Guitar Hero II – Banjo Hero

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(I should have posted this on the 1st – sorry, I’ve just been too busy.)

About ten years ago, Brad Feld gave me a copy of The Axe, a great piece of software created by a start-up he invested in called Harmonix.  The idea was that non-musicians could use the software to create music.

Harmonix_the_axe 

You played by pressing buttons on the keyboard and the software was smart enough not to play any "wrong" notes.  You can read more about the company here, but to make a long story short they went on to create Guitar Hero, a big hit, and the company was acquired by MTV.  Big success.  I had heard of Guitar Hero and how crazy people were for it, but I never played it until this week when it was released on the Xbox 360.  (Thanks to Amazon.com for the Guitar Hero II photo)

Guitar_hero_bundle

Guitar Hero is great, and while it’s not like playing a real guitar, it’s fun even for people who generally don’t like video games.  The Person Who Prefers Not To Be Blogged About has even gotten hooked on it.  I went through the Rock N Roll phase years ago, but I’m anxiously awaiting the next release – Banjo Hero!

Here’s a prototype of the controller.  I expect many of my Bluegrass favorites to be available and that it will be bigger than Guitar Hero. (Click on the photo to see more detail.)

Banjohero_terrygolddotcom_3

To the person who also got Guitar Hero II this week – try calling 1 800 4MY XBOX.  It’s a great speech recognition application and it has some tips about your scratched disk.  Max (the automated persona) doesn’t say anything about not hitting your Xbox with the guitar, but he does say not to move the Xbox while it is turned on.  Knocking your Xbox onto the floor with the guitar also just might have something to do with the green button sticking now, but that’s just a guess.

(Note: Banjo Hero will initially only be available in my home state of Kentucky.)

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Update and FJ Cruiser Car Computer Photos

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I’ve been really busy lately.  If you are in the communications industry, you know that business is very good and that a lot is happening right now.  I’d love to have the time to comment on it all, but I just can’t right at the moment.

I’m also getting a lot of emails asking what is going on with the FJ Car Computer project.  Besides not having much time, or a heated garage, I’ve been debugging a GPS problem.  The guys at mp3car.com just sent me a new gps receiver and I think that may have fixed the problem, so hopefully in the next few weeks I can move onto the next phase, which will include Vista, more speech recognition and more communications options. 

Without even trying I’ve got the top link for the search on fj cruiser car computer and I’ve made some new friends of people who are wanting to put a computer in their own FJ.  I’m still not ready to write a review of the Infill T3 computer, but I have dumped a bunch of photos in a directory if you want to see what the install looks like.  Sorry, I just don’t have time to make this into a nice slide show right now.

I’ve also dumped my Treo and I’m trying the Motorola Q again.  So far I like that it doesn’t hang or get slow like the Treo did.  Is there anything else out there that I should be looking at?  Yes, I’ll try the iPhone when it comes out just to say I did, but I need more than 40 minutes of battery life.  (I don’t believe the story either, so don’t flame me please.)  I’m also not interested in a Blackberry.

I’m still loving my Zune, and the Zune Pass.  There are signs that both Zune and iTunes could one day be DRM-free, which seems to me to make a lot of sense.  (DRM – digital rights management – the stuff that frustrates honest people and does very little to stop real thieves.)  Remember the story about the guy in WWII who lived because he had a bible in his shirt pocket that stopped the snipper’s bullet?  I will say that this guy will probably never trade his iPod for a Zune or any other mp3 player.

After figuring out why I was getting so many emails about the FJ Car Computer Project, I was curious about what other searches bring up my blog and I just discovered that I also have the top link for speech recognition entrepreneur.  Just so you don’t think I’m taking this too seriously, I also have the top link for entrepreneur knitting needles tsa.  I’m going home now!

Gold Systems wins best Speech Self-Service Application award

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I’m proud to announce that the Gold Systems Password Reset product was named the "Best Speech Self-Service Application" at SpeechTEK West this year.  If you work in a large company, especially one that is regulated, you know that your IT department is getting more and more strict about the passwords you use and how often you change them.  And for good reason – no one wants to be the next company in the news that got hacked and accidentally disclosed a bunch of credit card numbers.

The problem with stricter, ever-changing passwords is that it is becoming more difficult to remember all the passwords in our lives.  I’ve heard that as many as 25% of all calls to help desks are to request that a password be reset because the user couldn’t remember the right combination of letters, numbers and special characters that is now their password.  Our product automates the resetting of passwords, using speech recognition and even voice authentication if you are really paranoid, it’s more secure because the help desk agent doesn’t ever know your password and – here’s the best part – you don’t have to be embarrassed to call up for the third time this month and admit to a person that you’ve forgotten your password again.

The cost of automating this is generally less than the cost of the salary of one help desk agent.  Now the people can go back to solving the really hard problems like recovering the database that was accidentally deleted last night or figuring out why the wireless network isn’t working in the board room.  Help desk agents will always be needed, even if we can automate some of the more mundane, but still costly tasks that they do.  Speaking of help desk agents and IT people – try thanking them for the work that they do. When everything is working fine, they get little credit and when it isn’t, they catch hell. If nothing else you’ll enjoy the startled look on their faces, because their job is difficult and often thankless.

Hiring event Wednesday night

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Just a quick reminder about our hiring event this Wednesday night, March 7th at the Westin in Westminster between 5:30 and 7:30 PM.  Here’s my original post on the event.  I expect to be there along with a couple of other people from Gold Systems.  If you can’t make it, that’s OK, drop me an email.  I don’t know about the other companies who are going to be there, but I’d suggest you not dress up for us – we’re a Boulder software company.  Enough said?

New Boulder Blogs

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Jerry Lewis, the editor of the Boulder County Business Report, has started a blog.  I’m sorry to say I didn’t know about it until he whacked me over the head with a post about my FJ Cruiser Car Computer Project.  If you are dong business in Boulder, you should be subscribing to the Boulder County Business Report, and now you should subscribe to Jerry’s blog.  It’s his personal blog, but you can bet he’ll have interesting things to say about our community and doing business here.  I’ve always enjoyed his editorials and now I’m looking forward to his blog.

Jesse Sarles over at the CBS 4 sent me a link to another Boulder Blog called the Boulder Report.  It’s a "Review site covering Boulder" and has some great restaurant reviews as well as reviews on other businesses in Boulder.  If you live in Boulder, enjoy visiting Boulder, or you’d like to live in Boulder some day, check it out at www.boulderreport.com.

We’re hiring – Gold Systems in the News

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I get an email alert whenever Gold Systems is mentioned in a press release or when we show up on a website or blog.  Today I received a link to a press release that Rally Software put out announcing a recruiting event that we’re partnering on with a couple of other local companies.  You can read the press release here.  (I have no idea who said that Gold Systems "has been hailed as one of Colorado’s biggest high-tech success," though the statement that we’ve "helped automate more than a billion telephone calls around the world" is probably an understatement.  We can only guess at the number, but I would think it is even more than a billion.

                       HELP WANTED!   HELP WANTED!   HELP WANTED!

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Just making sure you’re still with me.  Gold Systems is looking for great people to expand our engineering and IT groups.  We need a variety of people because we develop with a variety of great companies, including Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft.

Ideally you know exactly what we do, you have experience and can step in and be happy and productive very quickly, but we consider people without industry experience too.  You don’t have to live in Boulder, Colorado either, but if you’ve always wanted to live here, nows your chance.  We have remote people all over the country and while you’d miss our snow, we can make that work too.

I’ve written a lot about the importance of culture and values on this blog and on the Gold Systems website.  Here’s the deal though – it takes work, it’s a constant challenge and not everyone is or will be happy at Gold Systems, or any other company for that matter.  We’ve got more work than ever before and our market and our business is changing in a big way that I’m very excited about.  Check us out, and if you think you could be a part of what we’re doing, email me and I’ll make sure you get considered.  Or just stop by the recruiting event on March 7th, between 5:30 and 7:30 PM at the Westin in Westminster.

Marshall Harrison is joining Gold Systems!

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Marshall Harrison, one of the gotspeech.net founders, has joined Gold Systems! 

Marshall was the first, if not THE only Microsoft Speech Server MVP and I’m really looking forward to having him join the team.  According to his bio at gotspeech.net, he’s now an MVP on the Office Communications Server.  Marshall and I have been exchanging emails and comments on our blogs for a year or two and he’s very enthusiastic about the Unified Communications market.  He’s a engineer who thinks about how people really use technology.

Welcome Marshall!

Boston Terror Scare

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There’s lots of great coverage of the Boston Terror Scare available on YouTube.  In case you are wondering what caused the scare, it is more or less this:

You can buy it at amazon.com here, and there is even a travel version, but I’m guessing you aren’t going to be able to carry it on a plane anytime in the near future. I can’t wait to see The DailyShow’s coverage of today’s events.  The Zebro video is not work-safe, or I’d link to it here.

My favorite magazine, Make, has posted some good coverage of the events and pictures of the actual devices if you are interested.  Warning – the photo in the Make coverage are also not work safe if your employer has a problem with LED cartoon characters making, as one correspondent said, "an obscene gesture."  (If you are a techie, who does work for a place like that, check out my company’s help-wanted page.  We have a sense of humor.  New engineering postings will go up sometime on Friday.)

Repost of Kansas City to Boulder webcam video

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I’ve been asked to repost the Kansas City to Boulder web cam video that I made last year to YouTube.  While driving the FJ Cruiser from Kansas City to Boulder, I had a web cam running that was looking out the windshield.  Every minute a photo was captured, saved, and at the same time posted to my blog in real-time via an EVDO wireless Internet connection.  When I returned home, I took all of those photos and using Windows Movie Maker, I turned it into about a two minute move.

If you look closely, you can see a Landstar Truck (Hi Marshall), the Largest Prairie Dog in the World Place, the Colorado Border and a rest area just outside of Denver.  Also note that there are plenty of trees between Boulder and Kansas City.  As I said before, the drive was a lot of fun and I especially enjoyed getting off the interstate a few times and exploring the farm towns.  The GPS(s) made that easy.  It was also interesting to listen to the farm report on the AM Radio when I didn’t have an Internet connection and couldn’t listen to Internet Radio.

Here you go . . .

(Hmm, if you don’t see the YouTube video above, then there must still be a problem.  Apparently I posted this just as YouTube took a digger.  I can’t access this video or the YouTube site now, though everything else is working fine.  It could be a problem on my side I guess, but if not . . . Wait – YouTube is now working, just not my video.  Here’s a link to the Soapbox posting, which still seems to be working fine.  While debugging this, I did enjoy the Zebroshow’s reporting of the Boston Terror Scare today.)

For more information on the FJ Cruiser Car Computer project, click here.  Unfortunately I’ve been too busy, and there’s just been too much snow for me to do much to it lately.  It has been great to have the FJ in all of this snow though!

P.S. The music is by Most Tuesdays

Calling all entrepreneurs – what was your biggest, ugliest challenge?

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Hello my fellow entrepreneurs,

I’m going to be writing a series of posts over at the Kauffman Foundation and I’d like your help.  We all know that being an entrepreneur is almost 100% an easy and happy existence.  Right . . . .  So, what about that 1% that really tests what you are made of?

I’d like to hear about the biggest, ugliest problem that might have some general appeal to other entrepreneurs.  I won’t use your name unless you tell me I can, and you don’t even have to give me the answer to the problem although if you feel like sharing, or if it would just help to commiserate about what did or didn’t work, I’d like to hear it.

By the way, if you like learning from other entrepreneur’s mistakes and misery, check out Lessons from the Edge, by Jana Matthews and Jeff Dennis.  Just don’t read it late at night.  With subsections like "when disaster strikes", "picking the wrong guy", "starting with a bang, ending with a whimper" and "caught in the act", this is one book that might keep you awake at night.  Confront your fears; the book has a "lessons learned" section and a "top 10 lessons" list after each section.  If nothing else, you’ll feel very fortunate because I guarantee that there are people in this book who had it worse and who have bounced back. 

Thanks in advance for your help.  Email me, or if you want to share in public, leave a comment.  Be sure and say if you want me to credit you by using your name if you email me.

Computer voices

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If you are a geek like me, and you hear voices in your head, are they computer generated voices?  No need to answer, but I have been thinking about computer generated speech recently.

A few weeks ago I remembered that my dad had brought home a 45 rpm record when I was a kid and he was very excited to say that it was the first recording of a computer singing a song.  I may actually have the record, but the recording is still available on the web and it has an interesting history.  It turns out that it wasn’t IBM who made the first computer sing, but rather a researcher named Max Mathews who worked at . . . AT&T Bell Labs, which is where I worked as a contractor before leaving to start Gold Systems.  A shiver just went down my spine to think how my dad handed me that record so many years ago, and now I’ve worked at Bell Labs and continue today to be involved with speech recognition and applications that use speech synthesis.  And to this day, my company works with Avaya, the grandchild of AT&T.

But the coincidences continue – my friend Verna sent me a link to what may be the first scanner that plays music.  Mostly because she knows I’m a geek and a musician, so what could be better?  Why do people spend time doing things like this?  Because they can and who knows what it will lead to.  I’m sure people asked Mr. Mathews why he was wasting his time and what must have been very expensive computer resources to get a computer to sing a song.

And now for the best coincidence of all.  A few weeks ago my sister and I were trading songs names and memories via email.  She remembered an old favorite song book, which I found used on amazon.com and ordered just a minute or two before she was ready to send it to me as a gift.  This book was published in 1952 and it has a great foreword that talks about the songs that were sung in America around the Civil War and the turn of the century.  (And to me, the turn of the century still means going from the 1800’s to the 1900’s)  I received the book a week later (thanks amazon.com and an independent book seller somewhere!) and started to flip through it.  Guess what the VERY FIRST SONG was in the book?  Daisy Bell (A bicycle built for two) by Harry Dacre.  That’s the song that the computer sang, thanks to Bell Labs, that I listened to as a kid and wondered about what other amazing things a computer could do.

Here’s a site with more information on the song. According to that page, Alexander Graham Bell also used the song in a demo, so that’s probably where Mr. Mathews got the idea to use it in his research.  Here’s more on Mr. Mathews – he looks like a fun guy!  And I just found a link to the very same recording I listened to as a kid.  Scroll down until you see "Daisy".  The singing only happens after a nice long intro by a second computer that was generating the music.  You see, it does matter what music your kid listens to.

Values in the Board Room

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(This is an older post that I left as draft accidently.  It still applies – I believe most boards are made up of decent people trying to do the right thing, despite what we see in the press.)

I don’t really have a board room but I have a great board of directors. (The only board member who reads my blog wasn’t able to attend today so I’m not sucking up) It was a great board meeting with a lot of energy, good ideas, good cookies and something the average person on the street probably doesn’t expect from a board – a discussion about values and integrity.

A topic was discussed and it quickly turned into a discussion about what was "right" as opposed to what was best for the company. Now I believe that what is "right" is also best for the company, at least in the long term, but I was very happy to see my board as committed to our values as the rest of us.