Powerset and Powerlabs, roundup

In previous posts, I liveblogged about Powerset's presentation this evening of Powerlabs to a select group of journalists, technologists, and bloggers. The big idea is that Powerlabs (launching in September, ahead of Powerset's search engine) will be a Digg-like site where community members can suggest and vote on Powerset features. Powerset aims to be incredibly open - as Steve Newcomb joked, the only thing stealth about them is that they're in stealth mode.

What Powerset is shooting for is ambitious, and has the potential to greatly improve how we find information on-line. Google has a lot of talent and smarts, but all the major players are doing variants of the same thing - statistical analysis on top of keyword search, an idea that goes back decades to Salton's work on document indexing. Powerset's approach has its roots too - decades of linguistic research and development at Xerox PARC - but turning even the best research platform into an internet search engine requires a lot of work. One example - the core engine they licensed originally took over a minute per sentence to index Wikipedia entries - now, with optimizations, it's down to a second or less. Still pretty CPU intensive, but as Steve Newcomb pointed out, indexing costs are small compared to the normal runtime costs of a popular search engine. At Google scale, Powerset would be profitable even with the increased compute needs.

Steve also made a point of saying that Powerset has never called themselves a Google killer. Still, they're trying to do something that's very cool. If they can do what they demod tonight on a grand scale, I'll switch.

Powerset demo

Part two of my liveblogging from Powerset. They're talking about how they differ with respect to indexing. This helps them with both matching documents and ranking them.

In indexing, they parse each sentence on the page. For example:
'Sir Edward Heath died of pneumonia.'

Here's how they index this sentence.

- extract entities and semantic relationships.
- - expand to find similar entities and abstractions

-In this phase, they understand that:
1. Sir Edward was a UK prime minister - a politician
2. pneumonia is a disease
3. if you died from something, you were killed by it

This is a big change from the search we know (Google). It lets the user phrase their query in a lot of different ways. For instance, Powerset can answer the following:

- 'what killed edward heath'
- 'which prime minister died of pneumonia'
- 'what was sir edward heath killed by'
- 'what politician died from pneumonia'
- 'politician died from disease'

Powerset has so far indexed NY Times corpus, Wikipedia, and is working with Freebase.

Liveblogging from Powerset's Powerlabs demo

Powerset is giving a demo for about 35 partners, journalists, and bloggers right now in San Francisco. I'll be liveblogging this event.

The core team members are introducing themselves now. John Lowe from AskJeeves, Tim Converse from Yahoo, Kevin Clark who's their lead Ruby developer, along with a lot of other Powerset linguists and developers in the room.

Steve Newcomb is about to go into the demo. More in a bit.

Powerset's tantalizing Powerlabs annoucement

Powerlabs Screenshot
Originally uploaded by official_powerset.

Powerset is about to make an announcement of their Powerlabs project. It's going to be a site where they solicit feedback from users in different search domains (travel, entertainment, even porn) about how they use the internet and how they'd like to see search work.

There's talk that they'll also provide access to Powerset search for the lucky users who get to be part of this test.

Keep an eye on Powerset founder Steve Newcomb's blog later today for the official announcement.

Update: the announcement just came out: Powerlabs: the first screenshot.

One week with the OQO 02

Last week, I posted my first impressions of the OQO 02, and I promised to follow up on my initial review. This is my take after one week. I'm happy with the OQO 02 - it lives up to its promise of being a great mobile Vista machine. But with such mobility come a few tradeoffs which I'll get into further into this review.

First, the specs for my machine - it's the "best / vista ultimate / verizon" model. That means it has a 1.5 GHz Via C7-M processor, 1GB of RAM, a 60GB HD, and Verizon wireless (in addition to WiFi and Bluetooth that come standard with all OQO 02s).

The Via processor is a real breakthrough. It's remarkably low-power, comparable to an Intel Pentium-M in power dissipation. This makes it possible for the OQO to get decent performance and 2hrs of battery life (with wireless on) out of a 1lb device.

The Via is no speed demon - qualitatively, it feels like a Pentium-M underclocked to 6oo-800 MHz, but it has one other benefit over Pentiums - a very small die size. This allows OQO to fit more gear within the OQO's case (namely, WiFi, Bluetooth, and WWAN).

Running Vista on an OQO:

Yes, it really works, and it feels pretty snappy too. The very first boot following unboxing took around 3 minutes as Vista got its bearings, but subsequent boot times were just over a minute, with resume from suspend taking 5-10 seconds. I find that it comes up fast enough that I use the OQO whenever I want.

While the OQO 02 is Vista-capable, it doesn't support the advanced eye candy of Vista Aero. I didn't find this a disappointment, as I was coming from an XP Pro platform. What did impress me was that the OQO felt responsive - I had expected Vista to run somewhat sluggishly on the OQO. When the OQO is on its default settings, everything is reasonably responsive. On the most aggressive power saving settings, though, there is some lag between clicking on a menu item and getting a response.

The keyboard:

I've heard that keyboard design is a pet obsession at OQO, and it shows. The OQO has an excellent thumb keyboard. All the weird characters that you'll use heavily on-line - the at-sign, period, colon, and forward slash - are all reasonably placed. Key feel is great for a device this small, and the sticky keys - Fn, Shift, Ctrl, and Alt - are well done with discreet visual cues to indicate their state. The keyboard backlighting is excellent, and turns off automatically in bright ambient light.

Now, no thumb keyboard will ever feel as good or fast as a decent full-size keyboard, or even a 90%-size subnotebook keyboard. In a week's use I still feel mildly frustrated when I try to write entire paragraphs. And trying to use long passwords with punctuation on the OQO is a recipe for insanity. But the thumb keyboard wins in convenience and great design - in its class, the OQO's keyboard is outstanding, putting to shame offerings from much larger companies.

Battery life:

With WiFi or WWAN on, expect two hours of use from a fully charged standard battery. This is a little tight - as soon as I get into work (following 1.5 hrs of OQO use in the morning) I plug it in. This limits the portability of the OQO, as I can't carry it around the office after I arrive. To remedy this, I'm considering ordering the double-capacity battery, which should give me a solid 3 hrs with wireless on.

Carrying options:

Aside from the OQO with XP Tablet Edition, none of the OQOs ship with a case. You will want to get one with yours because, unlike a regular laptop, the OQO's screen is exposed. Readers on the OQO Forum have suggested some third-party solutions (a CaseLogic CD drive case being popular), but OQO also offers three cases of its own: 1) Executive, 2) Belt-clip (standard with the Tablet XP OQO, slide rule not included) and 3) StrongHold. The executive case only fits OQOs with a standard battery, the belt-clip case works with both standard and extended batteries, while the StrongHold comes in separate standard and double-capacity models. The executive case is most corporate of the three, while the StrongHold is my favorite because it's the most durable and has a nice metal finish.

Cases for handhelds often come down to personal preference, but there's an added challenge when buying a case for the OQO 02 - what battery you are using. The only case that lets you use either a standard or extended battery is the belt-clip case. For those of you who, like me, prefer the StrongHold case, my suggestion is to get the StrongHold double-capacity case and find some material to use as a spacer for when you want to use the standard battery.

Wireless networking

The OQO comes with built-in Atheros WiFi (AR5006X chipset) and, on WWAN models either Verizon or Sprint broadband. WWAN models have a retractable external antenna.

WWAN sensitivity is good. Any place my old Verizon wireless card worked, the OQO could lock on.

WiFi sensitivity is adequate - I found that the OQO had some trouble connecting in places where my Fujutsu P7010D subnotebook (which has great WiFi sensitivity) could get a strong signal.

Conclusion after one week of use:

The OQO is a great portable Vista-capable computer. The battery life is a bit short, but the convenience of this small device outweighs the limitations. If you've got the budget, upgrade to the double-capacity battery and the OQO 02 becomes a seriously useful always-connected PC.

Coming up:

In subsequent reviews, I'll review my favorite OQO add-on applications, talk about gaming, and detail my experiences running Linux.

[Correction: a reader pointed out that the belt clip case works with both batteries. I've updated the article to reflect this.]

OQO 02 - first impressions

I ordered an OQO 02 (world's smallest Vista computer) in March after trying a preproduction model at OQO's headquarters in San Francisco (thanks to JH for setting that up). Yesterday, the much in demand handheld, a "Best / Vista Ultimate / Verizon" arrived straight from the factory in Singapore.

Day one impressions

The design of the OQO, from the box it comes in, to the device itself, is cool, modern, and black. I could see Darth Vader putting one on his belt clip.

The OS is straight Microsoft (Vista, with XP also an option), but with small yet significant OQO touches. For one, the computer comes with Firefox. Very nice choice. The OQO helper apps - for screen brightness, wireless, CPU/fan performance, are also well done - both stylish and functional. The latter app is a particular good example. Fan speed vs CPU speed is always a tough tradeoff - the faster the CPU runs, the snappier the performance. But this means the fan has to work harder (and louder) to keep the machine cool. The OQO's app features a slider with two extremes, cooler and quieter. With these two words, both ends of the spectrum sound good - this is a small a bit of design I really appreciate.

Another example of a careful design is the keyboard. On most ultra-portable computers, companies either skip the keyboard (most UMPC have none), or they put on a keyboard that feels like as much of an afterthought as rear seats on a Porsche.

The OQO has a thumb keyboard, and it may be the best of its kind I've ever used. It feels as good as a Blackberry; each key provides tactile feedback and has just enough of separation from its neighbors, that I typed this entire post on it without cramping up or getting frustrated. What's more, the OQO's ambient light sensor turns on the keyboard's bright backlight when you're clicking away in the dark, making it easy to type in situations which would otherwise be challenging (non-backlit thumb keyboards - why does any company think these are good ideas?).

Day one with the OQO 02? A definite success. More on this tiny computer at the one week mark.

OQO 02 delays for models with Verizon EVDO

Word is that while OQO is shipping some OQO 02 models now, direct-ordered top of the line models with Verizon EVDO have been delayed an extra two one to two weeks over Sprint EVDO models, and that the expected ship date for pre-orders of Verizon OQO 02s is now early May (up from an earlier announced date of mid-March to mid-April).

OQO 02 Unboxed

If you're looking forward to the OQO 02, and don't have one in hand yet, Boy Genius's photos of the unboxing of an OQO 02 might tide you over for a few days.

Might.

(via Boy Genius Report)

OQO 02 now shipping

OQO announced today that the OQO 02 is now shipping. I had a chance to try one of the pre-production machines at their office in San Francisco, and I was impressed by the design.

InfoWorld | Freebase, the Semantic Web, and the Metaweb Query API | By Martin Heller

Martin Heller has written a thoughtful technical review of Freebase and the Metaweb Query API in an article titled Freebase, the Semantic Web, and the Metaweb Query API on the Strategic Developer weblog at Infoworld. I recommend that any developer interested in the Metaweb read his review. And if you're really interested, I have three invitations to give away for our alpha test.

At Metaweb, we're making our API as open as possible - here's the documentation. The API allows programmers and web developers to query Freebase via MQL (mickle) the Metaweb Query Language. MQL is not your standard SQL "select user_name from users where ..." syntax because our database allows for a great deal of expressiveness and connections between objects with varying schemas.

If you want to ask questions and learn more, our dev team posts on the Freebase Dev Blog. For executive-level discussions about Freebase and the philosophy behind it, see Robert Cook's blog, Freebasics.

In addition to the API and MQL, we've also open-sourced (BSD dual-clause license) a web toolkit called MJT (midget). MJT is influenced by Kid and Genshi, and allows developers to query and display information with the rendering done in-browser. It's a nice way to create data-driven applications without a separate app server. Javascript has come a long way.

Here's a MJT documentation excerpt.

* * *

MJT Templates

Mjt is an HTML templating engine that runs entirely in a web browser. It was built for the Freebase service, but it can be used for many other web services. It is distributed as open source.

Mjt makes it very simple to take data from a web service and format it in a browser, with no server support. The templates are hosted and delivered as static HTML, and they are compiled and applied entirely in Javascript.

Mjt is particularly useful with services that return JSON values and accept a callback= parameter, such as the Freebase service and the Yahoo JSON API. With these services you can use mjt to build "mash-ups" that incorporate data from services on multiple hosts.For a step-by-step introduction to the mjt template language as well as an example of mjt in action, see the intro tour.

Freebase and Creative Commons

I just got back from SXSW, and there was a really positive response to Freebase from the people I met.

I think that our decision to make Freebase data available via the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-by) license is a big part of the positive reaction -- people are willing to share when they know that the sharing goes both ways.

Freebase invite contest

Now I'm looking for people who have data to share and would like to try out Freebase. So I'm holding a contest - if you want to use Freebase, post a comment and tell me why you are interested. The three best submissions between now and Friday, March 23 will get invites to our alpha test.

Whether you're a regular user, a programmer who wants to use an API, or have an interesting data set that you'd like to share with the world, you've got a chance.