Brad Horowitz talked at UMich today. Here are unedited notes….(well, lightly edited).
I was deliciousing links along the way too.
thanks for coming! good to hear the talk.
some notes:
john laird introduces; yahoo speaker series.
bradley grew up in flordia, moved to michigan, “flower king” in livonia
michigan, gymnast in high school. as undergrad in ATL down in the lab
doing all kinds of ramesh jain, terry weymouth, brian shunk (sp??)
from here we lost him to mit media lab to entrepreneur with ramesh,
a bunch of companies, most recently landed at yahoo. vp product strategy.
another indication of us building relationships with yahoo. connections.
—
here to convince you to work with or work at; phd dropout, stay in school kids.
thank my host, incredible day, saw my parents in livonia, overwhelmed by the
work today and its resonance with yahoo. working with us despite us and
around us. a lot to make that easier.
the worst student to stand up in front of you all and profess to have knowledge.
almost failued out a couple of times. came in as CS via LSA and took great books
and history of music and art and not interested in requirements. instead up in
ATL building having fun. took 6 years to get degree and graduate. like george
costanza, scholarship for “rebel bad students”, on teh verge of dropping out.
really cool job, now VP Advanced Development Divions, “VP ADD”. advanced
in the sense of a scout on the horizon, what’s next.
career: looking for first real job, a place to park between startups, fell into yaho0
(after virage…) attitude lasted for a day. quality and caliber of people there. not
a company crowing about how smart they are, “very humble guys”. taken by
level of their game. one report, doing multimedia search, image search; launched
video, audio, desktop search. then stumbled across flickr.
helped bring flickr to acquire them. poster child for web 2.0 movement. user-generated
content, rich interfaces with ajax.
runs speaker series for yahoo, brought in Negativland band for IP theft
——-
why do you find the internet depressing? you see what people are
actually doing with this stuff, stupid pet tricks or worse. brings out
the worst in people in a lot of ways.
the antidote is the most interesting photos on flickr.
heuristics that separate the wheat through the chaff, through
the lens of personal
“attention is our most precious asset”
flickr – “lowering the barrier to participation”
flickr compared to computer vision; “computer vision is hard”;
man plus machine, not man versus machine.
what makes flickr special?
4. flickr services, api, language bindings, encourage 3d parties
to make flickr bettr.
“this is emergent”.
“community and themselves monitor that”
—
Edward Vielmetti +1 734 330 2465
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