- The Future Bill Gates
-
Lots of news this week about Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft, but most people don't realize how un-Bill and un-Microsoft it is to spend time reflecting on the past, so the goodbye meeting I went to on Friday morning was a little out-of-character. (Tears?!)
The most interesting parts, in fact, were the discussion about the future. Bill noted that he expects his priorities at the Foundation to remain roughly constant for the next 30 years! Global Health, U.S. Education, and Global Development.
Speaking of the future, my team had some interesting interactions with him this week that we'll be talking about soon. Stay tuned.
- My new Tilt
-
After many years as a Treo user, my battery finally died and I was faced with a choice: get a new battery (for something like $50) or buy a brand new phone. Talk about an easy decision! So which one to get?
First, I had to choose a carrier. I've been on Verizon for a long time, but my need to do international travel eventually forced me to switch to AT&T (and their GSM network). Then I looked at the various AT&T phones (yes, including iPhone) and ultimately decided to get the "best Windows Mobile device", which according to the reviews is the Tilt.
I've been using it now for a month or two and here's what I like:
- Much, much faster than my old Treo. Internet speeds routinely faster than 1Mbs.
- Way, way more memory, including RAM, so I can run more apps simultaneously
- Built-in GPS. If you haven't used Window Live Search Mobile, you should immediately stop what you're doing and download it right now. You will not be disappointed. It uses my GPS receiver to show high-res images of my location. I love putting the phone in the backseat while I let the kids watch exactly where we're driving.
- Built-in WiFi: it saved my life during my trip to Costa Rica, where I was able to regularly get on line without exorbitant international data charges.
What I don't like:
- no built-in RJ-11 jack (or any kind of audio-out), making it hard to connect to my car's audio.
- slide-out keyboard. At first, I thought I'd prefer the larger size over the Treo, but I find myself missing the ability to type without opening up the device.
- No sound switch. If you're in a meeting where you need to switch to vibrate, you'll need to unlock the phone and do it through software. Worse, if you turn off the device completely, there is a startup sound (and no override) when you repower it. Gotta be careful.
I'm still in the "new" stage, playing with and learning new features. Oh, and the battery lasts pretty long for me -- usually about two days if I don't talk much. So it'll be a while I think before it starts to die [and gives me another excuse to upgrade!]
- I want Hi-fi phone calls
-
Once you've spoken with your young son or daughter on a wide-band telephony connection, you'll never want to go back to your old POTS (Plain Old Telephony Service) phone line again. Children have such high pitched voices that the upper frequencies get chopped off and it's hard/impossible to distinguish your boy from your girl.
I've wondered for many years why the phone companies don't offer wide-band, 16khz audio for phonecalls. I can sort of understand how upgrading the entire network infrastructure is expensive and maybe would promote incompatibilities among carriers who adopt different wideband technologies, but why not high-quality between callers on a single network? If AT&T is so proud of its push-to-talk service, why not go the next step and make all ATT-ATT calls high-quailty?
Turns out the answers to that obvious question aren't easy, but I'm glad that TMCNet writer Rick Bye has at least summarized the challenges. He concludes with good news:
So, wideband telephony, an exciting feature that has been ‘coming soon’ for a long time, but may now actually be on its way, offering clear benefits to end users that should result in more and more people switching to VoIP services.
- Tinkering and plunging
-
I admit that I'm often more of a tinkerer than a plunger when it comes to new technologies like Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and [insert your favorite web2.0 example]. I'm a tinkerer because I sign up for just about anything new that comes along, especially if I see it from one of my friends or others on my blog roll. But I just tinker with it, enough to get the basic idea, so I can be conversationally knowledgable about it if/when something becomes relevant later to my day job.
Plungers just jump right in, whole hog. They invite everyone they know, and then go crazy piling on dozens, maybe hundreds (or thousands) of friends, thinking they've discovered some new incredible way to automate what is fundamentally a one-on-one personal relationship-building process.
That's why I agree with sogrady at Redmonk who says:
[R]elationship volume and personal time are inversely proportional. As one rises, the other declines, more or less inevitably. In practical terms, this implies that the addition of relationships - be they personal, business or otherwise - unavoidably reduces the amount of time that you might allot to each.
So go ahead, add me to your Twitter feed if you like. I'll probably follow you and maybe learn something new about you in the process. But ultimately I think I'm concluding that Twitter, like Facebook before it, is more of a fad. It's being driven today by plungers, and once the next big cool thing comes along, they'll be on to something else.
- Microspotting
-
If you're wondering what it's really like inside Microsoft (maybe because you want to work here?), read the interviews at the corporate blog Microspotting. In the most recent post, Ariel interviews Microosft platform evangelist Jeff Sandquist, who tells us what it's like to work for SanjayP and how surprised he was to see that Sanjay reads the blogs of people in his organization. Since Sanjay recently became VP of the Response Point team, I guess I better say hi too! (Hi Sanjay!)
- Saved from the bell
-
I love to do interviews about Response Point, but for some reason I keep running into last-minute problems. I am sooo glad Response Point is easy, or I would be in serious trouble. Here's another example:
One morning last week I was getting ready for a phone interview on Let's Talk Computers, the pioneer of tech radio dating back to 1989, when our administrative assistant, Joy Olson, popped into my office to remind me that we would be having a fire drill in about 30 minutes. What!? I said. I have 10 minutes before the phone interview and how's it going to sound if there's a blaring fire alarm in the background?! Not good.
Joy kindly rushed to check all the adjacent buildings to see if I could borrow an office with a phone, but long-story-short, there just weren't any available on such short notice. Normally I like to do these interviews on my Response Point phone system (of course!) but how could I do that in the middle of a fire drill? I could use my cell phone I suppose, but we don't always have good reception around here.
So what did I do? Our PR manager and I rushed to the closest building unaffected by the fire drill, and I set up my laptop with OCS right there in a quiet part of their cafeteria. I did the whole interview over a VOIP line running on our internal, wireless network. Setup of course was super-easy and I had no problem starting the interview right on time.
Alan Ashendorf posted the interview and you can listen to it for yourself on the Lets Talk Computers web site. Can you tell that I'm talking on a phone system that was set up minutes before the call?
- Marketing Jobs at Microsoft
-
One of my favorite things about my job is the small, start-up feel to our organization and how I'm able to have the resources of a big company behind me, but with the flexibility and impact of a start-up. If you're interested in a job like that, please contact me, because my group is now hiring.
We have several jobs open, but in my marketing group I'm especially looking for people with an interest and passion for generating demand for a new product. We want to bring a new set of telephony devices to market, and we need people who can think creatively about how to get the word out, through marcom, PR, building new customer- and reseller-led communities, and more.
If you're the right kind of person, you probably either already have an MBA or have thought about getting one, but more importantly, you have ideas for how to turn a well-engineered product into a market success. If you have a background or interest in VOIP, IP PBX, small business telephony, or anything voice and consumer-related, give me a call. Our early reviews have been fantastic, so we know this has potential to be a real hit, and maybe you can help.
- Digital pen and paper
-
Philipp Schmid, former API developer in the speech team (and my fellow Mercer Island resident), is now working at a Seattle company, Adapx, that's in the news today for their work on new new applications for digital pens and paper. The cool part of their software is that it allows you to use normal paper (with special codes printed on an ordinary printer), making it good for field work for scientists, firefighters, or others.
They also make a version that works well with OneNote.
- Speech macros are here
-
I'm no longer in the SR group, but of course I still keep track of my friends there, and last week at lunch with the team I heard a bunch of updates. The most exciting one to publicly announce is the availability of speech macros. It's a free download for Vista that lets you automate just about any Vista task using voice. Rob Chambers (the new GPM for the speech team) started this project a couple years ago and I bet would have released it long ago except that it was so cool I think many of us hoped we could turn it into a full-blown product: you know, a box, a price, a business plan and all that stuff. Well, now I guess we'll have to rely on you to turn this into a business. Take a look at the macros, think of a great product you can build and go for it!
- Brainchild
-
At work on Friday everyone was teasing me about the new posting by David Greenfield at ZDNet, which among many flattering comments about our new release, referred to Response Point as the "brainchild of senior director Richard Sprague, a former Apple engineer". David's a very fun guy to talk with -- full of lots of new ideas, up-to-speed on lots of the latest technologies -- and I really enjoyed my conversation with him a few months ago when he visited us. He's one of those rare technologists who understands that the distinction between enterprise and consumer is constantly changing, so I remember chatting about lots of fascinating ideas like the impact of Second Life on businesses.
Although I do wish RP had been my idea, the credit of course belongs to my boss, Xuedong Huang, who started the project three years ago. For what it's worth, at the time I didn't think it was a particularly good idea, and it took me two years to realize how wrong I was and finally join the team.
They say success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan, so I guess it's good news if more people start taking the credit for Response Point.
- Snow showers in April
-
Unbelievable what I saw as I left the office tonight:
This is the parking lot for our office, Building 99. Here it is, heading into late April and we are getting snow! It's not fair!
- Demo at Small Business Summit
-
I live by the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared. And today I reinforced the value of that motto during my "live" demo of Response Point, broadcast during the SB Summit web cast. I say "live" (in quotes) because although the demo was real, recorded in real time, and what you see is completely unedited, I had to take a few setup liberties in order to make the demo fit in the short amount of time available.
I arrived extra early for the broadcast, which was a good thing because at the last minute I discovered that I wasn't getting IP from the ethernet cable they brought to the stage! This was in spite of all the prep I did a week before, on site with the producers, making absolutely sure everything would be there. Since a live internet connection is an important requirement for showing off the coolest new feature of Response Point SP1 (VOIP service that doesn't require a phone line), this almost prevented the entire demo.
I still don't know what went wrong, but no matter: Boy Scouts always keep a backup, in this case, an extra DHCP router that would let me do a standalone demo if necessary. But my router wasn't working! Fortunately, even then I have a Plan B: yet another extra router in my car. Anyway, I managed to get the whole thing to work without much additional trouble.
I originally planned to do a true, "live" demo from start to finish, plopping unplugged phones onto an empty table and then setting up and provisioning everything in real time. But when we did the rehearsal it ended up taking way more time that was available, so at the last minute we changed it to have the system already plugged in and ready to go.
Even that, unfortunately, was too much for the time available. I had hoped to be able to show off the external calling experience -- dialing from my cell phone into the system -- but we just didn't get to that part before my host, Chris Cashman interrupted me to ask about pricing, which was my cue that we only had one minute remaining.
Anyway, take a look at the broadcast and let me know what you think. Although the demo was more condensed than I had hoped, hopefully you still get the sense of how quick and easy it is to set up a small business phone system with Response Point.
- Watch me at the Small Business Summit
-
I'm doing a demo of Response Point tomorrow (Tuesday) March 24th at the SB Summit web cast.
It's free, and the easiest way to watch is to follow the streaming video on the SMB Community Blog site. Tune in between 10 and 11am (PST) on Tuesday morning, toward the last part of the hour, when I'll be doing a segment called "Phone it in".
update: Allen Miller just posted a downloadable version that you can watch any time.
- eComm tomorrow
-
I'm looking forward to flying back to my hometown for the eComm event starting March 12th:
eComm™ is a brand new telecom event for those interested in radical innovation and seizing the next opportunity wave.
Keynotes include Google, Skype and Ribbit
My Treo's battery is on the fritz, so if I can get a replacement (or a new phone) by tomorrow hopefully I'll be able to blog while I'm there.
- My new (virtual) PC
-
Wow, this is one of the coolest programs ever. The rest of you have been talking about Virtual PC and virtualization in general for a while now, but I finally had a chance to play with it for myself.
The virtual PC is a real PC, about as perfect a simulation as you can imagine. For example, it has its own MAC address, gets a unique IP address from the router, and can even share files over the network with the "host" PC. Obviously this means you get full internet access and all that goes with it.
What does it cost? It's free! Download Virtual PC 2007 from Microsoft's download site. Of course, to do anything interesting you'll need an OS and a bunch of applications, you'll need to buy Windows (or a Linux distribution) but you don't need to buy any hardware.
What's missing? USB emulation, so to do printing (for example) you need to use shared printing from another machine. To copy files from my USB drive, I first shared it from the host machine and that let me view everything from the virtual PC.
One tip: switch between the Virtual PC window and the "main" machine by pressing the right ALT key for operations , i.e. the ALT key on the right side of your keyboard--not the left one that I tend to use most often.
My next step is to figure out how to save a given Virtual PC image so I can copy it, back it up, hand it around to other people, etc.
