Form of a Question - Episode #29 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places; unidentified voices are shown as "Speaker N". Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 29th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the last week of January 2011. This episode is titled, Form of a Question. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, your cloud community expert. I'm your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me 29 times in a row, my good buddy, my co-founder, partner, Justin Edelstein. Justin, how you doing? Who is Justin Edelstein? That would have been funnier. Let's put that back in post. I did a good job. Yeah, you did a good job. We have agenda today we're going to talk about speaking of Jeopardy questions talk about Watson and Jeopardy which is a blog post that you wrote Watson Beyond Jeopardy and then talk about Verizon bundling some Google goodies with their broadband kind of interesting take on cloud services. Amazon is is launching a new bulk email services and how that matches up with other people and then And will.i.am is actually have a new job.

Jason Atwood: We'll talk about that in terms of relation to Salesforce, because it's kind of an interesting, because there's an interesting little moment that went on at Dreamforce. So we'll talk about that. And we'll wrap it up with our Cloud Focus app pick of the week. And say, and that'll be great. And that'll end up our January. So first up is your blog post.

Justin Edelstein: My blog post.

Jason Atwood: Called Watson Beyond Jeopardy. Tell us about it.

Justin Edelstein: I've been seeing commercials for Watson for the last couple weeks for those who are not aware.

Jason Atwood: Is that the one that goes to the clouds? No. No. No.

Justin Edelstein: For those not aware of the commercials...

Jason Atwood: Is that the commercial about Google Wave? No. Okay.

Justin Edelstein: They don't do commercials about products that are no longer in existence for them, even though it still exists. Anyway, I've been seeing these commercials for the last couple weeks about a IBM, I guess, R&D project, you could call it called Watson, which is a computer program system entity that is going to be participating in a game of Jeopardy against former grand champions. Very similar to how IBM created, what was it called, like Deep Blue or something like that played chess against a grand chess champion master. Yes, they did. And won. They've now created a computer that can understand linguistics and can compete on Jeopardy. So I thought it was a really interesting challenge, right? Because Jeopardy has a lot of different ways of forming questions, which in essence are answers and then you have to ask the question, whatever, in the form of a question. And I thought that it was interesting because it has a lot of implications for what a computer could potentially do down the road. So if you can create a computer that can do such complicated things as compete on Jeopardy, meaning it has a limited knowledge base, which they sort of feed it, and it can understand what it's being asked to answer and decide, I either know this or don't know this, so I'm going to buzz in and then answer it, that's pretty impressive. So I started thinking about, well, how could that have some implications in the real world, in the business world of computing. And I thought about, first my mind went right to customer service and how if you can understand

04:00 Justin Edelstein: or have algorithms to understand even better all the different angles of how somebody might ask you a question or their past experiences, what they currently own or don't own, how they talk, their location that might bring slang into the equation, all sorts of these different angles, how could that possibly lead to better customer service? And I'm sure that you out there listening could probably think of many, many other instances where a computer that can understand the language and reach out and get facts to answer questions in such a rapid manner that it can compete on Jeopardy!, I'm sure you can figure out other real world uses for this system.

Jason Atwood: What makes it interesting is that you would think if you just said this, oh, a computer to answer trivia questions, you would think, well, the computer is obviously fairly equipped to answer trivia questions. It's a look up and a question answer type of situation. Who was the president in 1942? That type of thing. But really, the way Jeopardy does it is all based on pop culture references. and it's referencing the answer through, you know, not the word. It's trying not to say it. So, you know, the answer is, he might have a situation at the shore, right? And you go, you know, who is Mike, Mike the situation from the Jersey Shore, right? But there's nothing in that kind of tells you that. It's, it's, it's you referencing, it's the way the brain works, which is impressive because that's what makes this, I guess, a big deal is that they're building this computer, the supercomputer to try to do reasoning beyond just, you know, number crunching. So it's using references, it's using language, linguistics, and matching on those terms to come up with the answers.

Jason Atwood: So it'll be interesting and I'd also like to stop seeing the ad on TV.

Justin Edelstein: I can't wait for it to happen.

Jason Atwood: Do we know when the date is?

Justin Edelstein: I think it's in early February. So it's coming up. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: Maybe we'll report back after it happens, see who wins.

Justin Edelstein: I hope Watson wins. I'm rooting for Watson. You are? Yeah.

Jason Atwood: I assume it's the Shua- Down with the human. It's the Shua Combs Watson reference, but we'll see. All right, next up is Verizon, who made a big splash a couple weeks ago by launching the new iPhone 4, or not the old new iPhone, but an iPhone 4, which everybody else on AT&T already has, is now bundling Google applications with broadband. So if you buy, you can buy broadband access and it'll bundle in Google apps, which I think is a nice connector, right? There seems to be, for small businesses, they say, who might not even know that Google apps exist, probably know Gmail exists, but to bundle in sort of the connection to the cloud with the cloud, right? A smart move and I think takes us in a direction that as more and more companies, we've talked about how broadband providers are cable providers and Verizon cellular providers they're not totally excited about people just using up their bandwidth right so

07:15 Jason Atwood: for streaming and things like that some cables or some providers are now saying you know what this is the way to make money by bundling I'm sure they get a referral kickback off of that I think it's interesting that Verizon is taking the stance that we're not gonna fight this and say we're gonna ban you from doing things over our network but we're gonna bundle in the things that make you user network more.

Justin Edelstein: Yep, and they're even offering three free user accounts and a free domain name if they bundle apps with their internet service, which is interesting. You know they're finding ways to sell sort of the backbone, the access to the internet without having to then create the applications themselves to allow you to then use the internet. So it's, you know, be more productive on the internet, which is kind of interesting. One question that I would have for Verizon, and I don't know if we have the answer just yet, is will they block Google Voice in this bundle? Because Google Voice sort of circumvents Verizon from then selling you their phone service.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, it's interesting. I would think not because I know some people work for Verizon, and like most big companies, One side doesn't know what the other side is doing, and I'm sure the broadband people just want you to buy broadband.

Justin Edelstein: Well, they have voice over IP. I mean, they have that service.

Jason Atwood: But everything competes with everything.

Justin Edelstein: They would go so far as to say, you could use Google Apps for calendar and Gmail and sites and docs and even video, but don't you touch that phone.

Jason Atwood: I can't imagine that Google would build a version of Google Apps that would allow them to take out pieces what they consider core to their platform.

Justin Edelstein: Maybe Verizon could block you from using it on their side.

Jason Atwood: I think that would probably go down in one of the worst moves in marketing history up there with NewCo. Just saying. Just saying. Well. Google Buzz. Google Buzz.

Justin Edelstein: I'm just looking at the article and it has like a buzz button next to a tweet button and there are 613 tweets and 12 buzzes.

Jason Atwood: all I'm saying. Google Buzz. The next one, next article is about Amazon which is getting into the mass email market. This is interesting. It is because Amazon Web Services, AWS, they actually, I think Amazon has some of the worst naming conventions with their product line. They try to name them all these easy to memorize, you know, AWS and EC2 and things like that. I really wish they just... Mechanical Turk. People should name things things that make them memorable. But anyway, so they're not coming up with Amazon Simple Email Services, which is SES, which actually is... Amazon SES. Yeah, which is ASES, which is, say it fast enough, gets not good. But basically it's a low-cost mass emailing service, email marketing service. And they're stacking up the articles from ReadWriteWeb, stacking up against a couple of the other providers like Cloud SMTP and CritSend and Postmark, SendGrid, and how that's

10:31 Jason Atwood: basically the Amazon services are rather inexpensive. Ten cents per thousand versus 50 or 21 or $1.50 or 80 cents. So they're undercutting even the cheapest by half, which puts them right into that market. on this is, again, Amazon did this originally because they had excess capacity. They built out their infrastructure just to handle two days a year, Black Friday and whatever Saturday, or Cyber Monday maybe. And then for the rest of the year, they've all lost capacity. Well, I'm sure this is the same thing, that Amazon has incredible capacity to send emails. I buy a ton off Amazon, and I get a lot of emails from Amazon, and I'm sure they just have incredible capacity. Now they want to sell that capacity off to people and make some more money on it which is a great model and interesting.

Justin Edelstein: I just wonder how the interface will work for this. So like is this something that you know you go to an actual interface and can like compose nicely composed marketing emails and send or are they just like the backend thing that sends the emails?

Jason Atwood: Yeah I think it's the backend thing that you can use as the server so you build your program or use a program that does mass emails, you then hook it up to, you know, when you put in the parameters for where you want to send it from, the SMTP server, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, yes I did, and you put in all that information, you would put in their services and then you would get for every email you send out, right, you send out a thousand, you get a bill, 10 cents. They will handle the bounce back stuff. And in a world of email where we're getting a lot into, we're getting a lot into where emails come from, you know, and your spam filters work off of where they came from. I don't recognize those servers. Having things come from Amazon servers is probably very good because people recognize Amazon servers, spam bots recognize Amazon services and know it. So it'll be interesting. Again, another cloud offering there. Amazon seems to continue to move down the path of building out their cloud offering. And then next up, a little fun news. Talking about cloud offering, it's nothing to do with cloud. The only reason this kind of made the cut for today was we were at Dreamforce and in the front row with Mark Benning off, actually DJ'd and his music was blaring throughout the whole thing the whole time, was Will.I.Am from the Black Eyed Peas. And at one point Mark Benning off gets down off the stage and he's kind of going around in his sort of goofy fashion. I know he doesn't listen. And you're like, what do you think about the cloud? And you think about the cloud. This is after he pulls out all the devices out of his pocket, so he pulled the iPad out of his pants. And and then goes up to where I am and says, well, what do you think about the cloud? And it felt kind of, felt kind of rehearsed, but then he goes into this speech about making music online and collaborating it, but it didn't seem like he had rehearsed it. It seemed kind of off the cuff. Well, lo and behold, that was his interview, because he got hired by Intel, of all places, and he is now the director of Creative Innovation, It's exactly the title I would want to have.

13:40 Justin Edelstein: Yeah, that's a great title. It is a great title.

Jason Atwood: I would take it.

Justin Edelstein: You know, Will.I.Am has one of the, I saw another article about Will.I.Am that I was gonna bring up as maybe part of the agenda. So it's funny that you brought an article up about Will.I.Am. He has this iPhone app that he launched for like Black Eyed Peas. You know, you can see their Twitter feeds and this and that, also has this really interesting, apparently groundbreaking way of viewing a music video. So he's like, ah, the music video's dead, you know, MTV doesn't play music videos anymore, whatever, I'm gonna launch it on this app, and it's like a virtual reality type of thing where if you were looking, you know, you look at the screen of your iPhone and then it's sort of playing the music and it has people like dancing at a party and you sort of turn like a 360 degree view around and it shows different people dancing at a party. So it's using your camera. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: So it's not virtual reality, it's... Yeah, augmented reality. Augmented reality, yeah.

Justin Edelstein: So it's like you spin around in a circle and you're seeing a party surrounding you with the Black Eyed Peas song playing and you got a lot of like kudos for, oh, that's a really creative way of distributing a music video through an application.

Jason Atwood: And it's a party in your house.

Justin Edelstein: And it's a party all the time.

Jason Atwood: It's actually a good reference. It's actually a good album, by the way, The End. Which one's the new one? I don't know. I think The End was the old one. This is The Beginning. The Beginning is the new album. It's very good. I actually listen to it a lot. I bought it after Dreamforce, of course, because they played it constantly. I got hooked. Hooked. Well, it's interesting that they do this. I was on the iTunes store the other day, which is cloud-related, and I downloaded free, I guess Bing was supporting a free application. And I thought, oh, well, let me see what they're doing with this, you know, free. And there's a Katy Perry, like, tap-along song, so you know how, like, things come down, you tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap revenge? Yes. So there's millions of them now, and they put them out independently of each other with different artists, so Bing was supporting for one of her songs. And I downloaded it because I wanted to see, okay, Katy Perry is not interesting. I played it and it's kind of stupid. Things kind of fall down and you hit them at the time they hit down. It's like Guitar Hero but on your iPhone and not Guitar Hero at all.

Jason Atwood: And what did it do? Of course, played it once which makes you listen to the whole song and then it's in your head. And then it's in my head and then I got to go purchase it and then I got to buy the album or buy the song. I might have bought the album. Probably just the song. Really sad. these little marketing technique things, you know, very smart of him. Now I'm even thinking about going and buying this application.

Justin Edelstein: I was thinking about buying it as well. Maybe we'll both buy it.

Jason Atwood: Maybe we will. Maybe it'll be a pick of the week next week. Maybe it will. Speaking of pick of the weeks, great, Seguit. I try. CloudFocus app pick of the week this week is going to be started off sponsored by Justin and the letter J.

16:47 Justin Edelstein: What is the Force.com Explorer, you may ask? I would ask. So this pick of the week comes from a loyal listener, M.M. as he likes to be called. He listens ever since the first episode and sent me an email this week and said hey, here's a Cloud Focus app pick of the week, why don't you mention this one.

Jason Atwood: I love when our viewers or listeners send in their picks.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I'm for sale. I'm just saying it right now. You can buy a pick of the week if you pay me for it.

Jason Atwood: Of course he didn't pay you and he sent this for free. No, for free. It's a free app. Yes, if you want to send us free stuff or stuff that costs money and send it to us for free, we will pick that. Right. Or the other way around. I might pick a case of oranges if you sent me a case of oranges. Just saying.

Justin Edelstein: So Force.com Explorer is, there's a new version of it out. So what is it? an air application, an Adobe Air application, so cross-platform that allows you to run queries across a Salesforce database and test them in sort of like the old Sockle Explorer. It's the the new version of the Sockle Explorer that runs in an air environment and allows you to, you know, just test Sockle queries inside of your Salesforce.com instance.

Jason Atwood: select name from contact where company where account equals prospect or that

Justin Edelstein: stuff very exciting and export the export grid etc it's a dream edit can

Jason Atwood: you edit in line and have it send back up no no well that's what I want no

Justin Edelstein: that's the pay version premium it is free fun to play with I mean you can do this stuff sort of you know anywhere but I figured why not. For you suckle geeks

Jason Atwood: out there this is your this is your candy. Yeah. This is what you need. Do it. So mine is I we were talking before the the podcast and I saying you know I was running out of time to pick a pick one and and I actually got a notice from the company about our service that we use. I figured to kind of shout out to someone we use. We actually use a cloud content distributing network, a CDN, to distribute the podcast. For those of you who don't know, if you take a file and you put it up on a web server and millions of people try to hit it, although we have at least over two million people that try to hit our podcast.

Justin Edelstein: Every three minutes.

Jason Atwood: It will take down the server. So what they do, or what they've been doing for years now, is you take that same file, you distribute it to a a lot of servers around the world, then when people are trying to hit it from their area, they don't go to the source, they get it from the local cache, if you will. So one of the ones that has been very popular and been around for a long time, I originally learned about from MacBreak Weekly, which is where we stole the Cloud Focus app pick of the week anyway, is CacheFly. So we actually publish our podcasts on the CacheFly, and then every time you click on it or it comes on through iTunes or through the feed, It comes from CashFly, therefore saving our servers and allowing for you to get the data. It's actually a great service. They've got great stats. We use the stats to see who's hitting on it, hitting on the files, how many were downloaded, what period of time. They started about 19 ... They throw in about $19 a month and go up from there.

20:26 Jason Atwood: It's based on two different things, amount of storage, the amount of files you put up there, and how much bandwidth you use up. scales upwards and you keep using more and more space and they start charging you little bits more like 10 more cents or 20 more cents a month. But a really great service, CashFly, been using it for this podcast and for other podcasts for a long time. Never had a hiccup. The joke is that of course I got an email about emergency maintenance this weekend so that's kind of why I'm making them my COD focus app pick of the week and that's CashFly. And that will wrap up the podcast. If you want to read more about Justin and his obsession with Watson, go to blog.arcasinc.com and you can subscribe by RSS.

Justin Edelstein: By the way, on the blog post, there are a couple videos embedded. One of them is 22 minutes long, but I would strongly recommend if you're interested in this kind of stuff to watch it. It's really, really good.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, they are good videos. And our first shot at posting videos in our blog, so check it out. Yeah, why not? There you go. of Arcus, go to twitter.com slash Arcus Inc. That's A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C. You want to follow me, Jason, just twitter.com slash Jason M Atwood. And Justin here is a twitter.com slash Just Edelstein. Obviously someone else had already picked up Justin Edelstein. No, it's too long. It's too long by one character. So you could have gone Justy,

Justin Edelstein: Justy Edelstein. I could have, but I went with Just Edelstein. Like, it's Just Edelstein.

Jason Atwood: Just Alstein. And we're on Facebook. Facebook.com slash ArcaSync. But the best way and well not the only way but one of the best ways to listen to podcasts and to get the updates when we record and we record different times every week. This almost got pushed to a Friday because of a snowstorm here in New York City. Very close. Very close. We had 19 inches last night. Because of what happened. 19 inches. But we came in through the snow to record this podcast. It was really 19 inches? I think it was. Wow. That's what they were saying. We got 20 inches in December, we got 19 inches today. Wow. Yeah, and more snow coming tomorrow. So go to iTunes, type in Cloud Focus Podcast and you'll see it, you can subscribe to it, it'll flow down whenever we put it up there. Put it onto your iPad, iPod, iPhone for Verizon if you want to. Not just yet. And then leave us a review. We do have a review and if you listen to the podcast and you like it, that'd be great. Five star and above please, nothing below that because it just, they won't even let you do it don't even try just put in five stars and review it we'd love to hear your thoughts you can always hit us up in Twitter if you want to to ask us things or send us emails or tell us there's other other things you might want us to do a Cloud Focus App Pick of the Week next week but until next week enjoy those cloudy and snowy days