azeem azhar

The language instinct at 19 months

I've been re-reading Steven Pinker's Language Instinct on the advice of a couple of older parents. In it, Pinker describes the process by which babies of Salman's age acquire language in it he describes:

[the] arbitrary stages like Syllable Babbling, Gibberish Babbling, One-Word Utterances and Two-word strings, the next stage would have to be called all hell breaks loose.

Salman is somewhere between one-word utterances and two-word strings with a healthy dose of gibberish.

For an amateur cognitive scientist (very, very amateur), it is a fabulous process. To be able to witness the arrival of object permanence and theory of mind. Charting the language acquisition is even more interesting.

A quick count of where we are in his 21st month (corrected) follows: 58 words, including three he picked up this weekend. (The three he picked up were cow (instead of moo), animal (or aminal, in reality) and please (he only said this thrice and now refuses to repeat); a number of two word phrases like 'get down' and 'stand up'.

The full list, which I'll now track as my contribution to the global hive mind, are:

Under the radar: Igglo

So it's been a month since I heard that Igglo.fi took $12.5m from Benchmark Europe to expand into the UK, but no-one seems to be talking about this deal.

Considering how significant it is in the context of buzzwords (vertical search, web 2.0, social media) as well as being a really significant market (average london estate agent commissions £8,000; market size in the billions; high streets full of expensive and unloved estate agents), that is surprising.

Are our tech journalists asleep at the wheel?

I just nudged Mike Butcher into writing about it, so maybe we'll hear about the deal soon.

P.S. I have an interesting non-start-up funding post coming up soon. Stay patient!

I want my iPhone

Reading SeekingAlpha, my new favourite site, I note that Apple's iPhone is getting closer to reality. SeekingAlpha quotes an AppleInsider report quoting a Commercial Times report quoting an insider at FoxConn, trading name for Hon Hai Precision Industry, an OEM, that Apple has asked for an initial build order of 12m units--for the first half of next year.
Things I love about this story:

• the iPhone is close, so close. What if it isn't called the iPhone?
• Apple is building 12m for six months so say 25m for a year or about 3% market share in year one.
• that at Hon Hai Precision industry, 'knife goes in, guts come out'
• that I can't found Commercial Times, the original news source, and had to settle for digitimes.com

Best of all for those who  kindalife Apple's products is that Bear Stearns reckons the iPhone will add $6bn to Apple's revenues next year and 22% to earnings.

It isn't just about Apple's products being insanely great again.

It's also about the triumph of style over the mundane. About having the confidence in your insight, customers and brand to enter a market which is crowded, consolidating and commodifying; a market where leaders are losing margin and investments are turning sour in a hurry; a market where incumbents have huge advantages, like big brands, great distribution and cushy relationships with channel.

It turns ordinary management thinking upside down. And I hope it'll turn our assumptions about what a phone should be inside out too.

Businessweek on Amazon & Powerset

BusinessWeek investigates Amazon's expansion into storage and grid computing. Turns out they used Barney's new project, PowerSet, as one case study:

"Everything we can get Amazon to do, we will get Amazon to do," says Chris MacAskill. "You're going to see all kinds of startups get a much better and faster start" by using Amazon's services.

   They already are. Consider Powerset, the secretive search startup backed by A-list angel investors, including PayPal Inc. (EBAY ) co-founder Peter Thiel and veteran tech analyst Esther Dyson. Co-founder and CEO Barney Pell harbors ambitions of out-Googling Google with technology that he says would let people use more natural language than terse keywords to do their searches. By analyzing the underlying meaning of search queries and documents on the Web, Powerset aims to produce much more relevant results than the current search king's.

Problem is, Powerset's technology eats computing power like a child munches Halloween candy. The little 22-person company would have to spend more than $1 million on computer hardware, two-thirds of that just to handle occasional spikes in visitor traffic, plus a bunch of people to staff a massive data center and write software to run it. That's when Pell heard about Elastic Compute Cloud. He was sold. Based on tests so far, using the Amazon site for part of the company's computing power could cut its first-year capital costs alone by more than half.

Freewire TV over broadband available

Marcus Liassides has announced Freewire TV. Freewire delivers broadcast TV over broadband connections to the UK.

The highlights are :

• Most of the Freeview channel bouquet delivered over broadband. The quality is  good. I've used it over a standard DSL line to a 42 inch plasma.
• Available initially over the Super Janet network (but see the note below)
• Delivered to a free player downloadable from the freewire website
• It is also H264 so I assume you can just run it through VLC, although I haven't tried.
• Runs over multicast-enabled Networks (e.g. SuperJanet)--most core telco networks are or will be multicast enabled in the next couple of years.

You can read more about the offering from Informitv

I think Freewire is available to Bulldog DSL subscribers as well. So I would be interested if anyone who uses bulldog wants to test the service and tell me what it's like. XP only, Mac support coming soon. (Apparently not right now--I'm checking on this. 5 November 2006)

(I am a non-exec on Inuk Networks, the parent of Freewire TV).

Covers off for Blyk

Marko 's new start-up, Blyk , has come out of stealth mode. Blyk offers free mobile phone services to 16-24s supported by advertising.

Will people really want advertising supported calls? Well not everyone, but a cash-poor 16-24 year old group might. 

The big challenge is to design advertising that is engaging not obstrusive. Actually, I'd go further than that--you need to design advertising your audience wants more of. That is hard to do but must be a success factor for the business.

Mobile Experience has a detailed interview with the Blyk team . 

Tags: blyk, marko, mobile, mvno