Software, Digital Content, Geopolitics, Economics & More from of a Libertarian Serial Expat and Entrepreneur
"The frustrating thing was, there was nothing I could do. "SYSTEM ERROR" was not even listed in the instruction manual’s "troubleshooting guide." I plugged "coolpix 775 system error" into Google and found this depressing list of user complaints on the Reviewcentre site. Seems that this problem is endemic to this camera."
I had the same experience when my first IBM hard drive crashed. A possibly useful application of the Google and Amazon APIs would be to parse the later product database, then run SKUs through Google queries for "problem" or "error." This is of course a very crude implementation, e.g. a page that says "Enermax power supply: no problem!" shouldn’t be counted as negative feedback. The challenge is to tap all this unstructured data and mine it automatically. Now when I research items I look for potential negative feedback to try and avoid bad surprises.
I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.