A few weeks ago, we held another edition of our (somewhat) quarterly WAG (wine and gourmet) potluck dinner club. This time, David and Hillary were kind enough to host the event at their place in Mill Valley, and they also suggested that each dish feature mushrooms, in the spirit of Iron Chef.

Katherine signed us up for dessert, knowing we’d get extra props for pulling off a fungal dessert. She did all the background research and decided we’d make meringue mushrooms (faux mushrooms) and candy cap mushroom ice cream (real mushrooms). We picked up the candy caps at Far West Funghi at the Ferry Building Marketplace. It turns out that putting a couple tablespoons of ground candy cap mushrooms in an ice cream or cheesecake recipe imparts a flavor almost indistinguishable from maple, without a hint of shroomy earthiness.

Our menu for the evening:

Quartet: Morel Meringue, Hot and Cold Mushroom Soup, White Chanterelle Terrine with a Portobello Bull’s Eye

with Laurent-Perrier Cuvee Brut Rose Champagne

Mushroom Street Snacks Intermission: Crispy Mushroom Rice Ball, Cinnamon Cap Soy Skin Crepe, Mushroomlike Blue Corn Fungus

Lobster Ravioli on a Bed of Cauliflower Fungus in a Chanterelle Saffron Cream Sauce

with 2002 Stag’s Leap Napa Valley Viognier

Meringue Mushrooms and Pumpkin Spice Cake Drizzled in Dark Chocolate with Candy Cap Mushroom Ice Cream on a Pool of Burnt Caramel Sauce



And here is the photographic evidence:

I had to include two shots of our dessert, one is a close-up of a meringue mushroom, which to me look almost real. Also notice the last photo. David & Hillary get great creativity points for using a shiitake mushroom log as the centerpiece. They harvested their shiitakes for brunch a few days later. As David observed afterwards, “everyone brought their A-game” to this edition of WAG. Thanks to David & Hillary, Ezra & Shireen and Dan & Stephanie for a great meal and a great time!

As of today Technorati is now tracking twenty million blogs, and is adding many more every minute. When Mobius invested in Technorati just over a year ago and I joined the board, Technorati was tracking just a few million blogs. While the past year has not been without scaling and performnance challenges, the team has really stepped up, and right now, performance is better than it has ever been, and will continue to get even better as the year goes on. Way to go guys!

I really hope this screen shot is not a hoax. If it is on the web, it must be true, right?

Steve Jobs needs to spend some time reading Seth Godin between his visits to the altar of Jonathan Ive. If only Apple placed as much emphasis on customer service and support as they do on the design and marketing of their products…

I am a lifelong fan of Apple — I taught myself to program on an Apple ][, own every flavor of iPod available, use a 17″ PowerBook G4 for work (and suffer the inconveniences associated with being a Mac guy in an office full of PCs), have three Macintoshes at home, buy a new one every year and upgrade to the latest and greatest versions of Mac OSX and iLife as soon as they become available. I can only assume that I must be the kind of loyal customer that Apple should care about keeping happy and in the fold.

I have a dual-processor PowerMac G5 in my recording studio, which I had not yet upgraded to Tiger because I was waiting to be sure that the latest and greatest version of ProTools was working smoothly with the new OS. Last weekend I decided to upgrade the Mac in my studio. Well, it turns out I was unable to do so because the Tiger install DVD failed verification and then crapped out midway through the install. The installer instructed me to call Apple Support to resolve this issue, leaving my studio out of commission in the meantime.

Since I was heading down to Palo Alto to run some errands, I decided to stop by the Apple Store and bring my Tiger install DVD with me, along with the box it came in, so I would have sufficient proof of purchase. The friendly (yet ultimately unhelpful) guy at the Apple Store told me he wasn’t able to replace my DVD for me and that I would have to call Apple Support, a task I was trying to avoid given the long wait times and the fact that the voicemail maze seems to me to be an immune system designed to prevent customers from actually speaking to real people.

So on Monday, I called Apple Support and spent twenty minutes on hold waiting to talk to a real person. Once I got through to a human, this friendly (yet ultimately unhelpful) person explained to me that since I bought the new OS more than 90 days ago, she couldn’t help me and that I’d have to buy a new copy. When I protested, she told me that since I had installed it successfully on two of my computers already, I must have scratched the DVD so I’d have to buy a new one. Given that I put the DVD back in its envelope and back into its box and it sat on my shelf for several months, I think it is unlikely I scratched it, and more likely that the slot-loading drive on my PowerBook or my iMac was the culprit. But in any event, when I buy software from Apple, aren’t I buying a license to the software and not the physical disc itself?

But I digress. I told the friendly (yet ultimately unhelpful) person that I didn’t find this to be an acceptable solution. She told me she would be happy to connect me with a “specialist” who I could explain my situation to in more detail. So then I had to wait another ten minutes and listen to Apple’s hold Muzak until this specialist became available (there’s that customer-support immune system again, trying to outlast my persistence and make me go away). After recounting my story again to the specialist, he grudgingly told me they would send me another copy of the DVD, though he took pains to point out that they were making an exception for me and wouldn’t normally do this.

Sadly, Apple squandered multiple opportunities to be “insanely great” to me. I know the main goal of the Apple Store is to showcase their products and win new converts, yet they are missing a chance to keep existing customers happy. The guy at the Apple Store should have given me a new copy of the Tiger DVD, no questions asked. Instead, he ended not only making me frustrated, but told me that I had to go waste more of my time by calling Apple Support. Then, Apple Support missed yet another opportunity to make me happy. Once they had my name and number, they should have been able to see how many thousands of dollars I’ve spent with Apple over the last several years, and should have done their best to please me. Instead, they treated me like a guy who was trying to shake them down for a free copy of software, which forced me to be an a**hole on the phone before I could get my problem solved. Unbelievable.

OK, now I feel better. Rant finished.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Customer Support

I popped in to my neighborhood Peet’s this afternoon for a coffee break. While reading a magazine, I watched with bemusement as a woman sat down at the table next to me, placed her cellphone on the table and began to converse with an invisible friend using a bluetooth headset.

Putting aside my ambivalent feelings about the social propriety of the increasingly common sight of presumably sane people sitting in cafés or walking down streets engrossed in conversation with absent companions, I watched as the woman finished her coffee (but not her conversation) and then stood up and left the building.

A moment later, I noticed she had left her cellphone on the table but was so absorbed in her conversation that she hadn’t thought to bring her phone with her. About thirty seconds later, she walked back into Peet’s (still on the phone — nice range on that headset), picked up her forgotten cellphone from the table, told her invisible friend she had almost abandoned her phone and then walked back out of Peet’s. Perhaps Bluetooth is leading to increased cellphone loss?

Technorati Tags: Bluetooth, Cellphones

Having co-founded a first-generation web search engine, I occasionally spend time watching Google take over the world and reflect on the factors that led to their amazing success which built upon what initially seemed like a me-too idea, while the early search engines such as Excite, Infoseek, Lycos and Inktomi floundered.

Most of us know Google because we use it every day to search, read emails or spy on ourselves with Google Maps. In exchange for providing these amazing free services, we supply Google with a huge daily inventory of searches and pageviews, which Google then sells to the highest bidder. This has resulted in one of the most incredible revenue ramps in startup history.

Of course, advertisers (aka Google’s paying customers) and publishers (aka additional traffic inventory for Google) interact with another side of Google, namely the AdWords product where they bid on and purchase click-throughs to bring traffic to their own sites, and the AdSense product, where publishers supply their search and pageview inventory to Google so that Google can serve advertisements on their sites in exchange for a cut of Google’s revenues generated on their pages. This is the revenue-generating side of Google that has enabled their meteoric rise, and has transformed online advertising into a quantitative discipline that can reliably (and measurably) generate traffic and commerce for an advertiser.

To me, the most profound aspect of Google’s pay-per-click model is the fact that it is powered by an auction marketplace that resembles eBay’s, only it is far more efficient and is sublimely frictionless, with Google collecting a much larger share of each transaction since they are not only the marketplace, but also the supplier and seller of the inventory. Even more impressive is that Google runs a real-time auction (which is really a hairy multivariate optimization problem that would impress even the brightest Wall Street quant) to serve advertising links every time someone searches on Google or views an AdSense-enabled page.

To put this in perspective, the NYSE and NASDAQ see average daily trading volumes in the low billions, while Google is certainly processing and delivering a comparable order of magnitude of advertising auction transactions every day given the number of searches performed daily coupled with the much greater number of page views generated by AdSense publishers.

Whereas eBay’s supply of merchandise is constrained by the number of sellers and the rather cumbersome process required to put an item up for sale, the genius behind Google’s long tail marketplace is that inventory is limited only by the number of searches and pageviews on Google properties (and non-Google properties via AdSense), while every item for sale is just a simple string of text, resulting in a marketplace with incredible liquidity and a potentially infinite inventory of items that are bought and sold with far more ease than would ever be possible on eBay, given that the sheer variety of items for sale in that global garage-sale defies easy categorization and standardization.

Ultimately, numerous human beings are directly involved in every eBay transaction: one very busy seller and numerous interested buyers who have to devote some of their precious attention intermittently during the typical week-long transaction. Google’s juggernaut is enabled by the fact that every transaction occurring on their system happens with far less overhead and enables the company to make money while they (and their paying customers) sleep. Nice work if you can get it…

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Google, Search

OK, file this one under “shameless self-promotion”. John Furrier, who runs Podtech.net and does a podcast series called “The infoTalk PodCast”, came by my office several weeks ago and interviewed me for his show. This is the first podcast that I have appeared on. If you want to hear me wax a bit geeky about Web2.0 (and say the word absolutely a tad more frequently than is normal), you can listen to it here.

Technorati Tags: Podcast, Tags, Technorati