After just returning to my last trip in US (read a couple of thoughts about it here), I am reading via ☞ Fred Wilson about two new services for finding hotels while traveling.
See the truth before you travel — thousands of undoctored hotel photos, and the world’s most comprehensive, professional hotel reviews.
or in Fred’s words:
Oyster, a web service dedicated to honest and excellent hotel reviews. They literally send out a person to stay in the hotel for a few days, take their own undoctored photos, and present in a clear and concise format.
Hunch is a more generic service that covers more than hotels. Hunch’s answers are based on the collective knowledge of the entire Hunch community, narrowed down to people similar to you, or just enough like you that you might be mistaken for each other in a dark room.
I think that best results will come from combining expert knowledge and crowdsourcing.
Staying focused is one issue; that’s the problem of information overload. The other problem is information underload. Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.
"One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made…. How many other things are we missing?
Appreciating Your Immediate World"According to the Intel’s Chief of Labs, Justin Rattner:
You can imagine 15 billion consumer devices that will be capable of delivering TV content in that timeframe with 100’s of billions of hours of video. We’ll need much more sophisticated ways to organize content and provide it on demand.
Based on the tons of statistics about YouTube, Hulu, etc, we can safely say that video and TV represent just another type of information overload. And considering the video usability current state the problem will be much more difficult to solve. But I do expect to see huge innovations in the field.
Very interesting experiment for testing the behavior of potential subscribers:
[…] the Economist, at one time, showed three options for their potential subscribers: online-only for $59.00, print-only for $125.00, or online and print for $125.00. He designed an experiment, using his students, in which 84% chose the $125.00 for print and online, 0% chose print-only, and only 16% chose online-only. Any rational manager would say the $125.00 offer print-only offer was useless. But when Dan removed the $125.00 print-only offer, 68% of people bought the online product for $59.00 while only 32% shelled out for the $125.00 bundle! In other words, the higher-priced option was chosen less than half as often. By having the decoy of $125.00 for print-only, the customer could make an easy comparison to the other $125.00 offer in which they got online for “free.” Even something as simple as choosing a magazine has enough complexity in it that a decoy choice can radically change buyer behavior.
The conclusion is not new and I’ve mentioned it myself when writing about the shift from search to recommendations in content consumption:
In our world of information overload, every new choice is an effort
Whoever manages to change the nature of content display on the Web from a search problem to a recommender problem will reap tremendous rewards.
While this may still look like a technology in search for a market (except the online retailing), my personal bet is in the same direction.
The other shift I think content consumption will see in the future is in its visualization. We are currently used with ‘linear’ text consumption patterns (and the optional ‘disruptive’ open link in new tab’). But as amount of created content has grown exponentially, we’ll have to figure out a different approach.
Today’s challenge is not having more information; it’s devising a less-resource intensive way to collect it and an efficient way to filter and disseminate it
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