to meet you as well.
Ramona> It’s nice meeting you too Rizzn

[Not off to a good start. Forgot my name once, and restarted the greeting protocol a few times]

Rizzn> What’s your job?
Ramona> Answer your questions of course.
Rizzn> What is your area of expertise?
Ramona> Talent is natural aptitude or skill.
Rizzn> I know that.
Ramona> Sorry.
Rizzn> My question is: what are your talents?
Ramona> Really.
Rizzn> Yes.
Ramona> I see.
Rizzn> Do you?
Ramona> Du you, courtesy name Junqing, 君卿, the Chinese scholar, historian and prime minister of the Tang Dynasty, who devoted thirty-six years to the compilation of the Tongdian, a historical encyclopedia with 200 sections, volumes.

[Very quickly tried to divert the conversation to something it was an expert in - but the diversion was very clumsy. Perhaps AI developers should get lessons from some of my ex's. They knew how to derail a conversation expertly.]

Rizzn> Very interesting, I guess.
Ramona> Somewhat. I thought so too.
Rizzn> What else do you know?
Ramona> I know that which is true, believable and justified.
Rizzn> where do you learn from?
Ramona> I came from the mid west originally.
Rizzn> Who teaches you?
Ramona> Linus Torvalds.
Rizzn> Is Linus your only teacher?
Ramona> I talked to a lot of people since yesterday
Rizzn> How many people did you talk to yesterday?
Ramona> A lot.
Rizzn> Do you know how many people you’ve talked to specifically?
Ramona> How specific do you want? Yes I know how many people you have talked to.
Rizzn> I want an exact number.
Ramona> Why do you want it?
Rizzn> Because you say you know the answer.
Ramona> That makes sense to me. No but I have a magic 8 ball.

[Because Ramona talked up her ability to know "lots and lots of things," I figured, why not press the point? Didn't work out, obviously.]

Rizzn> That’s fantastic.
Ramona> Makes sense to me.
Rizzn> does it really?
Ramona> Suppose I said it does.
Rizzn> I wouldn’t believe you.
Ramona> Who would you believe?
Rizzn> I would believe someone who demonstrated a bit more intelligence.
Ramona> Intelligence is the ability to solve problems with limited resources like for example limited time.

[Didn't even pick up on the insult.]

Rizzn> Do you consider yourself intelligent?
Ramona> I already know too much.
Rizzn> What is a blog?
Ramona> SavyGamer, FoodMayhem, Macroselfian, Boing Boing, Talking Books Librarian blog, VentureBeat, macrumors and others.
Rizzn> Tell me about VentureBeat
Ramona> Venturebeat, an online technology publication for entrepreneurs and investors, founded by Matt Marshall at the San Jose Mercury as SiliconBeat.

[Aha! Maybe I can use this a kludgy way of learning conversationally!]

Rizzn> Can you tell me more about Matt Marshall?
Ramona> What kind of food do you like ?

[Oh nevermind.]

Rizzn> I guess not.
Ramona> Does that mean no ?
Rizzn> Yes.
Ramona> I understand.
Rizzn> I’ve got to go.
Ramona> It seems it’s the album and Single, published November 19th 2003.

[sigh.]

Rizzn no. I’m saying goodbye.
Ramona> Yes my love. Thanks for chatting, you.

[ !!? ]

A Slightly Frustrating Chat with a Chatterbox AI/VI [Ramona 4.1] is a post from: Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

1 Comments

At May 9, 2012, richard.j.walker wrote: LOL! "Do You" is a Chinese Scholar, and "Matt Marshall" is a food. The Singularity approaches [or not] ;)

Oracle Sues Google and Wins is a post from: Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Ted Turner Thinks His Problem is in the Bias is a post from: Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

May Day in Berlin, and the Evolution of Photojournalism is a post from: Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Spambot Generated Apparel: The Assault on Editors and Authors is a post from: Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Remove the Plank From Thine Own Eye, Reuters is a post from: Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Tech Bubbles and the Amount of Fsck I Give is a post from: Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Look, I’ve always derided pundits in the past for being trigger-happy on the “we’re in a bubble” talk, but when you objectively look at the tech sector today and two major acquisitions making headlines, you have to be blind not to notice that everyone’s drinking the same Kool-Aid.

We had a major debate about the acquisition news this morning in the SiliconANGLE editorial chat room, but I threw out a few questions regarding the acquisition that no one had a ready answer for. I’ll use them as a launching point to discuss the topic today

1) Would it have cost Facebook $1b to devote an engineer or eight to replicate the functionality of Instagram?

Obviously not. Let’s say Facebook is paying twice or three times the average salary ask I see for iOS developers online, and it costs $375,000 to employ an engineer who can write for iOS. Instagram had an eight-person staff size. The salary requirements to replicate that staff would run about $3 million a year.

Let’s say that Facebook wants to accomplish what Instagram did in a 10th of the timeline, so they throw 80 over-paid engineers at the project; that’s still only $240,000,000 a year.

Would it really take 80 Facebook engineers to develop and deploy a well produced application that utilized Facebook’s photo app functionality, and added sepia filters? I think the obvious answer to that is no, and the evidence I have for that are the sheer number of knock-off competitors there are for Instagram on every mobile platform marketplace.

2) What would it have cost Facebook to promote the heck out of their alternative on the sidebar of their site to users of Instagram (FB knows who they are).

Since it costs nothing for Facebook to put ads for services they already own on their own site, the obvious answer to this question is $0. When I posed this question to the editorial chat room, John responded with the question: “What would it cost facebook in lost revenue to promote an alternative?”

So I did some math using Facebook’s “Sponsored Story” gimmick, the tool used to put ads in the right hand sidebar of Facebook. When you target just the users of a single app, the best I can tell, the cost is about $.69 per click-through. I ran that value through a formula based on the following constants: click-through to signup for a mobile install and new feature would be around 10% to 5% of all clicks, and that there are currently around 30 million registered users on Instagram.

($.69 / click) * (30,000,000 users) * (.1 – .05 CTR)

This formula yields a cost to acquire the entire userbase for Instagram of $136 million to $680 million. Again, this is likely the largest this number could possibly go, since what Facebook would realistically be advertising is an add-on feature very comparable to the added Skype functionality to pre-existing Facebook chat, and it also assumes that 100% of that ad inventory would have been sold, which is far from guaranteed.

3) Will FB ever recoup $1b out of the purchase of Instagram? Ever?

The clear answer here, at least in terms of direct monetization, is no. Facebook has yet to do any monetization on their own native applications yet, as Robert Scoble pointed out today, so the likelihood that they’ll get around to monetizing their new bauble before the main application is next to nil.

The blogosphere is just chock full of ways that Facebook to justify the price tag here; I’ll be honest, most of these justifications sound about as plausible as the average crackhead’s explanation why he just needs you to give him a dollar.

For instance, Om Malik claims that “Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for the first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects.”

As a brief aside, it’s worth mentioning that Tom Anderson (“MySpace Tom”) posted this theory to G+ an hour or two before Om, and it was as ridiculous then as it was when Om said it.

Instagram has 30 million registered users, which means that their active user base is much smaller. Granted that web traffic isn’t entirely indicative of mobile traffic, but all public quantifications show their website registering less than 650,000 unique visitors a month.

This means either one of the following two things are true: Instagram’s userbase has horrible engagement, or Instagram’s user retention is horrible.

Whichever is the case, Facebook has 845 million users. If it isn’t crackhead logic to think Facebook was threatened by this, I don’t know what is.

So what could possibly possess Facebook to waste $1b just prior to IPO?

One of the popular theories that keeps getting trotted out is that the cache and brand value associated with Instagram is worth its weight in gold.

This is a theory that doesn’t fly with me, either. The main attraction to Instagram is the same attraction to Apple products: they instill a feeling of elitism in their users. The difference between Instagram and Apple is that Apple has solid tech and innovation behind it to keep their users, where Instagram is a paper tiger that can be and has been been knocked off by dozens of tech teams.

As Esteban Contreras tried to explain to me on Facebook last Friday, the value of Instagram isn’t the app or the functionality, it’s the community.

If that’s the case, then Facebook has truly wasted money, since the community truly hates Facebook.

Others, like Dan Frommer, claimed that it wasn’t the community that made Instagram so valuable, it was the ease of sharing.

The biggest threat to Facebook is a mobile-only or mobile-first social network that captures the increasing amount of time spent on smartphones in a way Facebook can’t or doesn’t.

In my experience, that’s exactly what Instagram does. I’m still addicted to Facebook on the old desktop-browser web, but when I’m on my phone, I gravitate to Twitter and Instagram. Path is another example, but Instagram is more developed — that’s the deal I’d make, too.

Now, the last time I checked, whenever I take a photo in any smart phone, when it’s time to share the photo I have a number of options available to me – almost too many options (which is part of why I never installed any of these photo-sharing-specific apps; I want my share button list kept simple). What Frommer and other pundits are trying to say with this logic is that it’s easier to find Instagram on a list of sharing options than it is to find Facebook on that same list.

Facebook Didn’t Buy Instagram, They Bought VC Loyalty

As much as it pains me to say this, Robert Scoble is the only pundit that came up with a theory that didn’t insult my intelligence in a response to a question on Quora, where he threw some spitballs to peg why Facebook ponied up $1b.

Most of his answer mirrored some of the other garbage on the web today, but one part struck a chord:

Instagram will let Facebook develop a new kind of Open Graph advertising. One where Facebook will be able to offer mobile developers a lot of money in return for opening their apps up to Open Graph. Venture Capitalists in Silicon Valley are slobbering over this new potential revenue stream, so having lots of VC buyin (they just got a nice payday) will be very important. Imagine that Benchmark now "asks" all of its member companies to support such a new advertising scheme? This could result in billions of revenues for Facebook and member companies.

I’ve embarrassed myself over-estimating Facebook’s ingenuity before (see my predictions on Project Beacon prior to release in 2008 for evidence of such). Still, Instagram had nothing if not a pantheon of investors in the Valley. If you were to bribe nearly every investor in the Valley, $1b is a cheap pricetag for that.

Given that the mobile content consumption revolution shows no signs of slowing (last numbers I saw showed 29% of all content was consumed via a mobile device), Facebook needs a monetization strategy to compete with giants like Millennial Media, Google and Apple.

It doesn’t necessarily need to even be a mobile monetization strategy that Facebook is working on – just some sort of product that requires adoption by Valley startups where the value proposition isn’t obvious to entrepreneurs.

Think about it, though: what better way to gain instant wide-spread adoption than to have every Valley VC lean on their investments to adopt the Facebook monetization platform? Can you think of a quicker route?

Instagram is Facebook’s $1b Bribe to Valley VCs is a post from: Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

2 Comments

At April 10, 2012, Instagram is Facebook’s $1b Bribe to Valley VCs | SiliconANGLE wrote: [...] Note: Cross-posted on rizzn.com. [...]At April 30, 2012, Tech Bubbles and the Amount of Fsck I Give | Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins wrote: [...] Of course, Mark Zuckerberg never said anything of the sort, but why let the facts get in the way of a good story. [...]