Return of the Cyber Street Walkers

My second worst addiction is Yahoo! Chess, where you can find players of all skill levels--night and day--for a 4-minute blitz game.

Like any web community, Yahoo!Chess has an Instant-Message window, where the chatter alternates between chess nerds flirting and homophobic racists spouting names at Bush-whacking foreigners. That is, until about a year ago, when the streets of our cyber neighborhood--like those of any thriving economy--attracted the online equivalent of hookers. In order to drive traffic to their pornographic web sites, these clever bots engage players with flirtatious chatter crafted to simulate genuine chess-playing hotties.

While the chat window hadn't previously interested me, I now enjoyed watching these bots fool even chess masters smart enough to force checkmate in seconds with just a bishop and a knight. Finally, profit has motivated the development of artificial intelligence that can pass Turing's Test with an A!

Sidebar: the Turing Test

In 1950, the father of computer science Alan Turing published "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in which he proposed a practical alternative to the meaningless rhetoric around the question of whether machines can think. Turing observed that it would be difficult to deny the presence of cognition in an artifically intelligent machine if a human judge, communicating textually with both the machine and another human being, cannot identify which is which. An unclaimed prize awaits the programmer whose invention passes the test, and meanwhile an annual prize awards the best contenders. (You can appreciate first-hand the progress made from Eliza in 1966 to Jabberwacky in 2005.)

Unlike other AI engines, the Yahoo! bots do not even incorporate the human being's questions into their responses. Rather, they exploit the disjointed nature and shallow personae of adolescent chat to spoof a teenage girl, as demonstrated by these pearls of wisdom recently quoted--typos and all--from A_busty_babe_cc_32 (interjected with comments from armandolinares001, a naive suitor):

can any guys beat me?

you play good

19/f bored with pics in profile

can i see?

Hi... 19/f :-) Pics in my profile

do you have a profile?

oOOooOooo

yeah, in my profile

ohh

armandolinares001: hi

tee hee

armandolinares001: wat?

are you married?

armandolinares001: no u?

I love cheesy poofs

you play good

19?F/Cali web cam and pics in my profile!

I'm feelin gfrisky

lolol

thats hot

The enterprising authors of these bots obviously found a market because, as I expected, Yahoo!Chess was soon overrun by them, competing for attention in the sort of bot-on-bot action seen below.

With the bots obviously working--so to speak--I was surprised two weeks ago when they suddenly disappeared, just like that. (For readers of the novel Earth Abides, the life cycle of internet scourges like this one recall the rise and fall of species in the power vacuum of post-human Earth.) And then, just as suddenly one week later, they all re-appeared, as if returning en masse from the Hooker Bot Conference in Vegas.


The only clue I have to their mysterious hiatus is the difficulty logging into game rooms that week, often trying several times before I could get in. In their game of cat and mouse with the pornographers, was Yahoo! testing a new filter mechanism? My guess is that it excluded the bots at the expense of user experience, forcing a retreat to the staus quo.

So the bots are back, but like any good internet scourge (email viruses, spam, P2P song theft, click fraud...), the scammers colonized so quickly that they overhunted their prey--the Fooled Chess Player is now as rare as Japanese coastal tuna or American Buffalo.

Meanwhile, if you're seeking a real bot relationship, I recommend you find one with broader and less prurient interests. The best one out there is Spleak, who will buddy up with any user of MSN Messenger.

Ed. note: If you don't believe this story, check out Yahoo! Chess for yourself (and while you're there, invite me to your table for a quickie).

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China Pulls Ahead

Contrast how China makes use of its Great Hall of the People with how the US proposes to make use of its own legislative hall if Republican Congressman Lynn Westmoreland's bill is passed. (Be sure to click on Westmoreland below to see Colbert's brief interview--it's funny and yet depressing.)

Yes, The Ten Commandments are turning America into laughingstock. (Have you seen this legislative gem?) From the NY Times article:

Imagine, several string theorists in the audience mused, if a physics conference in the United States started in the House of Representatives.

China, meanwhile, surges ahead on the strength of science, overtaking us in graduate education and research spending. Heeding the sobering advice of Stephen Hawking to save our species, China this week has even announced plans toward building a lunar space colony.

Our rivalry with China could be the plot of a chapter from Gardner Dozois' acclaimed SciFi collection Galileo's Children.

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Bessemer's Fall 2006 Television Lineup

In addition to Delivery Agent (see prior post on Dwight Schrute Bobbleheads), here are seven other investments Bessemer has recently made on our Television 2.0 road map that address the rapidly changing landscape of video entertainment (in no particualr order):

1. IAG Research

Last week we announced our investment in a research/information service that complements Nielsen data with a new kind of measurement: rather than count households in which an exposure occured, IAG measures the quality of the exposure by surveying hundreds of thousands of TV and movie viewers every month on brand awareness, recall, and preference. By subscribing to IAG data feeds, brands can intellgiently allocate media budgets among the emerging ad platforms like web players, mobile video, and brand integration, precisely comparing each format's efficacy to the traditional 30-second spot. IAG subscribers include Toyota, Lexus, Nissan, GM, DaimlerChrylser, Kia, Verizon, Sprint/Nextel, American Express, Johnson & Johnson, P&G, Paramount, Sony, Merck, Pfizer, the NFL as well as the leading networks including NBC, CBS, FOX, WB, ESPN, Bravo, USA, Lifetime, TBS, TNT, and Food Network.

2. NextMedium

I recently joined the board of NextMedium, the emerging marketplace for Audited Brand Integration. NextMedium debuted its platform last month at the TV Upfronts, where demand from advertisers exceeded expectations. With the decline of the 30-second spot, the advertisers need a new medium for reaching broad audiences with visual exposures affiliated with content and characters that speak to the consumer. Integrating brands into TV, movies, and music videos offers them exposure that works regardless of whether the video is viewed live, on Tivo, through iTunes, on a phone or in a re-run. And the studios/networks need the new revenue stream to subsidize production as traditional ad revenues decline. (Click here to see Cisco's brand integrations in Fox's series 24, especially this one, where Chloe tells Division Chief that the terrorists couldn't hack CTU's system because "Cisco networks are self-defending.")

All indications from advertisers and producers point to audited brand integration as a hypergrowth market. (Indeed, roughly a third of IAG's revenue comes from their In-Program service.)

NextMedium takes product placement (in which products are supplied free for their production value) to the next level by creating a reliable, scalable, and measurable system for selling targeted exposures to brands. Producers propose integrations, advertisers bid for them, and the director selects the brand, incorporating creative concerns. Most importantly, NextMedium buyers pay for performance by bidding a price that varies based on exposures, using audited Nielsen data. I like to think of it, of course, as the Google of branded integration.

3. WorkMetro

As Tivo kills commercials, the cable companies also seek alternative revenue streams. So Comcast, Cox and Time Warner are getting help from WorkMetro (where I have also recently joined the board), which launches localized job listing sites promoted by their cable partner.

Having invested early in Hotjobs, I'm well aware of the competition at the high end, but local job seekers and employers, who don't necessarily use PC's all day, have mostly remained loyal to their local newspapers, where job listings typically generate the profit. Now WorkMetro is taking a bite out of that market, bringing the benefits of the internet and video-on-demand job listings to TV audiences.

4. GoTV

GoTV is the largest producer of made-for-mobile video entertainment. Sprint, Cingular, Nextel, Boost (and soon Verizon and many others) carry channels from GoTV offering news, sports, music, comedy, and more on demand, Tivo style. GoTV is the mobile distribution partner of ESPN, ABC (Lost, Alias...), Univision, iFilm, Sony, and others. Most of the content is produced in-house by GoTV's studio, led by Dan Tibbets who invented the "mobisode" while at Foxlab. The company's CEO is Dave Bluhm, a Bessemer EIR whom our mobile investor Ron Elwell recruited to run the company.

GoTV's servers automatically scale down the frame rate to suit your phone, but by the end of next year, CTIA projects that 22% of handsets in the US will be 3G and video-capable.

5. Siano Mobile Silicon

To serve consumers who want live TV, phone manufacturers are increasingly designing in MDTV receivers from Siano, whose all-CMOS chips are multi-band and multi-standard (DAB, T-DMB, DVB-T , DVB-H) for global coverage.

6. Revver

Skype investors Rob Stavis (Bessemer) and Howard Hartenbaum (Draper Richards) funded Revver, an advertising network that embeds ads within user generated videos, sharing revenue with the creator. Here's a recent favorite playing on the site.

7. Access Retail Entertainment

Access produces MTV-style entertainment in a venue without Tivo's ad-skipping for a growing network of over 5,000 retailers including Journeys, Underground Station, Vanity and Macy's, reaching over 40M youth each month. Cingular, Samsung, Wrigley's and others find that Access generates better brand recall than TV spots.