Richard Sprague WebLog

Yet another huge storm

sprague — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:18:52 GMT

It’s pouring buckets again today, with strong winds last night blowing some nasty winds. Fortunately, I’m extremely well-prepared, so it’s just another storm for me. That said, I’m looking forward to what’s next:

This is a good time to remind my readers, and anyone else interested in the rest of what I do, to please check out http://blog.richardsprague.com for more details and thoughts. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of Twitter as well, so please join me there too.

Just can’t get decent weather anymore

sprague — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:07:04 GMT

Just when we thought summer was near, we get reminded that we still live in the Pacific Northwest. Look at the view from my office window right now:

Somebody rescue us from this cold and snow!

Fingerprint reader on Windows 7

sprague — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:23:38 GMT

I upgraded my work laptop with Windows 7 a month or two ago (and I love it!) and most things are going smoothly. But one feature I’m loving a lot is the ability to swipe my finger across the fingerprint reader built into my Lenovo X60 TabletPC. That reader has been there when I was on Vista too, of course, but I enabled it in Windows 7 and it’s surprisingly useful. I rarely if ever enter my password anymore: just swipe and go. It misses a few times, apparently depending on how warm or sweaty my thumb happens to be, but even if I have to swipe an extra time or two, it’s still much faster getting logged in than if I have to type a password. Very nice!

eComm Notes part 4

sprague — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:55:15 GMT

Continuing my Virtual eComm attendance, here are some notes on other presentations;

Dean Bubley (Disruptive Analysis): Starts out with a great quote “Don’t assume” because consensus viewpoints are often flawed. (I would say consensus is usually flawed). Interesting examples of 3rd-party paid data and widgets combining benefits for multiple types of citizens looking for information, supplied via APIs delivered by MNOs.
Brough Turner (Founder, AshtonBrooke): 100Mbps broadband ranges from $127 (Amsterdam) to $11 in Stockholm but isn’t even available in important places like New York! His claim is that structural bypass is the solution, not network neutrality.
David Beckemeyer (TelEvolution) proposes a mobile phone sensor-net, a large peer-to-peer stream to send tons of interesting information beyond simply location. Wonder if he’s heard of the MIT SenseAble City ?
Graham Brierton (CTO, VoiceSage): CEBP (Comms Enabled Business Process) and how it makes a business use voice more efficiently.
Todd Landry (NEC Sphere) connecting the dots between people who “run the business” and those who “make phonecalls” with smart software.
Amir Zmora (Radvision): technical discussion of H.264 and video encoding issues for IP Video Communcations.
Jan Linden (VP Engineering at Global IP Solutions) VOIP and Video on iPhone, which he likes for the easy API, but doesn’t like for the lack of VOIP over 3G, lack of background app support, and requirement that app monitor the audio. Note that you can’t do 2-way video on iPhone yet because the app can’t access the camera.
Darrin Mylet (Founder, Spectru-station) hates that fact that 85% of all spectrum in the U.S. is going unused and proposes an interesting way to open access fairly to apps that need them.
Mark Rottegering (T-Mobile). Most people like the mobile industry is maturing, but really it’s merging with other industries. Lots of nice data, including a discussion of consumer willingness to pay per bit. Very interesting strategic discussion.
Shai Berger (Fonolo) is one I remember from last year’s eComm, so it was nice to get an update. They now have 500 companies mapped, with fascinating information about the call trees of various orgs. (Worst is US Department of Veterans Affairs).

…and much more. I’m learning a lot just browsing through the presentations. Organizer Lee Dryburgh says he wants to post the audio to IT Conversations again and I can’t wait to add them to my podcast list.

eComm Notes part 3

sprague — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:57:40 GMT

Continuing my Virtual eComm attendance, I’m browsing through several more presentations. Ordinarily I’d write my thoughts quickly in Twitter and be done with it, but sometimes it’s nice to have the longer flow and easier format of a blog post. Plus I can look back later and find it again.

First stop is Alec Saunder’s presentation, titled “Voice 2.0 Applications in a Mobile World”. Basic idea continues on his Manifesto theme that voice is a baseline and that apps are key. Slide 4 (the “future” of 2005) looks interesting: about the long tail of opportunities in online communities, but the title makes me wonder if he thinks there is now a new future? Unfortunately the following slide is a video (not available in the Slideshare deck), so I couldn’t tell if he meant more. But while I was there, I signed up for the Premium version of his new application, Calliflower. (30 days free – normally $50).

Then I looked at Mobivox’ Peter Diedrich: discussion and demo of CRM over Voice.

Trevor Baca (Jaduka): How to Do Things with Voice is a tough presentation to see without the presenter. It’s mostly photos of objects and situations that have something to do with communication.

Mark Spencer from Digium has a presentation on the Skype+Asterisk beta and the new chan_skype use cases: lets Skype calls integrate with existing Asterisk call queue. Claimed he’s going to start a public beta soon.

Peter Ecclesine from Cisco on White Space. He predicts the rise of database gateways that associate your device location and your contact info. Look at http://showmywhitespace.com to see how much of the new free white space spectrum is available in your area.

…more notes later as I have time.

eComm Notes (Telio)

sprague — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:26:14 GMT

My boss, XDH kept mentioning Scandinavia in his Twitter feed from Ecomm, so one of my first stops in my Virtual eComm attendance was the presentation by Alan Duric, CTO at the Norwegian telecom company, Telio ASA.

Telemetry and real time communications will start to merge, thanks to technology like RFID.
He likes mobile storage: points out that churn is much lower when customers get online data storage from their carrier.

I’ll be cranking through the presentations throughout the next few days, writing up my summaries… Looks like a really good show!

Hate the phone company?

sprague — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:07:31 GMT

You’re not alone. Telecommunications companies kept their #1 spot in Washington State last year for total number of complaints filed with the Attorney General’s office. They’ve been number one for the past decade.

Industry	2008	2007	2006	2005	2004
Telecommunications	1	1	1	1	1
Retail Sales	2	3	2	2	2
Collections	3	2	3	3	5
Auto Sales	4	5	4	4	4
Electronic Shopping	5	4	5	9	3
Contractors	6	6	6	5	6
Books/Magazines & Directories	7	8	8	8	11
Cable Networks & Program Distribution	8	10	n/a	n/a	n/a
Health Care	9	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Commercial Banking	10	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a

[via TechFlash]

eComm 09 virtually

sprague — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:50:19 GMT

Last year’s eComm was a wonderful way to see the latest cool stuff going on in the field of new communications technology and (more importantly) meet the people who are behind it all. The conference site, unfortunately, had poor internet coverage and many of us were unable to blog about it. And if you can’t blog in real time, it loses a lot of the fun. (That’s one reason Twitter is becoming so popular).

This year, my boss is attending, and I’m trying to stay in touch virtually as much as I can. So what do I do? Twitter of course: I’m following a steady stream of updates in real time on the Official eComm 2009 Twitter Channel.

So far, I’ve been intrigued by the Voxeo announcements and their new Tropo service.

Here’s a photo of conference organizer Lee Dryburgh speaking this morning, from Duncan Davidson’s FlickrR stream:

Looking forward to hearing as many more updates as I can squeeze in throughout the conference.

Write like me

sprague — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:04:20 GMT

I’ve hate handwriting. I’ve been using keyboards since I learned to write and my fingers just don’t want to use a pen. But there are too many occasions when people expect the “personal” touch of a handwritten document, so I couldn’t get out of it completely. Until now. Using the free font-generation software at http://www.yourfonts.com, I have a whole collection of handwriting fonts that let me give a personalized touch to computer-generated greeting cards and other documents I used to have to break out the pen for. I even made a “handwritten” CD label for a Valentines present.

The process couldn’t be simpler. The site is completely free; you don’t even need to register. Just print a one-sheet template (don’t bother printing the second page, unless you care about special foreign characters). Scan it and upload to the site. Double-check that it looks right, and download to your hard drive. Presto – you have a font you can now use in any of your applications. I made one for each member of the family.

Here’s mine:

and here’s the same text “written” by my eleven-year-old:

It can take a few tries to get it perfect. You can see a few problems with vertical character placement on the above samples, for example. But it’s waaay better than writer’s cramp.

Recite on Windows Mobile

sprague — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:33:25 GMT

Sometimes the best speech apps don’t really use speech recognition at all. I mean, yeah, there’s an audio stream and yeah there’s some processing, but you don’t always need the computer to understand what was said in order for it to be useful.

My favorite new example is Microsoft Recite, a technology preview from another sister team (like the cool Tag app that I mentioned previously).

I downloaded it over the air (it’s free) and had it running on my AT&T Tilt phone within a few minutes. After that, I just select “remember” and speak something that I want to remember later.

Once it’s been recorded, you select ‘search’ to find the note and play it back.

For example, I don’t have a pen handy right now but I wanted to remember a few things to pick up the next time I’m shopping at Target. Later, when I get to the store, I’ll just select ‘search’ and say “target” – the Recite software will pull up the note that I previously recorded.

It’s a simple trick for SR: rather than have the software analyze everything and provide perfect recognition, the system does a simple pattern matching – a process that’s much more robust.

As a bonus, it works in any language and with any speaker. Look at this short 90-sec demo to get the idea:

It’s a necessity

sprague — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:32:59 GMT

Look at the list of things Americans now list as necessities (according to a new poll by Pew Research)

Car	91%
Clothes Washer	90%
Clothes Dryer	83%
Air Conditioning	70%
Microwave	68%
TV	64%
Home Computer	51%
Cell phone	49%
Dishwasher	35%
Cable TV	33%
High speed internet	29%

Me, I think clean clothes and air conditioning are less important than high speed internet, but my wife probably disagrees.

It’s especially interesting to look at how the list has changed since the previous poll in 1996. Some of these items didn’t even exist back then!

Everything changes, technology keeps advancing, and what used to be luxuries are constantly turning into necessities.

Sneaking into the Macintosh launch

sprague — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:07:31 GMT

The Apple Macintosh was launched 25 years ago, which seems like ancient history because of course it is, but it’s fun to reflect a little on it because it brings back lots of personal memories for me – especially memories of what I think was the true Spirit of Macintosh. In those days, most of us felt like the true meaning of computing was embodied in a company like Apple (and to a much lesser extent, Microsoft, which was barely known at the time) which were fighting the on-coming onslaught from the Big and Boring Establishment (i.e. IBM). We wanted Apple to succeed because we thought of it as the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys in the Establishment, led by IBM with their zillions of dollars to force the world to use their software. All we had was our ingenuity.

I was in college at the time, and I remember being pretty excited during the weeks leading up to the launch. In those days there was no world wide web where you could read up on leaks about the product, and the whole thing was shrouded in ultra secrecy. I was working part time at a small startup software company funded by a Japanese printer manufacturer that was hoping to successfully introduce a PC to the US (based on, of all things, the CP/M operating system). But the management of the company was very interested in Apple too, and I had access to some of the early Mac stuff at the Stanford lab where I hung out. My friends and I were also avid high tech stock gamblers investors too, so we were Apple stockholders as well, which entitled us to get into the annual shareholders meeting at the De Anza Auditorium, where we knew we could see the introduction in person.

Unfortunately, when we got there the place was packed and it was impossible to find parking, so we agreed to split up in order to ensure we could get inside. One of my roommates, David, was driving, so he dropped us off at the front while the other three of us, Craig, Dario, and I went inside to find seats. But the auditorium quickly filled up and they closed the doors before David could get inside! What to do?

Without hesitation, Craig reminded us of some advice that I still remember: “Sometimes, if you can’t get in through the front door, you have to go in through the back door”.

So that’s what we did. Remember, this was before cell phones, so there was no way to call each other to set up the plan. Instead, Craig held our seats while I ran outside to find David. Dario and I agreed that in precisely five minutes, he would be standing at the locked exit door in back and would let us back in. I rushed outside and fortunately was able to quickly find our friend, and sure enough, Dario had the door ready for us and we snuck inside in the nick of time. We saw the entire event – and by sneaking in we felt even more like insiders for having “beaten the establishment” just like the Macintosh Spirit encouraged us to do.

Craig’s good advice still applies today when you’re a startup forced to think creatively about how to get around obstacles. The Established Players have the front doors all locked up. If you want to get inside, you need to be creative – and more often than not, that means going through the back door.

Prepping for ITExpo

sprague — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 01:14:59 GMT

One more week and I’ll be off to Miami for ITExpo East. I don’t usually look forward to trade shows, but I really enjoyed the last one and we have so many cool things planned that I can’t wait to get there.

The organizer, Rich Tehrani, wrote a nice summary of what we’ll be doing there publicly, but it’s actually the behind-the-scenes parts that have me interested.

There are plenty of good reasons to visit South Florida in February, but if you need another one, this is it. Let me know, and I’ll get you a free pass.

Disproving the Qwerty effect

sprague — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:09:25 GMT

I still run into people who cite the “Qwerty effect” as evidence that sometimes a big head start will give an inferior technology unfair market dominance at the expense of “better” ones. This theory has been disproven historically (it’s not true that the inventor of the typewriter deliberately mangled the layout in order to prevent keys from jamming) but it still shows up in people who cite the superiority of the Beta format over VHS (in fact, the double-length recording time of VHS made it superior, and videophiles at the time weren’t even in agreement about whether or not Beta had a quality advantage), or the superiority of <insert your favorite non-MS product> over <insert some less popular product>. It turns out that in real life, the superior technology almost always wins.

Well, finally somebody decided to test the effect in the lab, under controlled conditions. A new paper by Tanjim Hossain and John Morgan shows the results of experiments they did in a lab, testing inferior platforms against superior ones:

Somehow, the market always manages to solve the QWERTY problem. In sixty iterations of dynamic platform competition, our subjects never got stuck on the inferior platform—even when it enjoyed a substantial first-mover advantage. The remainder of the paper describes in detail the experiments and the results.

This is obvious to anybody who thinks critically about new technologies: often that underdog product that you think is so cool, is actually inferior to the market leader. The flip side is that if it really is superior, you can make it into the market leader if you play your hand correctly. The catch, of course, is the definition of “superior”: maybe some of what you think of as “better” in your product is something the market doesn’t care about. Go fix that first before complaining about your lack of first-mover advantage.

[ht: Marginal Revolution]

Do you know any scientists?

sprague — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:16:07 GMT

Now this is sad…

Only 18 percent of us know a scientist personally, according to a 2005 survey (subscription required), and when asked in 2007 to name scientific "role models," the results were dismal. Forty-four percent of Americans couldn't come up with a name at all, and among those few who did, their top answers were either not scientists or not alive: Bill Gates, Al Gore, Albert Einstein.

[from Slate]

I work in Building 99, the main offices for Microsoft Research, which is packed with scientists (one reason I like it here). But it’s too bad that the rest of America has so little face-to-face interaction with practicing scientists.

It’s also a shame, because scientists in my opinion tend to be very interesting people. Maybe somebody should set up a social networking system to let more people meet scientists. How about you? Do you know any scientists?