Oxyfish

David Pogue had an interesting article in the New York Times recently about the uselessness of Microsoft’s Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) idea (also touted by Intel). I agree completely. And it reminded me of some thinking I did recently about my ideal form factors.

Basically, I want one device, I can carry in my pocket, that can do everything a pocketable device is good for. If the device doesn’t fit in my pocket, then it might as well be a 15″ ultraportable laptop, because I’m going to have to carry a bag to put it in. I don’t see anything in between making sense for me.

My ideal pocket device has a bright VGA screen about 2.5″ across. It also has a qwerty keyboard (I’m spoiled by my Blackberry). To fit in my pocket, the keyboard likely needs to slide out. It can take high-res photos and videos, and play and record mp3s. It works as a phone, and I can hold it up to my ear as well as use a headset. I don’t care about WiFi, because I’ll have EVDO or EDGE, and that’s fast enough for the limited surfing I’ll do. I want email, with the ability to file messages on the server. I want GPS and basic driving directions. Obviously it needs to sync with my desktop and web services for contacts, appointments, and todos.

For just about everything else: heavy email, spreadsheets, powerpoint, photo editing, etc, etc, I will use a laptop. Don’t try to shoehorn these things into my pocket device, please.

We are getting pretty close. Some of the new HTC phones seem pretty cool. But I’m still waiting…

I decided it would be worth some time to make my blog look a little distinctive. As an engineer by background, I usually consider aesthetics superfluous, but I have learned over the years that a few flashy graphics go an awfully long way, especially in first impressions. Unfortunately, I also have very little skill in this area, so I turned to the internet for help.

I started by looking for a theme that I liked. After downloading and installing about ten that I found on the Theme Viewer, I tried them out on friends and co-workers. We settled on Limelite, which is basically Kubrick with different colors. I didn’t like the fact that the permalink pages didn’t have the sidebar menu, but that was easily tweaked.  I also fixed the archives to have entire entries instead of just excerpts – again a one-line fix.  Gotta love well-written code.

Next, I needed to get rid of the lime in the header, and replace it with something really unique. Because of the name Oxyfish, and its derivation, I had the idea that a fish talking on a cellphone would be interesting. Enter Elance.

A friend of mine (who works there) told me some great stories about simple projects he had contracted Elancers to do, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I posted a logo design project, and within a day or two had 24 bids, at an average price of just over $100. Even more impressive, several sent me mockups based just on the description of the project. I shortlisted a few that looked good, and finally awarded the project to betterHalfDesigns in Puerto Rico who had sent a great mockup. After minor modification, I had him put it in the header you see above.

Some of my friends really like it, some think it’s cheesy, but all agree, it’s pretty unique. Mission accomplished, thanks to the internet.

I had a good time at Ismael Ghalimi’s World Is Flat Breakfast the other day. Other folks have done a better job of blogging the whole event than I can. However, I did get a couple tidbits worth repeating.

One was an explanation of why Open Source will take over the world. It seems that large public software companies average $0.78 of sales and marketing cost for every dollar of license revenue. That makes it a pretty low margin business, even when compared to a service business like training and support. Open source has no license revenue, but also has no sales and marketing cost – so their overall margins can actually be higher!

The other tidbit was the names of a couple of companies that specialize in helping software development for software product companies. This is pretty different from custom development for enterprises, so it’s nice to see some folks with expertise in this area. The sponsor, Lohika, has been great partner to Intalio and at least one other company I know well. A couple others I have had good interactions with are Symphony and Persistent Systems.

I recently attended the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, and there was a very interesting presentation on Second Life and some of the emergent behavior there. I was an intermittent gamer when I was in college, but have never gotten into these more immersive multi-user worlds. I keep thinking I need to take some time and see what is there, both for my own interest, and because professionally I need to keep on top of technology developments like these.

I keep putting this off, because I know that I can’t spend just a night or two there and get any real idea of what is going on, and I really don’t have time to be a regular visitor. I probably need a solid week with no distractions to get established, then I might be able to jump back in occasionally to keep up. So, what I really need is a vacation to Second Life. This originally seemed pretty silly to me, but increasingly it seems like a real idea – just like taking a vacation to a new city to explore it fairly thoroughly. I haven’t scheduled the week yet, but I’m definitely thinking about it.

I spent a couple days at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference down in San Diego. I really enjoy this conference, because it is so geek-oriented. There’s nary a business model in sight. The most obvious example of this was the session on playsh, which was very cool, but completely useless – I love it!

The theme of the conference was The Attention Economy, and I think the idea there is particularly relevant. As Michael Goldhaber said, once people have enough money, the scarce resource that must be optimized is attention. Now, I’m not completely clear on the difference between attention and time, so I’ll have to read his book when it comes out. But, it is increasingly clear that demands on our attention are skyrocketing, and anything that helps manage that flood is a good thing.

There were a couple very cool demos, including Ray Ozzie’s demo of a cut and paste mechanism for the dynamic web, and a very cool light table with multiple touch inputs. I think this conference is another one that is great for me professionally, not because I see a lot of companies that I can invest in now, but because it keeps me in touch with things that people are working on, and introduces me to entrepreneurs that might be ready for me in a few months or years.

Spent most of a day at the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference. I found several sessions very cool, and like the way the trends seem to be pointing. Generally these tech conferences result in more education and interesting ideas than actual investment opportunities, which is still a good longer term investment of my time. I thought the coolest hack was playing Zork by voice – I used to love Zork, and recently found a version for my Blackberry.

My main takeaway is that between VoIP infrastructure, and clever ways to do carrier-avoidance, the telephone as a platform is opening up in ways that the incumbents have long tried to prevent. This is producing lots of interesting experimentation. There are many similarities to the Internet in this process, and lots smarter people than me have researched this. I did draw a few conclusions though: like the Internet, identity and security are problems that still beg for solutions. Also interface richness, particularly with handheld devices, is a major problem.

It seems to me that to get to the next level of maturity as a platform, there are a few fundamental ecosystem players that still need to emerge. For example, there’s no good payment system like Paypal, nor is there a commerce platform like Ebay. I’m also looking for the AdSense equivalent, to power some of these experiments. Finally, I’d be interested to see more collaboration tools for remote workers.

We are actively looking at investment opportunities in this area, and have focused on building relationships at carriers, equipment providers, and startups to continue to learn more. We are also helping to create resources for our existing portfolio companies in this space, which include SS8, Azaire, and Borderware.

The text of a classic talk by Richard Hamming on research, but really applicable to everyone. He basically challenges everyone to work on the MOST important aspects of their chosen field. He also talks about why most people don’t, and what the benefits are. Worth reading.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

I came in to work this morning and saw a window offering an “upgrade” to Viewpoint Toolbar on my screen. I definitely did not download this, and I don’t know how it got on my system. I clicked “No Thanks” and I hope it went away. Anybody know where it came from?

Update: Found out it probably came with AIM, which I installed to do video chat with my parents. I have now uninstalled. Anybody know a good free video chat client?

Viewpoint installed by AOL

Viewpoint… Transforming the way you view your world.

An interesting article about generating power from the temperature differential in the ocean. Contains a couple of ideas new to me: the ocean is the worlds greatest solar power collector, the pump requires little energy because of the siphon effect, you get free air conditioning, you generate clean water just by capturing the condensation on the pipes, etc.

Wired 13.06: The Mad Genius from the Bottom of the Sea

A hilarious video featuring John Cleese, sort of an ad but mostly just funny. Definitely click the third button.

Institute for Backup Trauma

MetaBrainz is the parent of MusicBrainz, and has a pretty impressive board of directors. MusicBrainz is a much more highly featured replacement for GraceNote or FreeDB.

MetaBrainz Foundation

This is the “special announcement” from Flight School – not quite as exciting as I had hoped.

Brant Sponberg, Program Manager at NASA announced 2 new Centennial Challenges. One is for beaming power through space, and the other is for high strength-to-weight materials.

Read the Wired article for more info, or see my notes in the extended entry.

Read the rest of this entry »

More notes from Flight School afternoon sessions, in the extended entry. Anybody know how to make MT preserve hard line breaks, but still do word wrap?

Read the rest of this entry »

At PCForum Flight School I just saw a pretty inspiring movie clip about the Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner missions made by George Butler, and have been listening to Bruce Holmes of NASA Langley talk about the future of both aviation and the space program. Bruce had an interesting idea I’m not sure I agree with: each revolution in communications has an accompanying revolution in transportation. He cited the telegraph and the railroads, and linked the telephone with the rise of the automobile. An interesting idea.

I’m at PC Forum and wanted to jot a couple of ideas that I heard here that I thought were worth writing down.

John Seely Brown and John Hagel led a moderately interesting discussion of loose coupling vs tight integration. Their main example was Chinese motorcycle companies, which were competing with Honda for the world motorcycle market. By loosely coupling with their suppliers, and working collaboratively, they were able to quickly innnovate the price of a motorcycle down from $700 to $200, while Honda was still at $900. There were two major reasons it worked: loosely coupled modules in a business process can be rearranged or reintegrated to form new things or try new ideas much more quickly than tight integrations. Also, innovation within a module is possible without disrupting the entire system. One other caveat: this mechanism needs a reference model to work from, in this case a Honda motorcycle. Other cases cited include Linux (working from the Unix reference) and Apache (from NCSA, among others).

One interesting company was SoloMio. They provide services through cell operators to allow quick response to an incoming call without necessarily answering it. Imagine when a call comes in from your wife, you can quickly select an option that responds with “I’m in a meeting – can I call you back in an hour?” This is a great idea, and it’s too bad it requires so much work on the part of the operators to implement. One idea I want to add to this is one that’s been kicking around in my head since about 1999, for a Bluetooth watch. No, I don’t want to get the time via Bluetooth. I want to know who is calling (caller ID) and have a set of 3-5 responses I can send with one touch. That way, when someone calls, I can just glance at my watch, and possibly press a button, to respond – with minimal interruption of the conversation or meeting I’m currently in.

There was also an interesting open source panel, with Kim Polese (CEO of SpikeSource) and Mitchell Baker (Chief Lizard Wranglers of the Mozilla Foundation, and boy does she look different from her picture in the program). They both represent large Open Source projects with corporate sponsorship. One thing we didn’t explore in too much depth was the shift (or maturity) from random developers from scratching their own itches and gratifying some ego, to real enterprise application development. To my mind, there is not always much of an intersection between the people with domain knowledge in an enterprise business process, and people with development capability. So, what is interesting is that in the new models it’s companies that are altruistic, not just people. Some companies have the farsight to realize that it is in their long term best interest to pay for the development of software that will be given away.

I’m at PC Forum, and I just missed an opportunity. I didn’t get much sleep last night, but that’s no excuse. There was an entire panel discussion on metadata and tags, with audience participation encouraged. I missed an opportunity to get on my favorite soapbox, and ask why photos don’t the ability to embed user-created metadata. I wrote about this before.

Basically, I always want the metadata to be closely coupled with the data itself. My big problem with Flickr is that if I take my photos somewhere else, I don’t get to keep my metadata. I don’t understand why we can’t store the tags in the EXIF, the same way we store ID3 tags in the MP3 file.

I got in late from golf^H^H^H^Han important business meeting, and all the dinner tables were filled except for the kids table. I had a very enjoyable dinner with about 7 14-year-olds. What was really nice was that for the most part these kids were mature and extremely smart.

To pretend I was working, I polled them for their technology habits. As expected, they were all quite computer literate, and used their computers (mostly Macs) a lot for school and play. However, I found a couple of surprising things.

One was that they all use AIM for instant messaging, without fail. Another was that none of them use email, at all. They all had cellphones, and considered them much more important than their computers. They do some SMS, but consider it too hard for real conversations, and mostly just call their friends, leaving voicemail if they need to. They do play computer games, and sometimes get really into them, but then the interest fades as they get into other things.

Not a scientific sample, at all, but I was surprised that for them IM and cellphones had made email irrelevant.

It’s about time a reasonable method started to emerge to at least somewhat standardize browser/server comms without updating the entire page. It’s a hack on top of a kludge, but it seems to work fairly well, and is supported by most browsers.

Slashdot | What is JSON, JSON-RPC and JSON-RPC-Java?

Wow. I need one of these at my house.

George writes: “For example, you can build a phone system that can support 72 analog telephones or fax machines, 100 IP hard or soft phones on site or remote, a T1 line to the public telco for 23 simultaneous external PSTN connections, multiple IP-based IAX trunks to multiple remote offices for seamless toll-bypass 4-digit dialing, IVR, and almost unlimited voice mail for everyone – for under $6,000 in a 1U chassis.”

George Ou » VoIP and open source, the next great frontier – ZDNet.com

From the EFF newsletter:

~ And the Gold Medal for Stupid Web Policies Goes to…
…the 2004 Olympic Games. Organizers issued a ridiculous
“hyperlink policy” that requires other sites to ask
permission before creating a link to their site. You know,
like the one below. And no, we did not ask for permission
first:
http://www.athens2004.com/athens2004/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040820.gtrolym20/BNStory/

~ And the Silver Medal for Stupid Web Policies Goes to…
…the 2004 Olympic Games. Organizers issued a ridiculous
no-blogging policy barring athletes from writing first-hand
experiences in weblogs:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/08/20/tech/main637474.shtml