What happened today is about 1 chance in 84 Billion.  Here is what happened.

I was using the URL shortening service http:\\tr.im.  This service takes a long URL and shortens it into something manageable.  The utility of the service is that you get a short URL which can be used on venues such as Twitter, where every character counts.

In fact, I was going to tweet about a new product, Contact Capture for the iPhone.  The latest iPhone is the 3GS.   I typed in the long URL, as shown in the picture below.

Next, I pressed the [TR.IM] button and got the following:

If you haven’t picked it up, the iPhone is the 3Gs, the trimmed URL is “x3Gs”

Now for the fuzzy (very fuzzy math)

There are approximately 96 usable ASCII characters.  ASCII is the characters on your keyboard plus a few more  (A-Z, a-z and 0-9, etc) .  There are about 96 usable ones that the TR.IM service can use.

With 4 unique characters in the URL, that means there are 96 * 96 * 96 *96 combinations or 84,934,656 combinations.

This itself is interesting, but the fact that the URL was for an iPhone 3Gs we have to look at this question:  Of all trimmed URL’s, what percentage are for iPhone related content?  I am going to be  conservative and sale 1 in 1000.

So 84 million multiplied by 1000 is one in 84 billion.

The bottom line is that this was a coincidence, it made me smile and I thought I would share it.

Here are the links I made today:

Contact Capture for the iPhone:  http://tr.im/x3Gs

Contact Capture for the Blackberry:  http://tr.im/x3Fu

If the Blackberry link included something like a Blackberry model number, I would be heading out to buy a lottery ticket…no such luck.

This all made me think about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers.  One of the concepts I gathered was, basically, when opportunity knocks, you need to take advantage of it.  Sometimes an opportunity is one in 84 billion.

Don’t get caught up in the naming of things with words, it gets confusing.  Words change the very nature of how we think about something.  It is “this”, therefore it is “that”.  Now, a tree is a tree and a rock is a rock, unless you are in some altered state on consciousness, but we won’t go there. I’m focused on the newcomer words that are still in flux.   Too often it is herd mentality that gives  new things their name.

Today I stared on my iPhone, Blackberry, GPhone and Palm pre on my desk and ask myself  “what are these?”

Cell Phones, Mobile Devices or Mobile Computers?

My company, Broadlook is developing software for mobile devices and I needed to have all of them.  I’m also a gadget freak, so I enjoy having all of them. Perhaps the collection of them, together, was odd and put me into a bit of a trance.

“What are these?”, I asked myself again.
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Tag Cloud

I’ve had some recent fun with Tag Clouds.  These are the sections of blogs that show the most frequently used words in blog postings; the most used words are shown in larger text, less frequent in smaller text.

Tag clouds are great summary tools.  In my next presentation at the Specialized Information Publishers Conference in DC,  I am presenting on The 7 laws of Internet List Generation.  I thought it would be fun to start the talk with the first slide that shows a Tag Cloud of the most frequently used words in the PowerPoint presentation.

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For about two years now, I’ve been getting calls to act as a consultant for several of my clients.  Normally, this is not my role.  My role at Broadlook, historically, has been envisioning the business logic behind a technology solution, building the product, and then evangelizing the hell out of it.

Sales and recruiting teams, in 22 countries, are power users of Broadlook software solutions.  They are thinking of new ways to leverage technology that I dreamed up…in ways I never dreamed of.  Cool. They are creating their own internal Broadlook corporate training classes, building corporate wiki’s and flying Broadlook Black Belt trainers on-site for advanced training classes.  Very cool.

Here is what bugs me:  They are not talking!   Many clients see the Broadlook tools as a confidential trade secret and an integral component of their business process.  So they won’t talk about what they are doing. Not cool at all.

Here is what happened recently: Read the rest of this entry »

Having worked with many databases as well as having extensive experience in searching the Internet, I thought I’d share some thoughts on the differences between the two.

When I observe people searching the Internet, there is a common mistake I see them making.  Most people search the Internet like they are searching a database. Don’t get me wrong,  the Internet does include databases. Thomas Register, Spoke and Zoominfo are examples of different types of databases. Via different methods, information is added to these data sources and some sort of query mechanism is provided the subscribers. Can you use the Zoom query on Thomas Register and visa versa? No, these are proprietary systems that have search methods specialized to the content inside them. Each of these databases is limited, incomplete, but stored in a homogonous fashion.

The Internet, in its entirety, is not homogonous.
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