Interesting uses of Unified Communications

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It’s late on a Friday afternoon, and I just got an IM from someone at my company asking if I had a master key to his office.  He had locked himself out with his wallet and keys inside, but he was able to get to a computer and he used Office Communicator to see who was still in the office.  Without communicator, he would have had to start calling people hoping someone would pick up the phone at 6:10 on a Friday night, or he would have had to send out an email to everyone in the company asking for help.  This way, only me and one other person knew about his mistake.  Until now that is . . . . 🙂

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Bye!

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Kentuckian, inventor of Wireless Telephony

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I was exchanging emails with a new friend in Australia who is promoting Gold Systems’ Password Reset product, and in the conversation I mentioned (as I often do) that I was originally from Kentucky.  I have a list of Kentucky facts to counter any hillbilly jokes, and I sent him a few.  Since he’s from Australia I figured he might know about Daniel Boone or the Beverly Hillbillies but not much else.

One of the facts is this:

  • The radio was invented by a Kentuckian named Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray in 1892. It was three years before Marconi made his claim to the invention.

As I hit send, I wondered, is this really true?  Well, according to Wikipedia, it is – sort of.

Nathan B. Stubblefield (November 22, 1860 – March 28, 1928) was an American inventor and Kentucky melon farmer. It has been claimed that Stubblefield invented the radio before either Nikola Tesla or Guglielmo Marconi, but his devices seem to have worked by audio frequency induction or, later, audio frequency earth conduction [1] (creating disturbances in the near-field region) rather than by radio frequency radiation for radio transmission telecommunications. Though there were contemporaneous experiments by others such as William Preece, Stubblefield has been proposed as a claimant for the invention of wireless telephony, or wireless transmission of the human voice.  — From Wikipedia

So, I’m not the first kid from Kentucky to get involved with telephony.  I love the fact that he was described as an American inventor and melon farmer.

Now here is one of those coincidences that I love so much.  Another fact that I have in my list is:

  • The public saw an electric light for the first time in Louisville. Thomas Edison introduced his incandescent light bulb to crowds at the Southern Exposition in 1883.

I don’t have a reference to that, so I did a quick search.  While it may be true that the first American public display was in Kentucky, in 1883, according to this website, the first publc display was in 1863, in . . . . Australia.

Leaving comments in documents – how NOT to get funded

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I know I’m going to be passing this story on in the future, so I’m saving it here.

Rick Segal, a blogger and VC in Canada tells a story about receiving a business plan from an entrepreneur who forgot, or more likely didn’t know, to remove comments in the Word Document before sending it out.  I often look at documents that people send me to see if they have left comments in, or to see if the properties of the document contains anything interesting.  See Rick’s post for the whole thing, but here are a few of the choice comments that he found in the business plan.

  • I’d delete this section since we don’t have these features on the roadmap and haven’t figured out how to code this unless you believe the investors won’t catch this
  • VCs are typically stupid when it comes to this section so be prepared for a dumb question blizzard
  • Scratched out Beta is in 6 months replaced with code is out there now

I’m guessing these guys didn’t get called in to do a pitch.  Word 2007 makes it easier to avoid this embarrassment. Press the Office button, then click Prepare and Inspect Document. Now if only Outlook would notice if a Word document is being emailed that hasn’t been checked.

On a related note, just don’t write anything that you don’t want someone else to read.

FJ Cruiser Car Computer V4 Install Begins . . .

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I began the install of V4 of the car computer this weekend.

0531081509

First the old radio is removed.  Because of the great job Woody did installing V1, everything unplugs and I have a wiring harness ready to plug in for the most part.  I had to add a few connectors.

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Here I have the old harness connected to the new harness that came with the Xenarc display and radio combo.  I labeled several wires that weren’t labeled before – I know I’m going to be in there again soon and I want to make it as easy as possible.

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I’ve learned to test before bolting everything back into the dash.  I always put a fire extinguisher and a telephone next to the FJ before reconnecting the battery.  I’m not THAT confident in my wiring ability.

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It will be nice to have a backup camera again.

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This is not really a computer – it’s a combination radio/CD player, with a motorized touchscreen that will connect to the computer, which is going to be installed elsewhere.

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I have to say that the Xenarc MDT-X7000 display for radio is pretty ugly.  It looks more like a Commodore 64.  Hopefully Xenarc will update the firmware and improve it.

I made good progress this weekend, but I didn’t get the actual computer installed yet.  I went to wire in the power supply for the computer and I realized that mp3car.com had sent me two of one harness and none of the other harness that was supposed to ship with the power supply.  Now I’m going to be delayed another week at least as I try to get the harness.  Of course it isn’t a standard plug . . .   

Blackwater Rafting on the Kindle

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This weekend I bought my 20th book on my Amazon Kindle ebook.  I still read the occasional paper book, but if I could, I’d trade all but my favorite paper books for ebooks.  It really is that good in my opinion.

I think that the Kindle is just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on at Amazon.  What really matters is the infrastructure that is being built out to support authors, publishers and other merchants.  To learn more about that side of the business and to see how this is all going to evolve, the Person Who Prefers Not To Be Blogged About has given me one of her short stories to experiment with, and I’ve published it on the Kindle.

If you own a Kindle, you can buy the story right here.  It’s priced at the minimum price of $1, and Amazon.com currently has discounted it to 80 cents.  It’s only 10 pages, but I’ve seen people cry from laughing so hard while reading it.  Waitomo Caves – Wonderland or WeirdoLand? is about a blackwater rafting trip we took in New Zealand.

The tourist description of this trip is the beginning of the story.  The “Lonely Planet” guidebook on New Zealand describes the blackwater tubing experience at Waitomo Caves as “… a three-hour trip on an inner tube floating down a subterranean river that flows through Ruakuri Cave … floating through a long, glowworm-covered passage.”   We began to realize this wasn’t the Lazy River at Disney World when we got fitted for our wetsuits and hardhats.  I’d be happy to answer any questions after you read the story, such as why I would take a claustrophobic person that I love deep into a cave with a maggot-covered ceiling, or what I believe the chances are of her ever going with me into another cave in this lifetime.

For the moment this is a "Kindle Exclusive" story, but I expect that Amazon.com will open the platform up to allow anyone to publish ebooks that can be downloaded to other devices and read in a browser.  The capability is there, they just haven’t made it as easy to use as the Kindle platform is.  To publish the story, I had to create an account, giving them my taxpayer ID and bank account information.  That’s going to stop some people right there, but I expect to make a good ten or twenty dollars off of this venture, so I kept going.

Next I saved the story in Microsoft Word as an html document.  Uploading the document was easy, and I even uploaded a photograph that I took on the trip, and I filled in a few fields of descriptive information.  After I uploaded the document, it took about 12 hours before it showed up on the amazon.com website.  They say that it will get even faster in time.

I realize that (besides the writing) the hard part about publishing is getting the word out.  That’s where you come in – if you like the story, please take a moment to give it a good review at amazon.com  I really believe this is the future of publishing, but I’d like to hear what you think. 

Car Computer V4

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Can you believe the FJ Cruiser is over two years old?  It seems like only yesterday that people were following me around to get a better look at it, and now they seem to be on every corner, at least here in Boulder.

If you’ve been following the Car Computer Project, you know that V3 of the project never really left the work bench in my office.  V3 was a replacement for V2, which died back in June somewhere in Kansas.  V2 was an Infill T3 that I bought from mp3car.com.  When it died I found out that they could either send the unit back to Korea for repairs, or they could replace it with a new Vista-ready machine.  I chose the later, but it turns out it would have been quicker to wait for the boat from Korea.  As of last week, I still didn’t have the radio module for the new unit and I decided to stop waiting and cut my losses.  I wasn’t really looking forward to taking a hacksaw to the dash of the FJ to make the new touchscreen fit, and I still think an AM/FM radio is a requirement, so I’m salvaging the computer that MP3car.com sent me and matching it up with a new combination radio/touchscreen unit that is getting great reviews.

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That’s it on the left, a Xenarc MDT-X7000.  The touchscreen is motorized, and with it retracted the unit looks like any after-market radio.  My hope is that when I don’t want to fool with the computer, I’ll have a very functional AM/FM CD player with real knobs and preset buttons.  Then when I push a button, it will transform into a car computer.  Here’s a photo from the Xenarc website.

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This will even leave some space in the dash for something else, and the actual computer will be hidden out of sight in the back of the vehicle.  There is an intimidating amount of wires in the harness, but I’m going to try to install it myself when I get a free weekend.  Unlike the Infill, this unit came with documentation and the wiring harness is labeled in English so how hard can it be?

Let me give two quick disclaimers.  If you want a car computer of your own, buy a Ford with the Sync option.  The kind of system I’ve built is pretty far from being prime time.  Second, don’t type and drive.  We don’t need people surfing the web while they are driving!

Welcome to the Mesh

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Brad Feld recently mentioned in a post Microsoft’s new product called, "Live Mesh".  I thought it looked interesting enough to sign up for the private beta, and just in time for the weekend, my invitation arrived to try it out.  If you are currently using Foldershare from Microsoft as a way to sync folders easily across multiple computers, you’re going to want to try out the mesh.  In addition to syncing folders, you can also do remote desktop sharing.

I just used it and saved enough time to write this post.  🙂  I was trying to find a website that I looked at this morning at home, but I had not saved the URL.  (All of my Favorite URLs are synced between my machines, including the FJ Car Computer using Foldershare, so if I had saved the URL I would have had it at work this morning.)  Then I remembered the mesh – I clicked on the little blue icon  Capture  and was able to connect to my home machine in seconds.  I’m at work, but it is as if I’m sitting at my machine at home.  The web browser was still sitting there on the page where I left it this morning.  I got what I needed and then saved the page to my Favorites.  Before I could log off, Foldershare had synced that new Favorite to all four of my machines – two at home, and two at work.  With the Mesh, I should be able to do the same thing.  Also there is "storage in the cloud" so I can have a bunch of disk space that is accessible from any web browser, even if none of my machines are running.

The Mesh is being called a platform, and this is just the demo app according to the team blog that I read.  They already are saying they will sync to Apple and to mobile devices in the near future, but they talk about a lot more.  Should be interesting.  At the very least, I’ll be able to move everything from Foldershare and have remote login capability.  When the car computer goes back into the FJ, I’ll be able to work on it from anywhere without having to sit in the garage with a little keyboard on my lap.  That alone is worth the upgrade.

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Strategic Thinking Simplified

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The last time I posted an article by my friend Todd Ordal, he didn’t have an RSS feed.  Now he does, so if you’d like to subscribe, here is the feed:  http://community.icontact.com/p/appliedstrategy

I particularly liked his latest post, which he’s given me permission to reproduce here.  You can also read more from Todd at http://www.appliedstrategy.info

Strategic Thinking Simplified – By Todd Ordal

I snuck out for a mid-week ski day late in the season this year. It is a luxury to ski during the week because the crowds are minimal. I also enjoy skiing by myself on occasion as I can quickly cover a lot of ground and there is no debate about which part of the mountain to ski on.

 

After lunch I rode a lift with a middle-aged couple who looked like they were out-of-towners on vacation. (Those of you who ski a lot understand ‘the look”.) I asked them where they were from and they responded “the Detroit area”. As I had taken many business trips to Detroit, we had something to talk about.

Because much of the workforce in Michigan is part of the auto industry, I asked the gentleman if he was employed in the car business. “No”, he replied, “I was for about 20 years but now I have a construction business remodeling homes”. As I asked him a few more questions, it occurred to me that this guy—with no apparent formal business education—was a great strategic thinker.

When I asked how and why he made the transition, he said, “Well it was pretty clear to me that we were heading downhill fast. The Japanese were doing a better job with quality and building cars a whole lot cheaper. Most folks just dug in and put their heads in the sand. I didn’t see this changing so thought that I better change.” In strategic thinking terms, he had clearly identified current reality, thought about the future business environment and realized that a different strategy would be necessary for him to succeed.

I asked how he had picked home remodeling and he responded from a perspective of core competency and industry attractiveness. Those are my words; his were, “I liked building things and worked with tools in the car business, so I thought; where else could I use those skills? Homebuilding seemed the most logical choice, but I didn’t want to be on the hook financially for a large project and have all of my eggs in one basket. I’d rather have several smaller projects going at once.” In strategic terms, he thought about his funding requirements, cash flow needs and the issue of customer concentration.

He went on to say that he worked primarily on high end homes with a niche for kitchens. He liked kitchens because he noted that when socializing, everyone always ends up in the kitchen. “This looks great! Who did the work?”, they ask. More good thinking—specific customer attributes (wealthy—which allowed him to use good materials and hire good subcontractors), branding (a niche in kitchens), and a referral-based marketing plan.

So here is a blue collar guy who clearly understood the key elements of strategic thinking. He thought about the future, identified current reality, thought about his core competencies and used them to connect the dots.

Darn; this guy was smart! “So, how is it going?” I asked. “Pretty good” he said. “We’re out here in Colorado looking at different ski areas for a second home”. I think that next ski season; I’ll get out more during the week…

It’s lonely at the top! Todd Ordal serves as a thought-partner to CEOs and other business leaders who are challenged to identify and manage strategy. You can contact Todd at todd@appliedstrategy.info or call 303-527-0417.

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You can also subscribe to an email distribution of Todd’s writing.  I get a fair number of email blasts, but I’ve found that I always read Todd’s no matter how many emails are sitting in my inbox.   Todd, thanks again for letting me republish one of your articles.  Speaking of the auto industry, it was nice to see that Ford has turned a profit again.  I wonder how much their Sync initiative has contributed to the turnaround?  It certainly shows to me that they get that customers want more than just reliable transportation.  — Terry

Computer versus human

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I think I tend to take my brain for granted.  And I don’t really mean my brain in particular, but brains in general. 

My business develops speech recognition applications.  We’re not the speech scientists figuring out how to recognize sounds as words, but we take their engines and then build applications on top of them.  Given a limited domain, we can build applications that really do an amazing job of interpreting what a person is saying.  When you encounter a "bad" application, it’s usually the result of a designer who’s tried to push the technology too far, hasn’t given enough consideration to what we call "human factors" or they haven’t done a good enough job integrating the speech recognition with the back end systems that retrieve whatever information you are looking for at the moment.

My big sister sent me an email that had the following passage in it, and it reminded me just how amazing our brains are at pattern matching.  I guess software could be written that would be able to interpret the text accurately (it almost makes me want to go download Visual Studio and take a shot at it) but to think that our brains can do this without much effort is pretty cool.  I believe we’re still a long way away from a computer being as "smart" as a human.

Can you read this?

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty  uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig  to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a word are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is that the first and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! If you can raed this psas it on  !!

Now sometimes this pattern matching ability gets us in trouble.  In the same email was this little test . . .

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI
FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS…

Now go back and count how many times the letter ‘F’ appears.  (Go on, I’ll wait for you to count.)

The answer is six.  I’m sure I’ve seen this before, but it still took a couple of tries to get it right, thanks I imagine to the amazing pattern matcher in my brain.