Here's a brand new paper from a conference in Vancouver last month:

Whittaker S., Matthews T., Cerruti J., Badenes H., Tong J. .: "Am I wasting my time organizing email? A study of email refinding"

They instrumented the email client of about 345 users of Bluemail, an email client built by IBM research, and identified two subsets of users:

1. Users that do a lot of foldering (organizing email into folders)
2. Users that don't use foldering and rely mostly on search.

There are a bunch of great results in this paper, but let me zero in on the most surprising result.

The authors looked at operations where the user would try to find a particular email, either by starting a search, or browsing and scrolling through folders. They looked at whether the user was successful in finding the email he or she was looking for. "Success" was defined as opening an email and reading it for more than 29 seconds (the usual amount of time it takes to read two paragraphs of text), or if the user did something to the email after opening it. For example, opening an email and replying to it would count as a "success" as well.

The results are surprising: Both groups - folderers and non-folderers - found the email they were looking for 88% of the time. Non-folderers found their emails faster too: In 66 seconds instead of 73 seconds.

Organizing your Email into Folders doesn't make finding your emails easier or faster. People that put emails into folders spend more time organizing their inbox, more time searching their email, and don't find emails more often than people who just use search.

If you're not using Hipmunk for flight search, you should be.

I'm going to Peru in May to see Machu Picchu. The flight I was about to book on Orbitz looked innocent enough, but it wasn't very clear that there was a 6-hour layover in there. Here's the same flight on Hipmunk:

Disclaimer: I'm an investor in the site.

"There are a bunch of 19-year-old startup founders running around these days saying that they want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. Some of them don't say it, but they're still thinking it. The reality is that if you want to get funding being 19 years old, you have to get traction and growth. That's what set Zuckerberg apart and that's still what it takes to get funded when you're that young. If you don't have a track record, it's too hard to tell whether you're going to give up and go back to school."

I've been playing around with the Android NDK (native development kit) recently, which lets you compile C and C++ code directly to your Android phone's ARM chip rather than writing Java. This is very useful for performance-critical apps. Unfortunately, the Android NDK doesn't have a full set of libraries, and when you're compiling third party libraries to Android, you often run into these missing pieces. One of the biggest missing pieces is glob.h / glob.c, libraries which are used for file name matching aka globbing (think the "*" in "*.txt").

I've massaged a glob.h / glob.c from FreeBSD to compile on Android. They might come in handy in your Android NDK adventures.

Download: glob.h | glob.c.

You'll need to add glob.c to the LOCAL_SRC_FILES in your Android.mk.

I got into an argument with a friend the other day about how much retail happens online vs. offline. Given the amount of money I spend on Amazon and the various branches of the empire that is Gap, I guessed that about 10% of retail happens online (at least in the US), while my friend insisted it was more like 2%.

My estimate was based on the convenience of home delivery and the quick, cheap delivery networks of UPS, FedEx, and OnTrac (a logistics company Amazon uses for a lot of its deliveries in California). In addition, residents of many populous states can avoid state sales taxes by ordering stuff from Amazon: For exmple, Amazon doesn't have operations in California and thus does not have to collect sales taxes. (However, in theory, California residents have to pay sales taxes on goods purchased out-of-state via their tax returns.)

After some research, I found this TechCrunch article from 2009 suggesting that in 2011, 7% of retail will happen online. Not quite 10%, but still impressive.