WES 2009

We are going to Orlando, FL next week, to showcase MiaMia for BlackBerry.

If anyone is around the area, please visit us at our booth, at Demo Pod #520.

The showcase is on Monday, May 4th 12:00 noon to 4:00 pm.

Additional hours:

Monday, May 4th	6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Tuesday, May 5th	12:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Wednesday, May 6th	12:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Thursday, May 7th	9:00 am – 2:00 pm

SMS in the Philippines

The Philippines is a country where people use cellular phones mostly to text, and they text more than anywhere else. It is estimated that every day, Filipinos send about one billion messages. That's how things work there. 

Due to complex telecommunication regulations, it took us some efforts to acquire an inbound SMS phone number via a chain of intermediaries; ours belongs to Smart. After a relatively stable initial period, it went into a volatile state where it used to disconnect every two weeks or so for days. Eventually, it just died without a warning. When we inquired our SMS gateway provider, Clickatell, they told us that their provider now requires details what our service is about. We provided the info, and nothing happened.

Currently we are trying all kinds of formal and informal channels to solve the problem. Is the Phillippine SMS going to be back online soon? We are doing all we can to bring it back.

Questions that people keep asking

It has been a couple of months since the last entry. The test run is going smoothly so far. We are checking different directions, and many things are happening behind the scenes.

We noticed some questions that keep popping up. Since our staff and automatic rules redirect people to this blog, I'll reply here.

Q: Is MiaMia automatic or human?

A: Both!
It is, probably, puzzling that some questions are answered instantly, and some take more time. Since the automatic answering module is configured to mimic "human touch" and base conclusions on some human answers, and the human experts try to mimic machines, it can be safely said that we passed the Turing test by cheating :-) . It wasn't our goal though.

Q: Do you hire agents in US / Europe?

A: Not at this stage. For one or another reason, this often comes from ChaCha guides. Our processing center is currently in the Philippines (with other locations in the works), and we employ a very different approach. We need people employed full-time, and the possibility to train them and improve their performance. It does not work with crowdsourcing by definition.

Q: Do you have local numbers in my country?

A: Unfortunately, due to complex regulations, in many countries the SMS receiving phone numbers are very difficult and sometimes costly to obtain. In the Philippines, we are facing a unique problem which I will refer to in a different post.
However, voice mail numbers are relatively easy to obtain, and we are still offering voice mail for US, UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Belgium, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Norway. Please do not send SMS messages to the voice mail - it is simply not processed, except for the cases where your mobile operator courteously converts it to voice (like Sprint in US). The phone numbers are regular phone numbers, not premium and not free - so you will pay regular communication costs.

I sent a question in French / Arabic / Spanish, but there was no reply!

In addition to English, we currently have limited support of French, Dutch and some simplified Chinese. While eventually we hope to cover as many languages as possible, unless we find marketing partners in these markets, we do not plan developing other languages in the immediate future.

Who is the founder / owner of MiaMia?

Marc De Daele is the CEO of MIIA Holding Ltd. Jo Lernout is the visionary who planned SofIA (the precursor of MiaMia) during the last months of L&H back in 2000 when Google was still in its infancy. Vadim Berman (me) developed Carabao Language Kit, the NLP technology used as a backbone of MiaMia.

Communication forwarding services

MiaMia is more than just answering questions. We aim to provide services for people on the go, and those who don't have access to the internet, but need it. "Poor man's internet", so to speak.

In the Philippines, for one, nearly everybody uses the internet. How else people are going to stay in touch with the relatives overseas? But for many (or probably most), using the internet means going to the internet cafe. It is a bit of waste to fork out your hard earned pesos to send a short note.

Or consider a different scenario. You are 20 years old, and backpacking somewhere in the Kingdom of Far, Far Away. You are staying in a small village, where two houses have electricity, and one house has running water. The word 'internet' causes the locals to expose their trademark toothless grin. Good thing you have your mobile with a local SIM card, and the connection is good enough to send SMSes. Too bad you don't have much load for international calls, and 3G and mobile internet are not exactly an option here.

Well, you have MiaMia as an option. Simply text something like:

send an email to myrecipient@faraway.com: hi guys, I'm alive and well 

or

send SMS to +1234567890: hi guys, this is me, my phone number is this: +987654321

and it will be automatically forwarded to whoever you want. If you got it right, you should receive an acknowledgement (or an error message) within a few seconds.

Note that you can forward your SMS or email to everywhere in the world. So with a local access number, it will cost you like a local SMS.

No crowdsourcing please

I'm not a buzzword person. It's probably not so good for the publicity, but the repeated use of neologisms like "crowdsourcing", "cloud computing" or sequences like "term coined by..." makes me cast doubts whether the person really has something to say. In the techworld, big guys use this to cover the king's nudity and sell Nothing In a Box v2.35 (build 821: works anywhere, any time!), and tech bloggers with a lot of time on their hands and skillset of Paris Hilton, use it to make themselves seem important.

Many people who reacted to the articles about MiaMia, mentioned ChaCha (possibly the first one), another question answering service, which has raised whooping $16 million and have been in different permutations for over 2 years now. Having recruited thousands of search guides, ChaCha uses "crowdsourcing" (and so does more interesting Amazon Mechanical Turk). What does "crowdsourcing" effectively mean? 

You stand in a busy place and scream on top of your lungs: "Hey!!! Who is the author of the binomial theorem? Does anyone know?.." In certain cases it might work - if you ask about the closest bus stop or a similar triviality. But for a service like ChaCha it proved to be a disaster. Some things just can't be delegated to random people.

De facto launch

Things happen quickly when one least expects it. Massive development of MiaMia only started this April, after a couple of months we started a test run. In late August, a few journalists from Belgian De Tijd started bombarding us with questions, and the next day a few Belgian newspapers and blogs published the news: Jo Lernout is back with MiaMia. From here, it spread like fire through the blogosphere, and after just two days we started receiving questions from literally everywhere. (Last thing that surprised me, a reader in a Cosmopolitan online community mentioned the service.)

While it took us by surprise, we are very pleased with the first results. Most of the reviews were positive, most of the answers were to the point. In addition to reviews, some people asking the questions even took the initiative to thank us personally. Oddly, a lot of people ask questions from desktops.

Of course, no one is perfect, and we are still in BETA stage; we can't satisfy everybody. We do aspire to get better though - so people who are not satisfied with the results: your feedback matters a great deal to us. Thank you for taking the time to react.

As the system's architect, I will be mostly talking about the technical stuff, and what's in store. MiaMia is not only about answering questions; we'll be doing more.

I'd like to highlight a few aspects. People keep bringing it up, so I feel the need to clarify these:

• the service is financed by advertisement. There is no "catch", except that you'll see an ad after the answer. We will not SMS you again (unless there is a bug :-) ), or sell your phone number / email / IP address / homing pigeon's name to third parties. Like I mentioned in one of the blogs, considering the system's complexity and the datamining tools we use, it would be like using the Hubble telescope to peek into your neighbor's window. It's the model of nearly every desktop search engine, why is this so suprising when it comes to mobiles?
• you can ask questions from: website, voice call, SMS. They will be delivered to: mobile phone by SMS, and email. We are planning for more. While we don't have phone numbers in all countries, you can use any of the contact numbers in our list. The phone numbers are regular ones (as you can see), so the cost of communication will be as if you called to a regular number in that country (if you are calling from abroad, of course, international rates apply - but nowadays it's not that much either). Note: when submitting your question through the website, don't forget to specify your country code (US & Canada: +1, Australia: +61, Philippines: +63, full list here). We'll add some more checks, of course.
• there are some questions we can't answer, and some questions we don't want to answer. If someone is asking, "what kind of medicine I give to my child if he can't sleep" - we won't answer this. We don't want to endanger lives, and / or get sued. (I'll take a liberty to give a personal recommendation in this case not to rely on Google either.) We will not help you to enroll to al Qaeda (yes, you'd be surprised...), build a nuclear bomb, or find out if your wife is cheating on you. In fact, as the service is worldwide, the system is wearing a very tight digital chastity belt, and won't answer anything about locating porn and sex services either.
• we do not aim to and do not claim to be a "new Google." Every single company that comes up with a funky gadget to display search results in 3 columns, claims to be a "new Google." We want to be more realistic. 

MiaMia

We get great reviews about our MiaMia service (www.mymiamia.com) . Some people wonder or find it annoying that sometimes it takes 10 to 15 minutes before they receive an answer. Well, in most cases, the answer comes back in seconds or in case a human agent needs to search for it, a few minutes only. In some cases it may indeed take 10 to 15 minutes for our Human Knowledge Agents to find an answer.
Yet, it still may be worth the wait : suppose you are on the go, and you have no (mobile) internet connection, just a regular cellular phone : waiting for MiaMia to answer your question may still be faster (and a lot cheaper) than calling a friend to find the required information for you on the internet. And even when you have (mobile) internet, but you are driving a car, calling MiaMia and speaking your question and getting the answer a few minutes later may be much more handy than to look for a spot to pull over, stop the car and do the internet search yourself.