We are Gerger (www.gerger.co), the creators of Formspider (www.theformspider.com), the Web 2.0 framework for Oracle PL/SQL developers. We are preparing a new version of our product and we would like to renew our product web site www.theformspider.com along with it.
Our product Formspider is for a specific group of developers namely, the Oracle PL/SQL developers. It's mainly used in mid to large size companies to build Budgeting, Accounting, Order Management, HR, ERP etc.. software.
Current Web site was done by us a year and a half ago. It's nice but building web sites is not our focus. The site is also showing its age.
Formspider impresses our users with its simple and elegant design. It is perceived as an unusually high quality, very innovative product built with care and attention to detail. We would like our new web site reflect these facts.
We want a simple yet beautiful design in our web site. Readable large fonts, excellent copyright, gorgeous pictures, icons and screen shots should provide a enjoyable experience to the visitor. We don't want run of the mill, stock photos, icons and text anywhere on the site. Each page needs to be individually crafted and be of excellent quality.
The entire goal of the web site is to reflect the high quality of our product.
Our favorite product, company web sites are www.apple.com (you should have seen this coming at this point :-) ) and http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/
We've been struggling to find a freelancer or a team that can get this done. I thought of asking you on HN hoping that you can help.
Our background is PL/SQL and Oracle Forms. We were annoyed with the way web applications are supposed to be built nowadays. We wanted to build the Forms for the 21st century, and Formspider is just that. It is an intuitive, elegant framework that just feels right to build applications with. A framework that empowers you, eliminates all the drudgery of the Web but embraces all its beauty. Once you start using it, you will never want to build with anything else.
NB: I just removed one extra word, changed "build" to "built" in one instance, and combined a sentence. I didn't do a full re-write.
Yeah quite a few. I haven't updated the site in almost 6 months + there are NDA issues with a few. So until they launch can't add some of them to my folio.
Yes I noticed too. :-). Hope all is well with PlaceChallenge. I looked your work. Quite nice. Did you make any other product web sites other than PlaceChallenge web site?
Hi Author here. Thank your for the harsh words. I guess I gotto take it to the chin.
Please allow me explain my point in another way. I think Siri is to A.I. what Apple II is to computers. Does this analogy explain what I am trying to tell better?
I think that was clear from the article. What jenius, I think, was saying is that you don't offer much support for this claim. How, for example, can startups get on the AI-as-a-service bandwagon without having the resources and experience of a company like Apple?
Exactly right john_b... the author's follow-up comment addressed nothing that I said, just made another baseless claim - that "I think it's like the apple II of computers". Why? What makes it like the apple II? You have to back yourself up. I personally think they are nothing alike, and here's why:
The Apple II was a revolution of personal computing. It brought the personal computer to the masses, and made it infinitely more accessible in both form and function. The form and parts for the Apple II became the base for all other computers. Nobody had ever made anything like the Apple II before. The Apple II on its own sold like crazy, and brought the entire company to success. Siri is a small piece of software on an already successful device (which is significantly more 'revolutionary' that siri on its own). The idea for siri has been come up with and implemented many times before, in the exact same manner (see the many android comments). Apple just worked really hard on it and they allegedly did a good job.
Hey the author again. :-). It is true that in the article, I did not explain why I think that the era of A.I. started on October 4th. The article starts with the assertion that it has begun and moves on from there. I guess more than anything, the article is a call for action. I wanted the discussion to start and it did.
If I can present my chain of thoughts leading up to my decision in an interesting way I may write another article called "Why I think Siri is the Next Big Thing".
But here is my chain of thought for the curious mind in a very crude way:
What I did was to observe the moves of Apple and try to figure out their strategy. I put together the information that is available on the Internet. I connected the dots.
I knew Apple bought Siri for about $200 mil. I knew about Siri's history. You don't buy voice recognition software for this price. I watched the Mossberg-Jobs interview where Mossberg keeps insisting that Siri is in the search area and Jobs keep correcting him saying no Siri is in the A.I. area. I watched how the critical question "What are you going to do with it?" got lost during the conversation. When Mossberg said that the iPad is great for consumption but not for creation, it was very clear that Jobs did not see it like that at all. I also watched some Apple videos from late 80's which depicts a professor talking to his computer and getting his daily business done. It seemed to me that they had this vision all along and now they were implementing it.
Then I realized how iCloud fits in to this all. With the introduction of Siri it was clear to me that the next frontier the competition is moving to is A.I. Apple is going all in. IBM is pushing hard. Apparently, Google is baking some stuff.
While I was thinking about all these and trying to find its meaning, the interview between Fred Wilson and Carlota Perez helped me to put it all in context.
I think this is the time to invest in A.I. If a VC expects huge returns from his investment in 5-7 years, I think A.I. is the right way to go. If an entrepreneur wants to do something amazing, I think A.I. is the right way to go. My speculation is in 1-2 years this is going to be all we talk about.
I think A.I. is where the puck is going now. I might be wrong, I might be right. We will know soon enough.
I have thoughts on the particular question you asked too. But I cannot cram every bit Of thought I have to one blog post. It would make a terrible article. This article makes a prediction baldly. It asserts a threshold in A.I. is crossed and it's implications will be big. Diverging into startup funding in this area would just not fit in well. That deserves its own post. :-)
Also guys -- remember smarterchild? Did just about the same thing in terms of the artificial intelligence (not the voice recognition, but that wasn;t the author's point)... how long ago was that?
No, no and god no. Siri is not voice recognition. It is not even in the same universe as the voice control in Android.
And yes of course A.I. will use one or more search engines to look information up. But Google might not necessarily be one of them and consumers will not care two cents as long A.I. gets the job done. My point it that A.I. will fly over Google's moat unless it is Google's A.I.
So does Google, I am pretty sure it remembers your previous searches and knows therefore that if you are searching for "Paris" you mean the city and not "Paris Hilton" (or vice versa).
Kind of like how I just typed "When is thanksgiving day?" and Google told me the date. It understood my question and gave me the answer. How does Siri differ?
Try "will it rain tomorrow", or "should I wear a coat tomorrow"? Siri is an answer engine that tries to determine the meaning of your query and answer it. Google in recent years has started to add those capabilities to it's search interface, but it is not there yet.
Siri is much more like Wolfram Alpha or IBM's Watson then a standard search engine.
Bullshit - Siri has some special loops for recognizing questions about date, location and the weather. That's it. It really is not more advanced than "call xyz", except it not only uses the address book, but also the calendar and the weather service.
... Siri is a front-end to Wolfram Alpha and other data providers. It roughly identifies what you're looking for and forwards it along to the best data provider. Google has the advantage of being one of those data providers.
I won't judge siri, as I do not know the details of technology or the machine learning algorithms used by it, but I would say this much: your one line pitch might just impress some businessweek readers but I don't think a really cool technology needs punchlines like that (..apple II..) - your article sounds like its coming from a non-technical observer for a non-technical audience - and that would be okay if the product had passed the stage of hype into early stages of common usage.
At this stage though I am more interested in how is it different from 100s of other AI applications that failed to take over the world or become the next big thing.
My need to criticize primarily came from your last paragraph where you are appealing to developers to jump in without realizing that that segment of your audience looks not very respectfully at phrases like 'buckle up' and 'amazing ride'
Hi, Author here. I think you make an excellent point. I think the revolution will start from small things where it is OK to make an error. Stuff like Siri does. Then it will move on to productivity tools or the like...where it is still OK to make a mistake. And A.I. will improve really fast, like the PC has improved. I think in 5-10 years we won't believe what we have accomplished. I think Siri crosses an important threshold.
Didn't know about Google. They might be working on something but I don't know of any production use of their A.I. software.
We are Gerger (www.gerger.co), the creators of Formspider (www.theformspider.com), the Web 2.0 framework for Oracle PL/SQL developers. We are preparing a new version of our product and we would like to renew our product web site www.theformspider.com along with it.
Our product Formspider is for a specific group of developers namely, the Oracle PL/SQL developers. It's mainly used in mid to large size companies to build Budgeting, Accounting, Order Management, HR, ERP etc.. software.
Current Web site was done by us a year and a half ago. It's nice but building web sites is not our focus. The site is also showing its age.
Formspider impresses our users with its simple and elegant design. It is perceived as an unusually high quality, very innovative product built with care and attention to detail. We would like our new web site reflect these facts.
We want a simple yet beautiful design in our web site. Readable large fonts, excellent copyright, gorgeous pictures, icons and screen shots should provide a enjoyable experience to the visitor. We don't want run of the mill, stock photos, icons and text anywhere on the site. Each page needs to be individually crafted and be of excellent quality.
The entire goal of the web site is to reflect the high quality of our product.
Our favorite product, company web sites are www.apple.com (you should have seen this coming at this point :-) ) and http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/
We've been struggling to find a freelancer or a team that can get this done. I thought of asking you on HN hoping that you can help.
Best, Yalim