Atlanta Midtown Restaurant Week: Trois
It’s one of my favorite weeks of the year: Atlanta Midtown Restaurant Week. A large number of restaurants in the area offer 3 course tasting menus for $25. We try to take advantage of the cheaper eats. Our first foray this year was to Trois, a place we’d been meaning to visit for quite some time. Located at the corner of 14th and Peachtree, Trois is one of the latest offerings by the same restaurant group responsible for One Midtown Kitchen and Two Urban Licks. We’ve had excellent food (and mediocre service) at both locations and we’d heard that Trois was the best of the three.
We arrived quite early in terms of the evening and our reservations so we grabbed a drink at the bar. My wife ordered a mint julep and I ordered their signature martini. The mint julep was definitely good but the Trois Martini was perfect for the end of a hot summer day. Green tea and mellowed taste of gin with just a bit of mint, yum. We sat at the bar which though empty felt overstuffed as it was crammed with chairs. The lighted floor and comfortable looking tables would have been a better bet. Despite the liberal use of metal, like the starry lighted aluminum floors, the place still felt pretty relaxing. That would have to wait as we headed up to the second of three floors to the restaurant.
The main dining area is surrounded by large windows that were open to views of downtown Atlanta and the surrounding buildings. I’ve always been a fan of glass art and I especially liked how the looked in the fading light of the day. The exposed kitchen was tucked off to the side but clearly visible from most anywhere. I’m not certain who we offended but were were stuck smack in the middle of the floor with other tables within much less than arm’s length. The wait staff had quite a few problems navigating over to us which led to a few issues with serving. The ladies were often served last from the left side, etc. Not a big deal but noticable. We were immediately presented with a glass of sparkling wine and an amuse bouche, a small taste of pureed watermelon which while refreshing was a bit too sweet. My dining companions thought the mirepoix spread for the bread was tasty and perfect for the slightly rustic loaf. In a break from most Restaurant Week dining we weren’t presented with any choices for our meal. They had a selected a couple of items off the regular menu and presented smaller portions of each tapas-style. The heirloom tomato salad they brought out first far exceeded my expectations. The freshness of the tomatoes was exceptional and the balsamic they had with the goat cheese was a great match. The hanger steak with bearnaise and fries was a let down. The steak was tough and salty and the fries lacked crispness. It should be said that I’m not a fan of bearnaise so that did them no favors. We also added an order of the burgundy snails and “Toad in a Hole”. The snails were a nice change of pace from the traditional overly garlicky presentation. I could actually taste snail, how ’bout that? The real winner to everyone was the goat cheese ravioli with tomato nestled among the snails. The “Toad in a Hole” was a fun trip though many textures with tuna tartar (nothing special), brioche and egg (yay childhood treats) and wasabi caviar (more wasabi please). It’s fun to eat but its taste feels a bit jumbled.
For the main course we were presented first with Flounder Parisian. Eh. The flounder lacked any sort of crispness though it tasted fine. It was served on a bed of green mush with some baby cauliflower lounging around. It had promise but I think they may have been phoning this in for the “cheapskates” of Restaurant Week. The duck breast was a different story. I’m a huge fan of duck. I order duck everywhere. This was my second favorite duck ever. (It loses out to Mario Batalle’s chipotle duck sloppy joe… lots of yummy chipotle taste, yet still very much *duck*). The confit served alongside was quite excellent as well. I’m definitely going back just for it!
Dessert was a flourless chocolate cake. I’m no chocoholic so this wouldn’t have been my first choice in dessert but the home made mint chocolate chip icecream was the real star. Like the other Concentrics restuarants ice cream is a focal area. More ice cream needs fresh mint, though ever since everyone went mojito-crazy I’m getting my wish.
We popped up to the third floor to check out their other dining room, usually held for private parties. It looked quite similar to the floor below, but the real goal for going up there was to check out restrooms. A very intriguing part of the fine dining experience. The “M” and “W”s marking the door were easy enough to figure out… and colored lights let you easily find an open bathroom “pod” but you can’t shake the feeling that you’re really in some weird in-flight spaceship bathroom complete with a weird toilet with a very well hidden flushing mechanism. They helpfully include a sign that informs you that the button is on the “right”. Which is a complete lie if you’re not sitting on the toilet while you flush… who does that unless they have to? Freaky. There’s a right nice futuristic waiting area for the men to sit around in while the lady-folk spend 5 minutes trying to figure out how to flush.
I’d definitely go back to Trois. They have an interesting French inspired menu, a great wine list and a bevy of interesting cocktails. Aside from being stuffed into an inconvenient table our waiter was excellent… oh and they validate parking. That’s always a nice touch in Midtown.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit StumbleUpon TechnoratiCan you trust Facebook to be your Social Operating System?
Quite a few people have been asking why they should use other social networking sites now that Facebook is the platform of choice. It’s the new Microsoft, the new empowering development platform and Facebook apps are the greatest and every company should have one. Everything is ultimately on Facebook so there is no need to go anywhere else.
I’m certain that Guy Kawasaki understands why moving to one platform is a bad thing. Lock out. Digital Life Disabled. Just like Guy your account can be shut down with warning or without.
How can you recover? If Facebook is a black hole then anything you’ve contributed solely within their world is now inaccessible. Facebook, the Social Operating System, has a number of drawbacks when compared to traditional OSes. When Windows crashes you may be able to restore a backup.. or these days due to diversification a lot of our important data lives in the cloud with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and more. When Facebook crashes you’ll quickly figure out that there’s not a lot you can do to restore it. If you’re trusting a single point of access it’s actually a single point of failure. If you’ve jumped into the Facebook platform with both feet then it’s your contact list, instant messaging, email, photo sharing and more. These are critical applications with no formal level of support. That doesn’t sound too smart.
Facebook can also change its terms and conditions at its discretion. Due to the real-time delivery of the web you can’t just opt out of questionable new features. Just wait until you have to deal with the Facebook Genuine Advantage! Look at all the love Microsoft has received.
One of the best features of Facebook is that it lets you control the privacy of your profile. It puts you in control of what other people see, great stuff right? Except that Facebook can determine at any time, willfully or in error, to take away that identity. Poof. Disabled. You’re not really in control. You do not have Administrator access.
So what can you do? While Facebook can be an excellent for aggregating information from multiple sources you can still maintain information on other established services like LinkedIn and even MySpace. You should also push the envelop by checking out the better designed sites like Pownce and Virb. Be mindful that what goes into Facebook doesn’t come out. Until a new social networking site with a truly open platform comes along you may want to be careful what you contribute.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit StumbleUpon TechnoratiBabelgum builds out its content
Babelgum, a company quickly adding independent content for its Internet TV service has added an area to their site highlighting some of their new offerings. Getting the premium treatment is “GONG” a network devoted to anime. Babelgum is certainly ambitious in their aim to “transform a thriving niche business to a mass-market.” The featured lineup is the lesser-known series Gun Frontier and Cosmo Warriors with Ikki Tousen to come in September. None of these are blockbuster offerings but they will help Babelgum fulfill it’s niche status. The deal with GONG isn’t exclusive to Babelgum as Internet TV competitor Joost is also a content partner.
Japanese animation aimed at the 15-30 year old crowd isn’t the only content that’s being featured. Babelgum will be offering a good bit of coverage to independent film festivals. The Italy-based Giffoni Film Festival, going on this week, will be the first they feature with a bit of content from last years festival, but more importantly they’ll be showing some of this years content simultaneously. The video targets an even younger demographic than GONG’s anime since Giffoni has content for teens and younger and is judged by their target audience. Ultimately there will be 8 short films from last year, 4 from this year and 29 long-form trailers. You can go and vote right now on your favorites via Babelgum’s voting feature. The highest rated video will be given an award on Saturday at Giffoni. This is an excellent step forward in user interaction and it’s something that Babelgum needs to improve upon by unlocking more social features. They’re even giving back to their users by awarding VIP passes for the Rushes Soho Shorts Festival Awards. Keep it up!
The last featured area is one that gave Babelgum it’s initial buzz: The partnership with Knicks-loving Spike Lee. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of information on Babelgum’s website about Spike’s contributions. For now there’s a blurb of info regarding the short film Jesus Children of America. If Babelgum’s popularity increases I’m sure we’ll see more independent films from well known directors appear. Internet TV is a phenomenon that is comfortably TV-like, yet inexpensive so it may be alluring for others to release documentaries or pet-project films without worrying about wide distribution costs.
It seems that Babelgum is turning out new content deals every day. None my be mindblowingly spectacular but that isn’t their way. I look forward to more announcements. One area that I hope they address is in the Science or History areas. I know there are a lot of people out there hooked on Discovery and the History Channel and there’s a lot of good stuff out there that should be easily available.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit StumbleUpon TechnoratiHow much of an impact will Semantic Search have?
Do we really need a better search for the Internet? And when it exists will anyone choose to use it?
There has been a lot of press lately about challengers to the current keyword search kings: Google Yahoo and Microsoft. There are a variety of different approaches being taken but a lot of the debate has centered around which technology can best return relevant results. Is it the incumbent keyword search the best we’ll ever have? How about the very retro human powered search like ChaCha or Mahalo? Powerset is banking that semantic search engines are the way to go.
At first I was skeptical about semantic search but after meeting with the folks at Powerset during their public unveiling I started coming around. They certainly had a good number of compelling queries that Google and Yahoo don’t handle with any great degree of accuracy. The ability to determine the intent of a query and to do more than word matching is impressive. Ranking based on semantic data sounds very useful. Hey maybe semantic search will be massively superior!
I’ve been thinking about these issues over the last couple of weeks and more cracks keep appearing. Just for fun I went back through my Google History (it has to be good for something, right?) and looked for places where I thought semantic search would be superior. I found that my searches generally took on a couple of forms and yours may differ.
Spell check and definitions
Over 15% of my searches were either a quick way to check the spelling of a word or used as a dictionary lookup. Sometimes it’s stupid things.. like determining if “margarita” has an ‘h’ in it since I knew the pizza-type “margherita” does. I can tell you right now that I’m not going to type “Does margarita have an h in it?” into a search engine when I can make Google’s auto-suggest feature do basic spell check for me. Sorry Powerset. I also know that Google has a handy “define” feature that saves me the time of loading up a dictionary site or changing the browser’s search box away from Google.
Shortcut to a site
Roughly 30% of my searches are for sites where searching Google beat typing in the actual address for non-bookmarked sites. If I need to visit MSDN it’s easier for me to type MSDN into Google than to type out “.microsoft.com” in the address bar. For many blogs and other sites out there I don’t have to remember if it’s a .net, .com, .us, .whatever. Keyword search to the rescue.
Just get a me a generic pointer to more
Most of the rest of my searches aren’t particularly targeted. Band names, people, products, etc. Typing is “What/Who is” just wouldn’t be helpful to the semantic search engine or myself. Firefox’s ability to highlight text and search Google is the origin for many of these searches. With the addition of Google’s Universal Search I’m often getting the image, video or news that I’m interested in by default.
Math and Unit Conversion
Google is my calculator. I suppose that’s all I need to say about that.
Error messages
I work with a lot of different software apps with varying degrees of stability. I also tend to have to track down a lot of random errors that seem to pop up when I’m learing new frameworks like Django or trying something new in RoR. Searching for error messages is unfortunately a habit of mine. This may be an area where semantic search can work quite well when looking to solve certain problems but understanding the meaning behind code seems to be an impossibly difficult task.
Facts, Recommendations, Recent results, etc.
I have identified only 36 searches out of just over 1800 that I believe have a high chance of being significantly impacted by semantic search. In some instances I’d like to find about what’s new on a particular topic over the last week. Unfortunately Google’s options only lets me limit results to things that are less than 3 months old. Most of these other queries were about fact finding: Who played X in a movie? What is Y’s latest album? When is Z going on tour? How many users does Facebook have? What is the best free screen capture app for the Mac? There were a few more where I was intentionally iterating to remove irrelevant results. Here semantic search could really shine! It’s unfortunate that all but two of these searches happened to be for programming related items. I just don’t search for specific facts all that often or I have different non-public channels where I look for advice (IM, Facebook, etc).
Conclusions
I immediately saw the benefit for about 36 searches, that’s roughly a search per day. 2% of my searches. Not very encouraging. Even if the number was 10 times higher I’m still not certain I’d want to take the time to change my searching behavior. This is especially true if using Powerset involves more typing (for better results) and slower response times (for now). This just means that Powerset won’t be a drop in replacement for my current search engine of choice. I’m not sure they want to be. I’m not sure Powerset knows what they want to be. Answering trivia questions or being a better search engine for Wikipedia may be their calling.
How do your search results compare? Do you see a lot of opportunity for semantic search to make a difference in your everyday searches?
PS: I found it quite difficult to remember the intent of my searches from over a month ago. I would have tried to use a large sample otherwise.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit StumbleUpon TechnoratiNew version of Babelgum tweaks its flavor
Earlier today Babelgum pushed out an updated version of their Internet TV application. Version 0.9.1 tweaks the user interface and addresses a few of the glaring problems that were mentioned in my Joost vs. Babelgum comparison. The automated update ability included in Babelgum was pretty smooth aside from adding an extra Windows desktop shortcut. It should be noted that there’s still no sign of a Mac version of Babelgum.
When starting Babelgum users are now greeted with a video that showcases a bunch of the company’s content. The video isn’t nearly so slick as Joost’s but it is a welcome addition. Best of all you can now jump forward and backward in the video stream by clicking on the time bar.
Subtle additions like the “Coming Next” pop-up message when your current video is finishing adds a bit of polish that was previously lacking. It gives you a quick snapshot of the next item in the channel, although the image is difficult to make sense of due to the small size.
Another tweak is the removal of lag when jumping to a new video channel. Now a brief loading image is shown while the streaming content is buffered. It definitely gives you instant feedback but the transparency level is usually set way to high so it’s almost invisible like in the shot below.
Overall the readability of the application has improved, especially the “invite a friend” and login features. Search has been added to a few more screens and is a primary way of finding new material to create “Smart Channels”.
Babelgum’s new version announcement says that there have been a number of performance and bug fixes, but the new version felt slightly slower and actually crashed during my tests. For a bit more information about the miscellaneous changes you can find them here. A fair amount of video has been added since the last time looked at Babelgum. Music content from Ministry of Sound and the recently announced partnership with Baeble Music have helped fill out a portion of the site. Unfortunately their competition is also getting a lot of press for their unique additions like exclusive airing of a VH1 show before its broadcast premier. Babelgum’s new CEO needs to start making some calls if it doesn’t want to get buried under the avalanche of press for other Internet TV contenders.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit StumbleUpon TechnoratiBabelgum’s New CEO and New Plans
The Internet TV service Babelgum announced the appointment of new CEO Valerio Zingarelli earlier today on their blog. Zingarelli, a former CTO of Italian mobile network provider Omnitel now part of Vodafone, will take over for co-founder Erik Lumer. This change marks Babelgum’s transition from building out their technical capabilities to focusing on content acquisition, gaining viewers and eventual making some money via advertising.
Zingarelli had the following to say about his appointment:
“Babelgum is right at the heart of a revolution in television, building a truly personal global media capable of delivering a huge amount of professional television quality content to millions of users around the world. It’s a new kind of distribution that is uniquely suited to satisfying individual passions and interests through the innovative Smart Channels concept, i.e. channels defined individually by users”.
The most interesting part of the announcement is independent content producers will soon be able to submit their videos for inclusion into Babelgum. At this point there doesn’t appear to be a large motivation for users to upload videos though. During the Joost vs. Babelgum comparison it was obvious that social features were strangely absent so community recognition isn’t a major factor. Users will be required to upload the content so Babelgum won’t be automatically pulling from other media sites as VeohTV does. I’ve also heard nothing about revenue sharing like Revver so there doesn’t appear to be a financial incentive either. The platform and interface is quite nice, so I hope they’re able to keep up their recent string of content deals and hopefully add some bigger fish.
Oh, and with plans to increase headcount to 100 employees by year end I’m sure that Dublin-based Babelgum is hiring.
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