Back from US

It's relaxing.

We've seen a lot and it was worth it. Check out our gallery and let us know what you think.

Visiting the Valley

A lot has been happening in the last few days, too much to write it all down. Of all things viewed and done, visiting YCombinator was the coolest one. My eyes started to shine when I first saw company sign from the parking lot near by.

YCombinator & Anybots
I didn't met neither Paul or Trevor, but the guys there were so cool and friendly. They showed me what they're working on - live. They fired up the robot and demoed it's capabilities. I've got my first robot-hug! Awsome! And wall of fame is very interesting too.


Google & Apple
Been there, seen almost nothing. They take security seriously, maybe even a bit too much. As a visitor, you cannot even reach Visitor's lounge... Go figure. Google is huge, could easily be called a village or even small town. Apple is smaller but still nice to see. Oh, and Apple's main address is 1 Infinitive loop... because you can drive around main building in almost perfect circle. Nice hack :-)

All in all a fun trip. A big thanks to Anybots guys! You rock!

America is different

We're here in sf bay, all settled and almost jet lag free. I'm sitting in Aeron chair with 30" screen in front of me. This place, feel and all of he technology around me is pure porn for engineers. Let me start from the beginning.

The 26 hour trip from Ljubljana to San Francisco offered quite some insights on how America works. Business for example. They take it seriously. Not like us, they really push it all the way. On JFK Maja bought Oprah magazine and it has 350+ pages. Oprah's foreword in on page 59. Those 58 pages are all pure commercials. Nothing else! The magazine has articles written on every fifth or sixth page. Everything else is commercials. You can't get away with something like this in Europe. And it's not just Gossip... The Wired magazine I've bought is no different. I expected to be at least as interested as online version. I was wrong. All commercials and only one or maybe two articles worth of reading. It may be just me, but I've expected more from Wired. For a tech-sawy it's worth nothing. But is sells...

Prices. It's a bit more expensive than in most of the Europe. An people still pay. $10 for 2-minute ride it's just a bit too much! I walked. But people still pay. Again, I don't think this would fly in Europe.

SF's vibe. You can really fell it. It's nothing like I've seen or tried before. People are relaxed, kind and mixed in so many different ways. It takes a bit to get used to it. And it's quite windy and foggy.

All in all it's still the best trip I ever had. We'll rent some bikes and cycle the city trough then, we'll head south to visit the Valley.

D Day

It's 6:30am and we're sitting on the airport in Ljubljana waiting for boarding to begin. It's 1:15h flight to Zurich. Still kind of sleepy, 4:45 is just too early for me.

I only took one book this time, as I belive time will be short once we get to SF. We have some plans, but nothing too specific. Sure, I'd like to see Alcatraz, their sea museum (or something similar) and of couse the famous old little train which drives up&down the hill. But we'll see, I don't really want to spend every day chasing museums and sites t see. The beach with my girlfriend and maybe a cup of tea... That's what I'd like.

San Francisco trip gallery

As we'll stroll trough West coast from SF to LA, I'll post some photos and comments on my web album at http://picasaweb.google.com/dh5114/SanFranciscoTrip. Please feel welcome to comment and ask questions.

Content based advertisement, takes two

The server push technology I wrote about few days ago really got me going. I've came up with so many ways to improve site's responsivness it's almost silly. And I can't stop thinking why didn't someone already exploit this opportunities? Where's the catch?

Site chat and user status updates are one of the first things that come up when you start thinking in reverse order. Event based pushing data in user's direction opens many doors, one of them are named content based advertisement. And I don't mean displaying relevant content based on search terms. Searching in this context will only be reasonable when you first start using Internet. Later, all of your online history will be relevant to things you'll see, find and buy online.

Pageviews and banner clicks are what's bringing money theese days. Unique users also count. Ad generators are sending ads to sites on every search action and page reload. It's quite common theese days to have ads displayed in flash object and rotate them lineary without really knowing what users are doing on the site. What a waste of money.

Why wait for user to do something and then send targeted ads? Why not push relevant data to the user right away? You know on what page the user is, what is the page's content and from where he got here. Why wait for user to do something in order to send him ads? You can even track his mouse movement and look over which words or pictures the mouse pointer is. Based on this information you can decide what ads to show him. All this without user's single action. Just using push, instead of pull.

Pushing the ads to the user based on page content, mouse position, browsing history and maybe even time of the day shouldn't be too hard. It's just updating content of an object on the page with some AJAX javascript. How hard can it be?