C++ Interview Questions - Finance

Finance is a bitch of an environment to work in, especially if you are coding in C++! You can end up spending endless hours staring at tiny bits of strings and numbers, wondering what the hell is happening. It can get to be quite a bit of a pain, as the problem is compounded with real time data, and if you are working with something like NASDAQ, you can be looking at 27 GB of data a day! That's pretty much alot of trades, but NASDAQ is pretty much as big as the whole of Europe combined in the number of trades that go on during the day (So whomever said the USA is declining as a superpower, please get a clue - far from it).

Anyway, I've always had issues finding any conclusive interview preparation when it came to programming and finance, because what I think that there is a critical gap between the developers and the bankers, a sort of digital divide, that the bankers are pretty much idiots when it comes to technology, and all us developers have taken jobs with NO FINANCE EXPERIENCE REQUIRED at the bottom of the job description........ I don't know what can be done to fix that, and i dont really care because I've done my own homework when it comes to finance. So maybe some time when am not stressed about that damn feed handler, I'll propose a new recruitment philosophy and arrogantly blog about it.

So to the meat. Here are some questions (and answers mind you) I have encountered, whether through being interviewed or interviewing, or just plain day-to-day issues I came across.

In no particular order:

1) How many vtables do you have in any particular program?

A: C++ maintains a virtual table for each class within your program.

2) What is the difference between allocating memory using new and malloc ? What are the disadvantages of malloc?

A: New allocated memory on the heap, while malloc allocates memory on the stack. Memory allocated using the heap will live throughout the lifetime of the program, while malloc goes out of scope as soon as the method/class it is contained in returns. Malloc is also bad as it can lead to memory leaks, and running out of memory if we do not free the memory we allocate. In addition, malloc will allocate a fixed chunk of memory that is static and must be set by the user, while that is left up to the system when you use new. New also invokes the destructor automatically

4) What is the difference between free and realloc ?

5) What are the four methods that are provided for you with by default when a class is invoked?

A: Constructor, destructor, copy constructor and assignment

6) How many bits in a byte? Give an example of where you would want to use bit manipulation in a financial context.

A: 8 bits in a byte. If you are receiving messages from a trade, you may want to move pointers around the bits and bytes to read through them.

7) So you are receiving messages from an exchange - in a tag->value format. What would be a suitable data structure to use ?

A: A map.

8) So you are using a map, what is the disadvantage of using erase()

A: when u erase an element from a map, the map reshuffles, and ur pointer may either be pointing to null, or to a different location in the map.

9) What is the size of a pointer?


10) What is the difference between a shared pointer, an auto pointer and a regular pointer.

share and auto pointers are smart pointers. Smart pointers own the object they point to, and thus are responsible for deleting it (calls delete on itself). An auto pointer is a regular pointer wrapped by an object that owns this pointer, and deletes it when that object goes out of scope. Shared pointers compliment auto pointers, and you don't need to know who owns it. When the last shared pointer for an object in memory is destructed, the wrapped pointer will also be deleted.

11) What is a pure virtual function? What would be a scenario when u would need to declare a virtual function as pure?

A: A pure virtual function has no implementation and it usually belongs to a parent in a parent-child class hierarchy. Rather the implementation is left to the inherited class- yet pure virtual functions force inherited classes to implement that function, yet when that method is not pure, the child class does not need to implement it. (Although it can).

12) What is the difference between overloading and overriding?

A: Overriding is usually in inheritance, that u override a function in the base class by re-implementing it in the child class, usually by having the same function with a different implementation, while you overload operators or functions that have the same name but different signatures are thus overloaded. Another flavor of overloading would be operator overloading, where u can use the + operator to add an integer to a pointer for example.

12) What is the recommended maximum level of inheritance in any number of classes?

A: Try to restrict your parent child relationship to 3 levels : parent-child-grandchild. Deeper levels can lead to circular references and confusion.

13) Assume you have a child class, and you declare an object of type of the base class in the child class. That object is pointing to a method in the child class. What happens when you delete the pointer? (An asshole in New York asked me this during an interview)

A: (This one still escapes me, if anyone has an answer or better explanation, give me a shout).

14) What is the difference between private and protected?

A: Private functions are private to the class itself, and its children, but none else. Methods declared as protected are accessible by friend classes.

15) What are forward declarations?

A: Forward declarations allow us to declare objects before providing definitions for them. That's probably why you would need to declare ur methods in ur header files first. You can use them in ur program and it would compile even before u implement them (or just have an empty { } implementation).

16) What is an abstract class?

A: An abstract class is a class containing at least one abstract method - an abstract method is a method declaration without any implementation.

17) What is the difference between a copy constructor and constructor ?

A: A copy constructor is a constructor that takes an object of itself as an argument:

class MyObject (MyObject A);

18) What is the lookup time of a hash table? How about sorting it? What can be the worst case scenario?

A: O(1) for lookup, O(logn) for sorting. The worst case scenario for hash table sorting is O(n) if heavy chaining occurs - i.e. lots of collisions with all elements having the same hash value.

19) What is the lookup time for a Binary Search Tree? How about sorting it?

A: O(logn) for lookup, O(nlogn) for sorting.

20) What is the reference of a null pointer?

A: Null pointers always point to reference 0 (zero).

21) What is a vector?

A vector is a dynamic array of any data type. The associated methods are pop(), push_back(element), size()

22) What is the difference between string messages and packets?

A: That depends on what your packet looks like, but the general idea is that packets have a header and a trailer, with checksums and CRCs that could allow you to reconstruct lost or partially received messages.

23) What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a TCP-based connection? How about UDP?

24) Can you implement a queue with two stacks? How about a stack with two queues?

25) Which of these tuples are alike? Why?

AABBCCDEE - 11233445566 - EEFFGGHII ,

AAABBBDDD - AAABBBCCC - CCCDDDEEE

11375500 - 09455901

ABCAABC - XXXYZZZ

Answer: In fact, all the above are alike except AAABBBDDD- AAABBBCCC - CCCDDDEEE because there is not enough information to make an assumption.

a - AABBCCDEE - 11233445566 - EEFFGGHII are alike because if there is only one byte that is alternating its position. For alphabetics based strings, the 3rd bit from the right-most side is a single digit and its alternating position to become the 3rd byte from the left most position for numeric based strings.

b-113755900 - 094559001 , this is a time indication. 11:37:55:900 (hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds

c-ABCAABC - XXXYZZZ : these are palindroms from the look of it.

27) Give an example where u would need to use bit shifting.

28) In Finance, time and timezones are of essence.

29) What is multiple inheritance? What are its advantages and disadvantages?

Multiple inheritance is mainly a C++ charachteristic, that allows classes to inherit from more than one class (disallowed in Java). The disadvantage is that it may lead to ambiguity.

29) In binary trees, describe preorder, postorder and inorder traversal.


More questions to come.

Reading List

One of my many issues, is that I have too many hobbies, too much interest in a multitude of things, too little time and too short of an attention span. Although, reading, is one of my more enduring hobbies, that has yet to fall of the wagon - no reference to party related wagons ha ha ho ho.....

Anyway, I try to keep a list of the books i've read online (usually on my facebook) , because I just simply forget what I read and I am too lazy to actually keep the books themselves or a physical list of them. Seinfeld was kind of right when he wondered why George wanted his books back from his ex-girlfriend, when he has already read them!

True, although, it's nice to have a library- we have a huge one at my Dad's place, and I try to send him the books I read to store them, coz I tend to loose, or spill coffee on them - and one can always go back to them. Techie or no techie I am not into these e-books crap, I still enjoy flipping through pages , and having a room full of books and papers and scribbles - well, at least until I move again.

So here is my list: (I forgot some books, and some of the authors, so take this with a pinch of salt)

• Nasser, the Last Arab – Anne Alexandre (Biography)
• Seeds of Hate - Lawrence Pintack (Politics, Lebanon & USA)
• The Four Seasons - Faisal Ziadeh (Arabic, Biography of Lebanese Author)
• To Kill a Mocking Bird - Harper Lee (Story on Black Oppression in USA)
• The Republic - Plato (Classic)
• The Epic of Gilgamesh - (Classic)
• A Cage without Bars - Ibrahim Yared (Memoirs)
• The Odysse - Homer (Classic)
• Confessions - St. Augustine (Classic)
• 20,000 Leagues under the Sea - Jules Verne (French, Fiction - Classic)
• Fermat's Enigma - John Lynch (Mathematics, Science and History)
• E= mc2 - David Bodannis (Science and History)
• The Strategy of Games Theory (Mathematics)
• David Cooperfield - Charles Dickens (Classic)
• Les Miserables - (Classic)
• Out of Place - Edward Said ( Autobiography)
• War and Peace – Edward Said (Politics)
• The Secrets of World Espionage - **** (Research)
• The Muslim Christian-Tarif Khalidi (Arabic - Research)
• Islam - A. Guillaume (English, Research)
• Sunday, Friday - *** (Culture and Religion)
• Lebanon - A quintessential culture - *** (Culture)
• Above the Rim - Nelson George - (History of the USA)
• Selected Articles on the History of the United States - (Politics)
• Away from My Desk- Rif K. Haffar (Adventure, Personal Experience)
• Michelle Aoun, Dream or Fantasy - Sarkis Naoum (Politics, Lebanon)
• No More Leaning On Lamp posts - Managing Uncertainty the Nick Charles Way - By Ian O. Angell (Business)
• Free Software, Free Society - By Richard M. Stallman (Computer Science, Philosophy)
• Does IT Matter?: Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage - By: Nicholas G. Carr (Business and Information)
• The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia - By David Hoffman (Political Economics)
• In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind - by Eric R. Kandel (Science)
• Listen Rida – Anis Freiha (Culture, Lebanon)
• Before I forget – Anis Freiha (Culture, Lebanon)
• Cross Roads to Civil War - Kamal Salibi (Politics,Lebanon)
• Global Political Economy - Robert Gilpin (Political Economy)
• The Road Ahead - Bill Gates (Technology)
• This Side of Peace - Hannan Ashrawi (Politics, Palestine and the Middle East)
• My Life - Ahmad Amin (Biography)
• Assad , The Struggle for the Middle East - Patrick Seal (Politics, Biography of Syrian President Hafez el-Assad)
• The World Is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century - Thomas L. Friedman (Politics, Economics )
• The Google Story - by David A. Vise (Business)
• The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer- by D. Leavitt (Biography)
• Democratizing Innovation - By Eric Von Hippel (Economics)
• From Beirut to Jerusalem - by Thomas L. Freidman (Politics)
• When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management - By Roger E. Lowenstein (Finance)
• The New Barbarian Manifesto: How to Survive the Information Age - Ian O. Angell (Business and Information )
• Rafic Hariri and the Fate of Lebanon - Marwan Iskandar (politics)
• China Inc - David A. Friedman (Economics)
• 50 Years with the People - Youssef Salem
• Software as Capital
• Fooled By Randomness - Nicholas Nassim Taleb (Finance )
• The English : A portrait of a People - Jeremy Paxman
• The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
• The Last Lecture - Randy Paush (Memoir)
• Bear-Trap: The Fall of Bear Stearns and the Panic of 2008 (Finance)
• Beiurt I Love You - Zena El-Khalil (Memoir)
• Lord of The Flies (G. Golding)

and I already have these books in my room, and yet to be read, hoping 2009 will see them covered!

• Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (Satire)
• The Black Swan - Nassim Taleb (Finance)
• The Wealth of Nations- Adam Smith (Classic)
• Killing Mr. Lebanon - Nicholas Blanford (Politics)
• Rafic El-Hariri - The Phenomenon - (Biography)
• Welcome to Everytown - Julian Baginni (Culture)
• Six Days - How the 1967 War Shapped the Middle East - Jeremy Bowen (Politics)

and a whole load of books I need to read! My Italian seriously needs to be attended to, and so does my C++ skills, so that calls for some readings, besides my already well blogged (blabbered) about tri-interests to which this infamous blog is entitled.

50+ books isn't much is it? I quote my good man Prof. Carsten Sorensen when he said "Some of you will read more books in a year that people would read in a lifetime" - well, I dread being the latter, and strive to be in the latter, every year. Although, on the flip side, I had a joke with another former professor of mine, Prof. Yahya Sadowski, when I walked into his office stacked with a wealth of books,

Me: "Doc, you read all these books right?"

Doc: "No, I just don't like empty shelves."

Yeah, I need three lifetimes and a time capsule to catch with his readings!

Tales from the Basement - Mergers and Acquisitons (2)

So in a previous post, I talked about M&A and how difficult it can be for someone to be M&A'd, because that requires a lengthy and tiresome process of integration and people shuffling and most importantly, resource allocation.

Well when it comes to technology, acquiring companies is a way of living, or to be more exact, a survival tool. Talking to someone at IBM, who's been there for 25 years, and is now on the Domino project, he said that today, on average IBM acquires a company every three months. that's in line with Domino, which is a meta software, I.e. a software that manages software. Well, wat is important in this point is the managing software bit. For a company like IBM, which is, according to my friend Kags (an IBM alum), is that the company is just too corporate, and that it takes a lot of effort and people to get the ball rolling on a project from scratch. So sometimes, its just easier to just buy a company with a working product.

But when they do that, there are 4 decision

1) business as usual: the small company has a good idea, its working and its staff are performing. With a little more push, resources and money, they can go to the next level,. The aquiring company can take them there, and everyone shares the profit. Example : Smith Barney

2) the idea: the aquiring company just wants the idea, with its patents and copyrights, when it can use its own staff to gut it and rebuild it. This is when it gets ugly, because that means people will be fired, job description will be rewritten and previous work may be chucked out.

3) client base : sometimes the company just want the clients and exposure to the market , throwing money at it, allocating engineers and staff, and providing with a wealth of resources. Example: YouTube. (Google just wanted the exposure and retaining as much users in its realm as possible)

4) Hostile Markets: Sometimes, small companies are like little thorns in a bigger company's side, and they are stealing clients from them, and well, that company is running the risk of loosing some clients, and if that company gains enough momentum, or enough small companies spring up and start merging, small fish may become bigger and evolve into serious threats. So, for the monolith company, its just easier to buy out the smaller company out of the market. Often, this is the whole point of the small fish anyway, is to be bought out, because they got the idea, and they really want to get more money for it, because it's not really there intention to make a long term business, but rather just cash in now on their idea. So, they come up with the idea, build something around, get a proof of concept going, and sell it to the highest bidder. (My style of companies) . Example of a killer whale: Microsoft. Example of small threats becoming a risk: Intel and AMD.

So basically that is the logic behind M&A, from a managerial side. I am not talking about M&As at banks, because these idiots are just out to make the cut on the sale and the aftermath is least of their concern. (Much like consulting, which I also hate).

Street Smarts

I was up to my old habit of wandering around the city, alone with my thoughts. Walking down one of the streets in East London, I notice an attractive young blonde kind of strolling around, except she wasn't exactly walking in a straight line. As I get closer, I relaize that she actually didn't look normal, turning around as if looking for something. Passing by, there was a car with two guys also looking at the blonde with a bit of a surprise. As we both become aware of each other looking at her, I make the gesture and the dude in the car goes "Oh right", as we both realize the woman is obviously on crack, as he almost climbed into the back seat to get a last glimpse of her curves as the car pulled away and I keept walking.....

I keep wondering what it takes to be an entrepreuneur, like the Richard Bransons, the Donald Trumps and the Alan Sugars. I am not talking about the Larry Pages and the Mark Zuckerbergs, or the John Paulsons, Vladimir Potanins, or the Rothschilds , because all those people started from something: The Stanfords and Harvards, or the Politics and the Connections. Am talking about those people who cam from mediocre, or just plain ordinary backgrounds, and made their way, all by themselves, to the top. The husslers, the streak entrepreuneurs, the capitalists. I guess it takes a lot of things, and a shit load of luck, but all these people have one thing in common:

Street smarts.

They say a great salesman can sell t0 water to a fish. These people know all about grass roots- and grass roots is where it all is, because that's where the real hunger starts. It's a jungle out there, and everyone is out to get theirs, and if that's what it takes, get you along the way. It's a competitive world, and in order to survive it, one should know his way around things and people. You can have all the degrees in the world, all the money and all the connections, but to be a player (Billy Harris RIP), you have to be street smart. A street smart person knows how to operate with very little, in a cut-throat environment.

When everyone was a kid, we went through high school. We were all bullied at some point, we got into trouble, we got ratted out, but people survive. Although that's where you start finding your route: some take the bullying and the crap, and stick to the books. Others bully and are on the opposite end, but in the middle you got a few who are a bit of both, the role players. This is when they learn what it means to be on each end, and to survive, they do the talking, the walking, and try to make the best out any situation. In high school, it's all in the open. You know who the nerds are, and you know who the bullies are. You have rules, and you have enforcers. Well identified.

In the real world, this, sadly isn't the case. It's all fair game, and you don't always know who you are playing with. Street smart people can operate in any environment, because, they know how to work the players. It's a business man or a car dealer, they do the sweet talking, they do the bullshiting, they know the math, and they understand the psychic (and if they are good, the women, too). They can lunch it in Hackney or the Bronx tonight, catch the subway to Chez Charles and catch the stretch ride to the Ritz. It's all people, you just have to know who and what the person you are dealing with.

The one thing that defines street smarts, is to be able to think on your feet, literally. Not in the comfort of the boardrom or on a noisy trading floor, but when your wallet was stolen and your phone battery is dead......in the Saudi desert. The street smart, is the dude who can catch a camel ride, dine with the nomads, and find a charger for his phone. What people like Richard Branson can do, is not only that get to that boardroom meeting, but make friends with the nomad, who in some crazy twist of event, can end up being the heir Prince of Arabia, and send some some serious bailout money to one of your credit-crunched companies.
That LSE degree sure is essential in that board meeting, but that means jack all in the desert! That's when street smarts comes into play. The degrees and the money work for alot of cases, but when that no longer does, the street smart man, knows that when they are gone, he still has something to work with, because he has....the grass roots savvy, and knows, that his biggest asset, are the people.

No refs, no rules.........no problem................

The Old Facebook Stupidity

You know what I dislike? It's people's abuse of the internet, and I am not talking about the hackers, crackers, spammers or scammers. Although, what I hate, is when people really think they can control the way the internet works, and that they can set the pace on how its used. (Sure users are the source of revenue but those who really understand users know that users are idiots and will keep coming back anyway. There is a sucker born every minute- I love this quote)

Back to the point.

I got two facebook accounts, more email accounts than fingers, and I don't know how many online accounts and logins on every website you can think of. It's just something that you have to come and accept that all this user activity we log, is simply unavoidable, and if you want to survive the informatin age, you just have to live with it.

An example of something I hate about user idiocy, is this "Bring back the old facebook" stupidity. Alot of people, actually most, people on the internet are completely ignorant of how the internet works, or how online communities work, or either of them. Sure, the thing about online communities is that they have no rules, and anyone can "start" a movement. I am not going to talk about online communities, that's actually an interesting thing to talk about. What really bugs me and spurred this post is how people don't understand how the internet evolves and will evolve, and that they think they can stop things if they get enough people behind it.

Go shout yourself.

For example, there is a group on facebook "4,000,000 to bring back the old facebook" and they are probably at like 3 million members so far. Utter stupidity. Facebook has changed its look and feel 3 times in the last 18 months, and none of these groups stopped them from doing that. And surprise surpise, out of the 3 million+ who joined these groups like idiots (sorry am using the word alot) did not leave facebook just because they didn't like the new look. Ha! that would be a laugh. They are simply too addicted and attached to it to leave, no matter how it looks. As long as it gets them to stupidly advertise themselves in a self-perceived-look-of-themselves-that-is-completely-different-than-reality, plaster their drunk pics, their lame social life, and their stupid ideas, then they will keep coming back. The only difference between facebook and other websites is that they do there changes in-your-face style, which I kind of like.

Take Amazon for example. If you take a look at the Amazon website 4 years ago, it would be much different. Yet, Amazon chose to introduce changes (recommendations, ratings, new products, etc etc...) gradually, and in a more subttle way, that users just evolved with it. Amazon probably has more users than facebook, but these users are a little more focused on the "in-out" idea (although this is changing also as more social networking features get added to amazon): find what you want, browse, buy, leave. But facebook is a passtime website, and users tend to spend longer time on it, and use the features, and hence notice them. And sometimes, don't like the way they change because its not the way they are used to..... but, they won't leave, because no else will !! There are 70 + million users, and growing, and as long as users think of self-advertising themselves on facebook, whatever Mr. Zuckerberg and co. at facebook decide to do, the users will accept.... well, as long as they don't start charging them for having an account. (Every wants free advertising )

Yet on the flipside, the crap thing about the changing online community is that business, like everything will set the pace on the evolution of the internet, is that it will go mainstream and become less fun. What facebook started off as something for fun and messing about making fun of each other and creating this virtual persona that had nothing to do with reality. Ribaldry (or manyake as we would say in Lebanon) was king, and I could up anyone by one, throw bad ass jokes on walls and portray myself as Chris Rock with a twist, it was fun. But when cats started using it to brag about how many friends they have, who they work for, what countries they travelled and how popular with girls they are, it all went wrong. And for people like me its now just another email concept of connecting with people- with less hassle on attachments. Check this post.

Bottom line, users are stupid, and smile, you are being exploited, because no one is leaving. As long as the girl thinks she can get back at her boyfriend by posting pics of her going out and having a blast, and as long as guys think they can get laid through facebook , everyone will keep coming back. I need to make a group called "all stupid facebookers"

It's shit that I now have to watch my mouth, even on facebook. Damn you majority.

Where Internet Search Fails - Outsmart Google

You know, the thing about being a geek is that it is a charachter. Something inborn that you can't change. You can become a financier, you can become a businessman, an artist or a comedian, but its this thing that when you retire to your room, in your warm comfy bed, free of society and alone with your thoughts that is when who you truly are surfaces, when no one is looking.
I am a lot of things, but, end come to end, I am a geek, and a techie geek (geek by definition is someone passionate about something so much it defines him- it's not restricted to technology- u can be a photography geek, or a stamp geek....). I always wanted to be a techie, coz I always was a geek. I do it for the joy. It's a geek's world, and a techie heaven, and I always wanted to be the guy who makes people look silly when it came to computers. Now I am one, and I may be into a lot of things, like running the London Bridge Festival club, and being into finance and business, but, when someone slightly mentions anything remotely techie, I drift away on techie tangents and the internals of how it works yada yada yada... you can't run away from who you are.

This is by far, a geek post, with a capital G.

Anyway, we were talking the other day about search engine optimization, and I instantly broke it down in my mind, following my usual habit of coming up with an innovative idea, building a business around it and running it to the ground of its flaws within 30 minutes. (bad, bad habit , come on bright idea please come! am poor!) .

I am sure you all heard about this small company called Google. Well, they are big on internet search. Besides the fact that I believe that the main reason Google is so successful is that they have an empty, basic, homepage, with just the search bar. It's human psychology- simplicity - is the way to keep people coming back. Now, behind that search bar, is the famous PageRank algorithm, u know where Google does its calculations of how high the page should rank by computing all these different factors, such as inbound links, outbound links, keywords, meta tags, and the works. The idea behind this is to come up with a number, that is associated with each page, related to a given search querry, and these pages accordingly.

In addition, they have something called an index, which, is something like hashtable to which each and every page (and I mean each- well almost) page on the internet hashes to one value within that table. So, when you have that index, and you compute a page's hashvalue based on the PageRank algorithm, u'll get your search engine results, ranked by the closest match between your querry, and the hashvalue within that index. The complete equation is not completely released by Google, or any of the other search engines on the web, but the idea is that they try to "approximate" what the closest value in that index is related to your querry.

Trick: if you want to get a rough estimate of the size of Google's index, just enter a random large string of characters like "fdjadkmfjakjfdakjsangfkjgsafsa" in Google, and u will get like 1 or zero results in the search, but it will say "Results 1 - 10 of about 19,000,000,000 pages" which you can estimate the number of pages in Google's index. Lately it seems though that Google noticed that, and when u enter such a random string, it doesn't spit out this index size anymore but rather rejects the querry or whatever. This is probably because of the index debate, with Yahoo claiming to have 20billion pages in its index, Google claiming to have 3 times that, and the new company Cuil (pronounced cool- company which is going nowhere) claims to have twice the index of Google. (Funny that there website crashed the day it was launched).

This is all nitty gritty and nice, except there is an upper boundary for what internet search can do. Your search results are limited to the text the user enters. No matter which way you want to put it, and no matter how many web crawlers and algorithms engines apply, they just can't get into a user's mind. You will only find what you need/want on the internet is if you know what you are looking for. i.e., if you are cluless of what you are searching for, for example "that movie that the guy says 'bloody as hell' ", well if you enter "bloody as hell" , you'll probably won't get very far. Entering "bloody as hell movie script" will probably have Pulp Fiction in your first few hits and you are there. But, the point here, is that your brain did most of the narrowing down of the set you want to search for. It's not very difficult for search engine optimizers (SEO) to have algorithms that simply figure out that when you enter the word "movie" after some text, it will look first in areas related to movies. You made the job straight forward when adding the word "script". Piece of cake. In simplified ways the engine would do this -> movies subset of index -> scripts -> sentence -> bloody as hell. (Now play drums).

The great Alan Turing set the upper bound for what computers can do, with his Turing machine, and he proved, beyond a doubt, with his Turing test, that computers can't and will never think, and similarly its the same bound for for search engines: they can't get into your head.

These days, with the growth of the internet, and the immense computing power for a massive search engine like Google, they could maybe index each and every word, but a better way is that they can harness user data, by keeping logs of the search querries, and minning the data, to make a better educated guess. If most people who enter "sex for free" go to the same website, even if it's PageRank is shite, Google will notice that, and will "bump-up" its rank in the search results, using guesstimates based on visits. It's the same with social networks and getting users to create Google accounts and all that stuff. Google don't care about reading your emails, or knowing which pages you visited to spy on you or find out if you are a pervert- what they really want- is your data as a "user" to give them a better search engine. (At least I like to think so).

But these are just variations and optimizations of the same thing: trying to figure out what the user is thinking, by comparing it to what most people were thinking when they entered the same thing. But, that's just a speculation, and there is always the X variable, that can negate it. I may be a weird dude thinking "looking where everyone has looked before, but thought no one had thought before" ! (paraphrased from Albert Von Szent-Gyorgyi)

You want a trick to break Google? Trying to find out what "the" is in English grammar. Google removes any occurance of "the" because its way too common. Entering "definition: the" helps a bit, but not that much either- but, by using "definition: " u already proved my point, of humanly limiting the search universe :)

They will mine my website and guess my trick and stop it, and I will find another one, because...... I am a geek who drinks too much coffee.

Tales from the Basement - Mergers and Acquisitons (1)

There is something about bus stops. Maybe because I often find myself standing at them, alone in the wind, with dim lights, and the wind blowing through my in need-of-a-haircut hair, but they make me think. Usually when I get these thoughts, it's probably remenicing that I am no longer leaning on a lamppost.... (ignore the comment, I just think Ian Angell, my former tutor, 's book "No More Leaning on Lampposts" has a surreal title, and its content is even more interesting).

Anyway, I know a couple of friends of mine that work in M&A, or Mergers and Acquisitions divisions of some leading investment banks. It's like slavery, because these people work the longest hours there is, and call there excel sheet home. I do not really want to know what there actual jobe entails, but my friend, the exotics trader, claims its the most boring and tedious job in the field.

That's there choice, although, I'd like to find out if those M&Aers know what it is like to be on a receiving end of a merger or an acquisition from the client side. They broker and engineer the deal, but once it goes through, they make their cut, and skedadle off, with the clients left to deal with the mess of either merging, incorporating, or integrating the 2 companies that just got M&Ad (nice I should make a t-shirt that says "Smile! you've just been M&A-d).

Well, I am on an integration team for a company that was aquired by another, much larger, company. I'll focus on the tech side for now, rather than the acquisition process, which is buying out the partners, all the outstanding shares, assets etc etc...

The way acquistions usually work, at least in software, is that companies make a strategic build-vs-buy decision once they are looking at usually a 5-year growth/survival/competitivness plan. A company will decide that it needs to offer a certain product or solution, either to gain a competitive advantage, or maintain competitivness within the market it operates. Usually, the second reason is the main reason for an acquisition: the idea already exists in the market, is offered by the major competitors, or a small company offers it, and it is small enough to be acquired. (That small company is usually a spinoff or a venture by someone in the business, who isn't really shooting at becoming a competitor himself, and can sell the idea with a working product and a client base, making a nice bonus when the company is acquired). On the other hand, usually new ideas are built in-house by companies, and existing ideas are only built internally when buying an already existing company-product (interchangeable terms here), is less cost effective.

Which brings us to the main problem, or issues that the i-bankers don't have to deal with, which is integrating the businesses together now that they have been M&A-d, which is one of the situations I am in. We, the mother company, work mainly with C++, which is the cornerstone of our applications framework. Mainly financial databases, market data, stock exchanges - and that's the most I can tell you due to respecting confidentiality! Anyway, the acquisition company operate(d) with Java. I can't say much about the details, but, C++/Java interfacing, especially that these are serious products with a serious code base, that is at least a few years old, are not in the .NET/C#/JVM kind of integration realm, which creates some hoops to jump through to create a seamless experience for the end-user: Be it Java, C++, or Spaghetti Gorgonzola, for the user, it should all be the same speed, same look and feel, same results - everything.
If you work with software, you are probably familiar with the concept of meshing , and we all know how much that can be of a pain. That's why, we , just like many other companies in finance that worked with a wide scope of data formats and forms, have their own internal integration technologies, to create one main interface that all technologies need to integrate to, and that's the main interface that the user interacts with.

It's a tough spot.... Internal technologies are always clunky, clumsy, buggy, because, there are just that many people working on refining them- it's not like open source, with myriads of people working on the infinite use cases a programming language or system may have. But, in finance, two things are prevail:

1) There are too many data sources that you have to have a common platform - a suite that brings everything into one place.

2) Finance institutions have the money to build serious technology in house, and lack the trust to give it to anyone else!

At least that's the technology briefing on M&A, but there is the other managerial side as well: different structure of work, different hierarchies, different corporate culture, different business process, etc etc... that often when an acquisiton is made, there is alot of people shuffling, with people leaving and new people being brought in to join the new kids on the block. (I'll talk about this in another post).

All of that, is not the worry of the M&A dudes......

But, hey, justice comes to some eventually! With all the i-banks feeling the squeeze, some have merged or been bought out by others, and now they can see what it is like to be M&A-d!

The Anomaly of Lebanese Banking

Everyone seems to have an identity crisis these days. People seem obsessed about their ancestors and their origin and and...No one seems to come from anywhere anymore, but the more of a fruit salad you are, the more interesting of a person.

I am Lebanese.

Ok, I am a bit of a fruit salad,I speak with a slight American accent, grew up trilingual, at home we celebrate every religious occasion there is (we almost celebrated festivus, and we are not even religious!) , my mom is English, my dad spent most of his life in Germany, and my immediate family is scattered along 4 continents, and I don't even look Lebanese. But I am, and I am proud to be! Why would I want to be proud of a country that's historically known for its struggles and their inability to agree on a single thing?!

Well, our banking system for one.

Lebanon's banking system has been the rock of our country, and if we had an economy, it would be it's cornerstone. Lebanese people (like the Jews) are very good at math , and people networking. Now if that's not spelling out F-I-N-A-N-C-E, I don't know what is. Whether locally or abroad , Lebanese people have excelled in the financial industry, to amazing levels. For our small country, Lebanese people have achieved considerable heights, but when it comes to money, we are in a class of ourselves (at least if you measure against the relative population) that unlike other domains where alot of us Lebanese excel outside the country, when it comes to finance, we excel both at home and abroad. London and New York, stink with Lebanese financiers, and Dubai, is literally there playgroung, but I am not talking about that.

Lebanon, was one of the few, if not the only, country whose banking system was not hit by the credit crunch. In fact, Lebanese banks, have made better than average profits during this period.

BLOM Bank and Audi Saradar, with Byblos bank not too far behind, have actually made record profits. BLOM, the biggest bank by deposits, has seen a 34% rise in its profits in the first 3 quarters of 2008. These three banks, are publicly listed on the Beirut Stock Exchange and would be equivalent to a AAA class stocks in the West. They are leading stocks, i.e. stocks that set the pace for the stock exchange index (gaining or loosing) , alongside Solidere, which is the other leading stock. Now, Solidere, is the development company for downtown Beirut area, in terms of construction. And it's a leading stock, as the housing market, and especially, the real-estate market in Lebanon, is booming, and sky-scrappers and high rise buildings are springing up in Beirut like there is no tomorrow. (If you don't believe me, ask Donald Trump, he's invested in Lebanon - well his ex-wife at least).

The Lebanese state, is the only state besides Switzerland, that has a banking-secrecy law. In fact, it's even harder for public authorities to get access to financial information regarding a certain individual in Lebanon, than it is to get it from a Swiss bank (true story - go ahead and try). If this is not an enough reason for UHNW individuals to move money to Lebanese banks, with all the commossion in the West, Lebanon is a very elegant and attractive place for Gulf Oil money. So much, that back in 2006, there was more deposits in Lebanon ($80bn) than there was in Kuwait ($75bn) , an oil producing country. (That's running accounts that is- which is possibly the closest you can get to the real information) What is held by the private (such as Saradar Private bank, part of the Audi Saradar group), investment , and asset management divisions, of these banks, is almost like massive hedge funds, where the banks have no obligation of releasing information about their investors. I know for a fact, that alot of oil money, sits in Lebanon.

If you don't believe me, well, get a load of this. US Hedge funds, are moving money into Lebanon, and it was reported by the New York Times. It's not me blaberring. But maybe, that's because our central bank forbid banks from getting into derivatives 3 years ago.Seems like a smart move, from Riad Salameh, our CB Governor, who won the World's Best Central Bank Government award by Euromoney in 2006- Mervin King take notice! We are not short of economists in our government either, with former minister of Economy Fouad Siniora heading the government cabinet as PM after long serving as Economy and Finance minister in all of slain Prime Minster Rafik Hariri's cabinets, with his deputy, Jihad Azour , now serving as Finance and Economy minister. (Now the Gordon Brown-Alistair Darling similarity is ridiculous!)

There are more banks, (58 banks as of October 2008) than there are banks in half the western countries, and almost as many banks as in Germany, the world's third biggest economy. Ok , am not comparing us with Germany, (Lebanon being the 77th economy in the world in GDP) , but well, with 4.5 million people in one country, that's one bank for less than 100,000 people. I still don't get it, but it works. At least Robert Fisk thinks so!

But the way I really know, is that, well, my friend works in the IT department at BLOMInvest, the investment arm of BLOM bank, and well, he said, in all the software they develop, they use "long integers", and have to support 12 digit numbers, in all applications.

That's alot of zeros.............and that's excluding the two zeros to the right of the decimal point!

Technology and Airlines

I like to surf couches. I do alot of my "addictive learning" from a couch, whether it is reading, watching TV, surfing the web or what have you. I also like to surf couches in foreign countries - am very good at that. So, while surfing the other day, the beeb (BBC) had a program on Airlines and how the airline industry is changing. The one thing that spurred this post was that now that Airlines are going a-wall, they have introduced some new on-board services such as mobile phone usage and internet usage.

What the airlines are trying to do is create new ways to generate revenue, in a feeble attempt to save the ailing airline industry. (I am a big fan of Ryanair and Easyjet). Before I delve into why this is completely and utterly outrageous, notably from a technology expert standpoint, first a few things about the air transport business

1) Air regulations are changing : they are opening up the skies so regional airlines can go international. The United States and the UK agreed to loosen the restrictions on across the Atlantic flights, allowing for local airlines in the US to fly to the UK and vice versa for UK flights. This kind of de-regulations is restructuring the business of airlines, which began to happen when American Airlines and British Airways struck a deal on having joint flight routes and collaborative flights. i.e. You can fly to London on AA and return on British Airways or something of the sort (am not the expert) but the jist of the idea is that they created somewhat of an unfair competitive advantage because of their size...
Bu this is also good in a way, that as much as bigger airlines can compete in smaller regions, so can smaller , low-cost, airlines can compete in bigget markets. Although in some areas some airlines get more advantage and drive out other airlines from the business, but the regulators are aware of that. BAA, who controlled Heathrow , Gatwick and Stansted, has been forced to sell of its rights of control to two out of the three. (Surprise surprise, they decided to keep Heathrow- otherwise they are just trying to get onto the list of 100 worst business decisions in history. Duh- Heathrow is the busiest airport in the world).

2) Taxation - taxation currently is high for airlines, and some destinations are just too costly to fly to because of high taxes, leaving only the mega airlines flying there. Not to mention that mother countries for these airlines, also play a role in taxation, giving such companies as Emirates, where taxation is almost non-existent, a competitive advantage. (Taxation, as Ian Angell in "The New Barbarians" to which I am a follower, is one of the issues that will need to be re-thought completely. Well, if Halliburton moved its headquarters to Dubai, that must mean something, right?)

3) The Credit crunch. People are feeling the money decrease , so they are traveling less, but, bad economic situations are always a driving force for people to travel more, and let loose on some pressure.

4) Low cost airlines. Just simply brilliant. Travel, is now commodotized. It's like riding a bus. I don't care about the movie or food on the plane. It's a two hour flight and I can review my papers and check my emails, or catch a quick nap. Just get me to where I need to be, fastest and cheapest.

5) Oil and Fuel prices. I hate oil debates- oil isn't the catalyst that makes the world go round. Yeah everyone was complaining about high energy prices. Yeah right, look at the price now. Well, if that's the case, please peg the price of the ticket to the oil prices. But, of course, once ticket price goes up, its a nightmare bringing it down again, even if energy prices drop. Greed never drops, like I said in my post of September 24th, 2008.

Anyway, enough preemption. These greed companies said they are going to to introduce new ways to derive revenue from passengers, such as allowing the use of mobile phones on the plane at a cost of 2£ per minute, or the use of the internet for a similar high cost as well.

That is outrageous.

I never switch off my phone when I fly. So sue me. It's an absolute rip off. Technologists have known for years that mobile frequency hardly interferes with the airline radio frequency, or any other frequency. Bottom line is, that with satellite communication, both mobile phones and flight radio transmission use the same technology except on different frequencies.
What I am saying is, that we could always use our phones and internet on the plane except they didn't allow it giving us all this security mumbo jumbo. So now that the airlines are in crap, it suddenly is possible? The technology didn't change, they just decided to rip us off. I tell you what i will do, which is what I also do when I get on a train that asks for me to pay for wireless internet. I'll plug my phone into my laptop and GPRS , and screw their Wi-Fi. You think i can't do that on the plane?

Hogwash.

I am perfectly fine with airlines thinking of ways to make money. Low-cost airlines have been doing it for years. At least, they had the decency to give us the choice of buying the duty free perfume or not. Meals are not included, but available. Hungry, pay up. Not like the legacy airlines who sell you a movie and a meal for 10 times the cost. They are doing it again, yet this time, phone and internet, on a New York to London 7-hour flight, aren't the complimentary meal, its' a necessity and charging 2£ a minute, is just plain rubbish.

....and don't sell me the technology hazard story.

JP Morgan , the IBM of finance

I was lucky today, that while coming back from my best friend's , knackered like it was a day out of college.... On the tube, I found a copy of the Financial Times Weekend edition lingering about. I figured maybe it was some Lehman or Merril employee who, after flipping through it, got so disgusted and said fuck it!

I don't mind picking up the crumbs.

It usually works for Warren Buffet. He has done it time and time before. He did it with LTCM in 1998, and now he did it with Goldman Sachs. The mighty GS are now a commercial bank, as we bid farewell to the era of the glory days of investment banking as we know it (or don't know it, as no one seems to know what the fuck is going on). Sadly, Morgan Stanley , who is full of brilliant Lebanese financiers such as CEO John J. Mack, and co-president Walid Chammah , among many others, also had to switch to the more regulated, tighter commercial banking sector, so the Federal Reserve can have their back. (I think the Fed can be renamed F'ed at the moment). Anyway, Warren Buffet took a $5 billion stake in Goldman , to save it from crumbling.

The other news that JP Morgan has swooped in to buy Washington Mutual , which was the biggest savings and loans bank in the USA. JP got them for a mere $ 1.9 Billion, which is pretty cheap considering. WaMu 's collapse was the largest bank failure in US history. (Which reminds me, the Northern Rock saga was the first run on a bank in the UK for 140 years - and in 2008, we almost had two, as Bradford & Bingley seems to be in a pile of shite).

I can see what JP is doing.

JP Morgan Chase, is now the biggest bank in the United States by far. What I think one of the strategies of Jamie Dimon, is to make JP so massive, that it just can't fail. It becomes such a behemoth, that it is so diverse and massive of a company, that it just can't go bust. It's the IBM effect. These behemoth companies, although can go into difficulties, are so large, that they become able to evolve as businesses. i.e. IBM, 20 years ago, was mainly a hardware company, yet, today, 54% of IBM's revenue comes from software and services, and its PC division, the same division responsible for the PC revolution of the 80s, and the key behind the rise of Microsoft (history note: When IBM started selling PCs left and right, it forced its consumers to purchase MS-DOS, which was Microsoft's flagship operating system at the time (now also known as Dummy OS), and Microsoft made millions out of royalties, which Bill Gates, no matter how much people hate him, mad a shrewd business decision to invest in R&D, and mainly in Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) ). The strategy anyway seems to be working, and after buying out Bear Stearns, now they bought WaMu, and are well on the way of become one of the pillars of the US economy - the IBM of the financial industry. Just too big to fall.......
Check this picture i found:


[Source: Wikipedia article]

Now why do I have this urge of saying "Hi, and welcome to Goldman Sachs telephone banking. I am Tina and how can I help you today?" hehe.

Your shirt has just signed in

I have this bad habit of loosing my keys in my room. That's pretty much an achievement by itself, considering the size of my, small, ridiculously overpriced, awkward looking, room. I am not writing about the housing market in London (and the UK in general, which is in freefall - which counterintuitively is raising rent prices even more) as I will leave this for another round of (bitching) analysis. It's just about my keys being lost and wishing if there was such a way that I could locate the whereabouts of my keys through my phone for example (loosing my phone would be ridiculous of me - I can call it from my blackberry to locate it in my casa - again London housing market sarcasm left for later).

Anyway, this all got me thinking. This actually can be done! All I need is to have a key chain with and RFID chip inside it, and a server or some piece of software that can track it. Cool stuff. Well, RFIDs (Radio Frequency Identification) are miniature computer chips that emmit a radio frequency, that can be picked up by a receiver. These chips, now being massively produced, can be fitted unto anything: clothes, bags, cars, hairdryers, books, dogs, cats, squirrels, and of course, humans! Using a simple client-server application, you can track that radio frequencey from any basic computer device. And that can be done, of course....remotely.

This, my friend, is the internet of things.

Take a look around you. Your sitting on a desk, on a couch, in a living room, or in an office - even in a cafe somewhere (except,if you are in the jungle - if your a geek with internet access in the jungle - you got a problem. Reading blogs isn't exactly why you should be doing in a jungle). Anyway, you got things around you : tables, pens, papers, coffee cups, chairs, desks, couches etc. Imagine, that each one of these objects had an RFID chip in them. From this same computer (I am hoping your using firefox- go open source!)- you can just have one tab on your browser for this blog page, and a second one, has a list of all the things you'd like to keep track of. That might be pretty handy: you can locate your keys in a second, you can find your glasses, a book in a library- you can even get the exact position of your coffee mug inside the dishwasher, or your shirt in the cupboard......

This sounds a bit absurd and useless, true. Finding your keys maybe, handy, but why would I be interested in knowing the exact location of my shirt in the cupboard or my mug in the dishwasher. Yes, well, that may fall into useless inventions at first, but well, can become very important for example when you have a supply-chain management business, or, goods delivery company, or anything of the sort. You can virtually guarrantee zero loss of items from production to consumer - and you can track each and every item, at any point in time. Just like Malcolm Mclean , the who invented containers, revolutionized business, so can this - it has the potential to become a disruptive technology.

Some companies already use RFIDs, except they are not fully commercialized. Not only that, that there is still a larger unserviced market to write commercial-level software for these RFIDs, before it reaches the layman, i.e. us. I know that some airports are starting to put RFID tags on luggage in airports, except these are removed before the luggage reaches the passengers on arrival. A niche opportunity for some tech savy entrepreneur, would be to commercialize luggage RFIDs: When you buy your bag, you get a CD with it, that has a software that allows you to track where your bag is , at all time. Now, that would make the Heathrow Terminal 5 saga a very distant bad memory! You just cut out the middle man! Now, if I had the opportunity to entertain such an entrepreunerial opportunity, I would go the full nine yards, and reach the point, that, well, all you need to do when you buy your ticket, is provide your bag RFIDs as well. Once you are at the airport, you just dump your bags wherever, and the rest, through a piece of software on some tag reading device, all bags go to the right places, and maybe be creative in some optimizing pigeon hole algorithm for sorting luggage. When you arrive, you just take out your mobile, click a button, and bang! You know exactly where is your bag, and you can just go for a coffe and the bag will page you when its out from luggage handling. Now that, would be cool!

Although, I'd really like to see the day when my shirt is on my IM - "your shirt has just signed in"......

Big Brother is your best friend

I'll spare the business and technical details. Just try to think of this: 10 years down the line, you'll get most of information you need from Wikipedia (if u think it is not creditable - think again.) , you'll be using your web account (gmail/facebook or something futuristic) for everything: you'll be "an account" - order food, clothes, transfer money , watch TV (digital broadcast is here - yay!) fall in love - you name it, and you'll be doing that all day, everyday - with your mobile. Eventually, we'll all have blackberries. (or my geek phone HTC S740).
The bottom line is, your life will change because ur expectations will change, because you'll have much more information about people and things. You will DEMAND more information. i.e. you'll know ur friends whereabouts at all times, there hobbies, there friends, and they will expect to know u equally. We will all be Lindsay Lohans and George Bush (check this : twitter.com), so, you'll want to reconsider how u perceive people and privacy.

Resistance .... is futile! (not really, but I always wanted to say this).

There is a digital footprint to all of this, and well, they can find you - what you do on the web will be you - and if you're worried about credit cards online, u have only your own stupidity to worry about, and how dodgy is your browsing. "They" is not the government - its the Googles, Microsofts, IBMs , YouTubes , Facebooks, etc... that basically keep a log of everything and anything you do on the web. Sure, this sounds like a blatant invasion of privacy, but well, we have to live with it, and there is nothing we can do about it. Of course, there are laws that protect us and disallow this information to be used against or without your consent, but that' really kind of a hollow protection, because once the information is out there, it's out there. If you said that your girlfriend was fat while chatting to your friend on msn or something, and she happens to stumble on your conversation history - you are history. What I am trying to say, that you can deny saying that, and you can also claim that she had no right to see your logs, but well, she did, and you can't take that back. But that's all bullocks, in my open source loving opinion.

A small story. During the Cold War, the United States had mini high frequency microphones all across the coast of Cyberia, that were supposed to record tons of shit that was going on in the former Soviet Union.
Fair enough, although, these microphones, were completely useless. Why? Becuase there was really no one to process all that data. The bottom line is, that most of the web is actually text, and well, since machines can't think (Alan Turing prove that machines can't ever think for themselves , using something called the Turing Test), and because machines can't think, well, even with all the sophisticated indexing and mining techniques, it still boils down to some kind of text search, and, the complexity of having smart searches, within these "data agents" becomes gastronomical with the exponential increase in data, and those logs, while may be very useful, are really mainly useful for those generating them.

i.e. If I wanted to know what I was talking about with my best friend a month ago, it may take me like a couple of minutes or so, to go back to that date and skim through the log to figure out what we were talking about. But, if I want to go through a log , so these logs are basically just the details to a more global picture, to which only those who create that picture, can use it.

Bottom line is, that all this data we generate, we should not fear the fact that now everything we do is being watched, and that Big Brother is watching us. I believe in a different thing. I believe in evolution, and again, I keep mentioning the word "critical mass", and once all these "logs" gain enough critical mass to become a fact of life, then, we will just evolve to seeing the value in having all our information on record. We will no longer try to hide our information, but rather, embrace it. In a sense, we will WANT to keep a log on all the details of our life, because, at the end of the day , we are the information we generate, and well, if we can look back at our lives, in ever more details, then, we can develop a better understanding of ourselves, our behaviors, actions and feelings.

So, if you're worried that if you are reading this blog, google is keeping a timestamp on the time and day you visited this site, well, great! One day, when I am rich and famous, you can actually go back in time and see exactly when ......

"I told you so."

Google vs. Facebook

I was doing some research, and I thought this might be of value in dealing with the flotsam and jetsam of our daily lives, of which for most, a considerable amount of waking hours are spent on the web.

Microsoft valued Facebook at $15 Billion. Sounds a little odd. But, one must realize that the biggest competitor to Google, will be Facebook. Those of you who have not joined Facebook yet, worry not, for you already are on facebook anyway - it's just called "Google"!

Let me explain. If you are using Gmail while reading this, look around ur screen: Gmail, Calendar (schedule an even) Documents, Photos (Picasa :)) etc... Look closer : Labels, Chat, Drafts Spam protection. If you really want to go wild, be brave and activate stuff from Google Labs.

This is looking more and more like Lotus Notes, or Microsoft Outlook, isn't it? It's faster, virtually unlimited storage, but also has a way to connect you to other users. Now, I am writing this using my gmail account, but, I can mask my addres to charles@loves.newyork ! You can even use gmail to send messages as if it was from Hotmail. Cool stuff! Go to settings, have a play. More, and many more features to come. You'll soon hook up your mobile to your gmail account - you already can, and some people will eventually find ways to send spam texts, and Google will find a way to filter it. It's a whole realm.

Wait a minute.

This sounds awfully like Facebook, doesn't it? You can send messages from facebook to email, upload documents and files, schedule events, etc., the works. Google just has a different approach to all of this, and probably a bit more effective, because, it's all about learning curves. (I am not a google man, but not a Microsoft man either - Google isn't better, it's just different). Humans in general have a resistance to change, and, introducing things bit by bit, makes the transition easier, and also makes people not only more used to it, but dependent on it.

Email is still the most used application on the web, and companies are just building on top. Because, all what the internet does, and this is quoting it's inventor Sir Tim Berners Lee, "it connects us together" .

Well, congratulations. You have just been social-networked!

Democracy of Online Communities

I wonder why is it that men are always good with tools and machines, and women are dubbed to be less competent in that area. It surprises me, because some of the most interesting questions I ever get on technology is from women......

At least when it's about online communities.

Carla was wondering about how search engines work, and after I explained to her that search engines rank results according to clicks, or to be exact, on how many times the link relating to the search keyword is viewed. She mentioned that that was "not right!". Amused, and foretelling that I will have to explain the Google Page Rank algorithm, I asked why. Well, we were eating pistachios at the time, and she said "Well, what if someone makes a website on how to plant pistachios, and another person wrote a novel about pistachios. The novel about pistachios will be probably be viewed more, but that would be unfair for people who are searching for how to plant pistachios."

True, but.

The web works much like a democracy: give people what they want. Is Obama the most qualified man to be US president? That's not the point! Whether he is the best man for the job or not, is irrelevant in democracy. The person who the people choose to be president, will become president, because he got the most votes. No one is asking questions, right? It's the same thing with search engines and online communities. It's a democracy, not a meritocracy, and that is the only way it actually can work. Why? Because well, if , for example Tim Berners Lee, the dude who invented the internet, was to decide if "How to plant pistachios" should be the first hit on a search engine, then he would be just a dictator. i.e. The internet, because it's a "user -driven" medium, lets its users decide on the search engine number one hit. So, if the website about the novel about pistachios is viewed more than the one about planting pistachios, then it will rank higher. If it gets viewed more, then its probably more important. More precisely, the search algorithm tries to "approximate" the best possible thing you are looking for.

Here is another example. If I search for the word "human" , which is a very common English word, probably one out of every three websites has the word "human" in it, which means millions of pages. So how can differentiate? Well, if out of these millions of pages the website about the "Human Genome Project" is the one that gets the most hits, then if you are searching for the word "human", there is a high possibility that you are looking for the HGP. Machines cannot, and will never be able to know what exactly you want (Turing impossible), because , it can only work on whatever you type into the search bar. That is it's boundary. So, it has to make an educated guess, and the best guess it can make is based on its previous "learning", i.e. what are the websites that are being viewed in relevance to this string of text? It's just a mathematical equation. Give the person searching the results of whatever most users usually want to see. Whether it's right or wrong, is completely irrelevant.

Just like Obama. He is popular, he is charismatic, people like him, he will (probably) win.

....Of course, technically speaking, this is not how the PageRank algorithm works, because it also has something called "inbound links" that are also used to rank a page based on how many pages it links to. Both this and the number of viewers I explained above, is why usuall Wikipedia articles are on the top hits, because they have alot of inbound links AND they are viewed alot. It kinda boils down to the same "democracy" principle (although, again, not quite, because since it's all machines and computers, this system can be "hacked" for getting your website as the top hit, but google's "Don't Be Evil" philosophy, comes into play to protect this democracy - and their business model :P).

I was just explaining how the internet in the third millenium works, and saving my friend the trouble of reading Von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation book.

Security of Online Communities

My friend had an accident 2 days ago, and I was keeping an eye out for him. Being Lebanese, we had swamped the hospital with visitors going and coming, as if it was a social event. While every other patient had his wife or "next of kin" beside him, my friend never had, at any moment in time, any less than three people , of which neither was a "next of kin". ...
Anyway, while there, I got into a conversation with a friend about Facebook , where a person had added both of us, and she was asking who was that person, as she thought because we had common friends, then she accepted her friend request. Turns out, neither one of us knew her, and it was just a random add by a random person. My friend, who is a little paranoid about this whole social networking thing , mentioned that there are alot of freaks out there, and this is just a platform for them to roam free.

That is true.

Which promoted quite an interesting technological debate. The internet, as Richard Stallman would say (I swapped emails with the dude, and he really believes in this) is a Free and Open Source platform for users to say and do whatever they feel like doing. The internet today, is what we call a "User Generated " medium in which the content is generated by and for the users, with, seemingly no restrictions. Ah, the keyword here, is the word "NO".

Well, not exactly.

Not long ago, Facebook, used to have very loose privacy settings. For example, regional networks, such as the London network, was clickable, and you could access the network's listing of all its members. That's very nice, but, there is an essential thing about social networks and communities, that changes dramatically once critical mass is reached. It's something like a bell curve : in the beginning, it's all free and open, with no restrictions. As the number of users go up, they will suggest new features, and new additions, or even add these features themselves. Although, at the point of critical mass , the number of users is large enough, that the number of malicious users becomes a threat.

A malicious user, is, a very, very bad person. The kind of person that will try to steal your identity, credit card details, try to shag you, stalk you, harrass you or your friends, etc.
A bit of math may you. If you have 2,000 users, then you'd probably have like maybe one or two malicious users, which, may not be much of a problem, and they would only be feeding on the idiots (as they say in formal Arabic: "the law does not protect the idiots"). But, if you have 2 million users, which you can consider a critical mass , then you'd have 2,000 malicious users, and that is the turning point. When you have 2,000 users, it's quite a big number, and they may even decide to create a "sub-community" to pool there powers together, and cause some serious damage, on a large scale. That is when preventive measures, restrictions and "corrective surgery" will need to made on the system, to prevent it's abuse, and that's when it starts going down again on the bell curve. (It's not actually a turning point, but rather resembles a saddle point where features are restricted, but newer, more safer ones get added, so it kinda goes up and down, but let's not get too mathematical ).

It's all social dynamics, and heavily influenced by network effects.