Adsense for TV adds

TV adds is $64 billion industry in USA alone.  And it works on the TRP rating systems which are nothing but statistical formulas applied on TV viewing timings of few thousand homes per country.  The simplest way to disrupt this market is by controlling the remote control. A wifi-enabled Android/iOS running remote can give real time information about who is watching which channel at what point in time.  And once you have it, you already have Adsense for TV.

And that is what I think Apple and Google are going to fight for over the next few years.

What is the mystery “entertainment device” Google is testing?

Apple patents new touchscreen remote control for a future Apple TV

IntoNow, the ipad app purchased by yahoo was a nice step in this direction using the audio matching technology. I guess this whole set of social TV apps is mostly about finding who is watching what at any point in time.

The same objective can be fulfilled by making TV's more intelligent (Samsung TV apps) and also by network connected setup boxes.  But I feel universal remove is a much cleaner and simpler way to go about doing this. If google were to crack this, they will not only be the entry point to anything we do on the browser but also entry point to all devices we use in our houses.  When we switch on/off lights, how many times does microwave is used, how much TV we watch, etc.

It will be interesting to see how they market this and at what price points.
 

Cacheismo learnings

I already knew lua, memory management, writing servers and other technical bits. I did learned the automake stuff to make sure people can compile it.

But the best part was something else. Marketing. I guess I failed miserably at that one. I don't know if anyone has downloaded cacheismo code and tried to compile it or is anyone using it. I think it is one of my best works and it is free and I don't know what more do I need to do to convince people that it is better that memcached.

I tried the following:

• I wrote a mail on memcached group explaining cacheismo.
• I wrote to author of highscalability.com blog. He was kind enough to include a link. 
• I created cacheismo google group. Only my friends joined. (Thanks!). No questions so far.
• I tried to answer some of the questions on stackoverflow about memcached. I looked at problems which people face but can't solve with memcached. Tried answering the questions to best of my knowledge and also provided information about how it can solved using cacheismo. Someone removed all my posts :( from stackoverflow. 

So I guess even if their exist people who might find cacheismo useful, it is kind of impossible for them to find it, unless of-course they magically search for cacheismo on google.  So the question is what is the plan? And the answer is nothing much. I am not actively working on cacheismo. I will be more than happy to help anyone who wants to use it.  I need to solve the discovery problem and the plan there is to keep posting to stackoverflow...until the person who deletes my posts gets tired of it. Quora is another option. And may be some videos on youtube.  

May be caching is not such a big problem for people and memcached is good enough. Well in that case I will write some more servers. Http Proxy something like haproxy but configurable in lua might be fun. Or may be websocket server for HTML 5 applications.