John Doerr on personalized information

John Doerr (of Kleiner Perkins, on the board of Google, Amazon, and others) spoke at Web 2.0 and audio of the talk is available at IT Conversations. A great excerpt on personalization:

I was talking with you and I fantasized about something we haven't invested in yet but is Amazon or Google-sized in terms of its technical challenge ...

Maybe we'll get to 3 billion people on the web and say that what matters to all of us is information, and products, and more. Which is we live in time and we're assaulted by events. And, so, let's just say there's 3 billion events going on at any given time. And if you wanted to compute the cross product of the 3 billion people and the 3 billion events -- 'cause you need to filter very carefully the information that's going to get to this device -- I don't want to be assaulted by anything but the most relevant information ...

John Doerr is talking about personalized information streams, personalized filtering of information about events. John's saying, show me the relevant news, interesting new products, and useful new documents I need to see. Surface the events that matter to me.

[Doerr talk via Scoble]