The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 6)

SM: That is your hypothesis, which is fine. I think there are vertical search cases which have broken out of the pack and been very successful. TC: I do think vertical search works. There is no question that in places people can manage to get themselves established as an idea.

The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 5)

SM: Is there really a high degree of mistrust in Europe? TC: In Ireland you do not give your credit card to a waiter at restaurant. The waiter will bring the machine to your table where you swipe it yourself and enter your PIN. There is a high degree of mistrust.

The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 4)

SM: Based on the way you are approaching the problem, it seems much easier to do relevance in a constrained domain than in an unconstrained domain. TC: Absolutely. Relevance is the idea of constraining things.

The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 3)

SM: How successful is your architecture when it comes to indexing? TC: We now index a lot more pages than other people. Microsoft and Yahoo! have fallen behind in terms of indexing and keeping up with Google. Google will get better with more competition.

The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 2)

SM: Did Anna go to Google after it went public? TC: She went there before it went public. Google was in a total panic as Yahoo! had come out with a competitive product. Google was in a hyper phase of trying to make things better, which is a terrible thing to do. They got nothing

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The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 1)

Tom Costello has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University. His emphasis is artificial intelligence (AI), and aside from teaching he has worked as a researcher at Stanford for DARPA and the U.S. Air Force. He was one of the founders of Xift, and he later worked at IBM. Today his research in the area

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Deal Radar 2008: Baynote

I have written a few pieces on recommendation systems that help sites personalize their offerings. As you know, my thesis on Web 3.0 heavily centers around personalization. In this installment of the Deal Radar, we will be looking at yet another recommendation technology company.

Vision India 2020: Lucid

In 2004, we started investigating the issue of K-12 education, especially in Math and the Sciences. As part of this endeavor, we interviewed a number of teachers at various high schools in the Bay Area. Two nuggets came out of these interviews (1) there is no standardized methodology of teaching (2) there is no methodology

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