Soaring on Ridgelift

Internet NOISE

The growth of the Internet and the introduction of services like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed etc. has created new challenges in isolating the signal (the information in which you are really interested) from the noise.

Search only gets you so far – it's good if you are looking for the same information as everyone else or it's already been indexed but if you are looking for new or breaking information that is relevant to you – you have a much bigger challenge than you did in the past.

 

Think of yourself as a high performance radio receiver…

The challenge in building a receiver is to make sure that you have a high enough signal-to-noise ratio to get the job done – detect the faintest signal in which you are interested from the ambient noise.

Part of the system engineering choices of a high quality receiver is balancing the capture and amplification of the signal you want while at the same time minimizing the sources of noise in the receiver. The more signal you can capture and amplify while minimizing system noise, the better the signal-to-noise ratio of the receiver and the clearer the received signal.

One of the other important aspects of receiver design is minimizing spurious signals – signals that are a by-product of how the receiver has been implemented – these spurious signals are sources of interference and noise that mask the signal that really has your interest.

 

A large network of "friends" may be socially reassuring but if you use it as one of the inputs to your information receiver you are making a poor design tradeoff between signal and noise. After all, large groups de-emphasize individual opinion in favor of those elements of information that are perceived as having wider (and hence allegedly more useful) appeal.

When I first started writing this blog in March 2006, my first post was about "Finding stuff in the Blogosphere" where I noted that most of my blog reading was articles that had been forwarded by friends. Two years plus later I read a *lot* of blogs but STILL the more interesting "new" stuff I get has been filtered by a small group of friend or colleagues who share common interests with me.

By a few, I mean a handful or so of people who are loosely collaborating on something of interest – in my case it ranges from a couple of groups around my hobbies/personal interests to a larger disjoint set of groups around the companies or business ideas on which I focus. These interactions have a very high signal-to-noise ratio.

Unlike these filtered interchanges of information, many Web 2.0 companies that focus around entertainment and social interactions are being confused as sources of signal while in reality they are sources of noise. We've been lured by the comfort of social interactions and the sense of being "one with the herd group" that we've lost sight of how much harder it's become to find relevant information in a timely manner.

As the current wave of Web 2.0 companies begin to fade from interest, it's time to capture the essence of their true value – interactions between groups of people who have tightly coupled, shared interests. After all, does anyone really have 500 "close" friends whose opinions are all equally valued? I didn't think so!

I think the future applications of "social networking" will see a new wave of companies emerging that focus on leveraging small (social?) group interactions around more meaningful objectives (like sharing knowledge, digging into a topic, learning new things) than throwing sheep at one another.

Got an idea for one? Drop me an email and let's talk.

 

It’s the simple things…

Sometimes it's the simple things in life that offer the most joy! Simple things like… sunny days, clear blue skies, skiing in pristine powder or something more mundane like listening to static free music from your iPhone.

One of the advantages of the iPhone is that you always have your music with you and the battery is usually always charged! I couldn't say that about my iPod – carrying around a second device (and forgetting to charge it) was a hassle. The iPhone provides an elegant solution to both issues.

Unfortunately, my car doesn't have either the support for an iPod via the integrated electronics nor an AUX input. This leaves two options… hack the car (even I draw the limit here…) or using an FM transmitting adaptor to play through the car stereo.

The second option was my historic approach to iPod and car integration – not the best of solutions given the crowded airwaves here in the Bay Area. Every frequency is in use somewhere and often the radio station overpowered the iPod FM transmitter. This solution was a bust when I got my iPhone as not only did the phone give an incompatibility warning, the interference from the GSM RF deck made music listening an unhappy experience.

When iPhone compatible FM transmitters appeared in the local Apple store I gave in and bought one – the interference was gone but the poor reception problem remained. I kept thinking about ways of improving the reception but never thought about the problem when I had a browser at my finger tips… until this last weekend.

A short browsing session later I had a very simple, inexpensive and elegant solution. There are several sites that reference this out on the 'net – here's one of them.

Get a 33 inch length of wire (any wire just as long as its insulated), fold about 2 inches of the wire back on itself in a U-shape about half an inch across… and tape with duct tape (or any other strong tape available) to the back of the control unit of the transmitter.

You are done.

No kidding, this creates a simple antenna that's one quarter wavelength long at 88.3 Mhz that gets inductively fed from the antenna in the unit. No invalidation of the unit warranty, nothing to break, nothing to build, fix, or curse.

Works like a charm and renders music listening static free even in the RF swamp of Silicon Valley.

 

Metro-WiFi – free IS the only way

Today's NY Times has a front page article on the looming failure of metropolitan WiFi networks in cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco – "Hope for Wireless Cities are Fading". Faced with deployment challenges to get adequate coverage and competition from other broadband offerings, the service providers that "won" the contracts are withdrawing.

" But the excited momentum has sputtered to a standstill, tripped up by unrealistic ambitions and technological glitches. The conclusion that such ventures would not be profitable led to sudden withdrawals by service providers like EarthLink, the Internet company that had effectively cornered the market on the efforts by the larger cities."

The challenges of building these metro-area WiFi networks are not new – almost 2 years ago I wrote about the issues that cities like Taipei were having in getting an adequate number of users to pay for the network – in "Saturation Point?" I speculated that the challenges of getting enough users would cause projects to be postponed or cancelled. Sadly, it looks like those fears are being realized.

Hopefully these setbacks are temporary and don't foretell the end of metro-WiFi – these networks would be a great asset.

As I said in my original post, "the imperative is on the user hook" – what does it take to get enough paying user up and running on the network to help subsidize those who can't afford to pay? Perhaps the answer lies in getting the cities to sign up as anchor customers as this quote from the NYT suggests…

"In Minneapolis, the Internet service provider agreed to build the network as long as the city committed to becoming an "anchor tenant" by subscribing for a minimum number of city workers, like building inspectors, meter readers, police officers and firefighters."

In the meantime, I place my bets on the community efforts sponsored by companies like Meraki where the goal is to get the network deployed, not run it as a "for-profit" business. If it had been a requirement for the original "Internet" to be run "for-profit", I doubt we would be using it today – the plug would have been pulled a long time before critical mass was achieved to make it a profitable endeavor!

iPhone in China

Thinking about the bill I got earlier in the year from using my old Treo with GoodLink in the UK (and having the benefit of more than two hours notice of leaving this time!), I signed up for the International Data Roaming plan with AT&T Wireless before I left.

I'm able to check my email and the combination of the roaming plan plus the usage meter on the iPhone itself gives me great comfort about next month's bill – no surprises! Data connectivity back to my email host is patchy – it has to be the data gateway because the cellular coverage here in Beijing is awesome!

Despite the iPhone not being sold (yet) in China, there were quite a few folks at the dinner I attended last night with iPhones – every last one hacked and running a ton of applications!

I'm looking forward to Apple's release of the iPhone SDK – can't come soon enough for me.

Déjà vu – all over again?

The recent announcements by Google of OpenSocial and now Android, their open platform for mobile phones, has left me with a distinct feeling of déjà vu… or as Yoggi Berra said "Déjà vu all over again".

Both OpenSocial and Android are collections of companies threatened by a common foe – in the case of OpenSocial, the foe is FaceBook, for Android, it's a combination of the cellular carriers and the dominant handset players.

Déjà vu? We've seen this phenomena before. Think of initiatives like the Open Software Foundation of the late 80's that was created by DEC to counter SUN Microsystem's collaboration with AT&T – Scott McNealy nicknamed OSF – "Oppose Sun Forever".

I'm hard pressed to think of many (any?) industry consortia that resulted in a significant and enduring market shift. How will Google drive the efforts of OpenSocial and Android to a different conclusion?

The failure dynamics of earlier industry consortia cluster around:

• Standard defined by a committee
• Checklist endorsement of the standard by consortia members – no one wanted to surrender their differentiation but everyone wanted to say they played in the sandbox.
• Outflanked by a nimbler competitor who could a) see the slow moving consortia battle plan in full detail and b) out execute their massed competitors

Google may be able to avoid some of these pitfalls – Eric Schmidt is a wily veteran of the Java adoption wars and heads up a company with market dominance and deep pockets. To me the biggest tests are going to be whether Google resists letting too many fingers into the API specs and whether the different players fully embrace the new spec.

Time will tell…

A taste of SPAM to come?

Thought you'd seen it all? SPAM in the form of embedded images, PDF documents, simple email text – yep, we've seen all that but wait, there's more!

Check out this article in the online NY Times this afternoon about the next wave of SPAM – audio and possibly video!

What's really bad about this is the increasing size of the SPAM messages – most of the crud I see in my SPAM folder today is about 5-7 KB – if audio SPAM catches hold, the size could increase 10x – a sizeable increase in the resources that are wasted by Spammers.

Xobni – useful but may have to go

I've been using Xobni for a couple of weeks now since their launch at the TechCrunch conference. It has a couple of features I really like – for example, displaying the last email you looked at when switching Outlook from Mail to Calendar. As simple as it sounds, this is a great feature as it saves having to remember the date and time of the meeting you are about to add to the calendar or having two windows open for Outlook – one for mail and the other for the calendar.

Unfortunately, since installing Xobni the performance of Outlook has fallen dramatically and from time to time Outlook hangs consuming 50% or more of the CPU. After a few of the hangs I'm beginning to believe there is an interaction between Xobni and X1 – X1 is the fast-as-you-can-type search tool that makes search for everything (mail, contacts, files…) so fast that it's a corner stone of my workflow.

I'm going to wait for another release update of Xobni before deciding whether it stays or not – I hope the interaction problem gets nailed but in the limit, Xobni is a nice to have and X1 is a MUST have for me.

Group discovery

There's a good introduction to FriendFeed in an article featured in the Business section of today's New York Times – "Service Helps Friends Share Their Online Discoveries".

I read the article early this morning and went and signed up for a beta invitation – Bret Taylor sent me one about an hour later and so I created my profile and started to test drive FriendFeed.

I think this is a great idea but needs an addition – let me create separate feeds of what I find interesting for groups of my friends. This would a great tool for sharing research, stream of consciousness etc. with a group of like-minded friends or business colleagues.

It would also be nice to have the ability to tag a page into a feed without having to use Digg or one of the other services that FriendFeed tracks to extract your interests. In some respects, FriendFeed reminds me of Ted Shelton's PersonalBee (now a part of Technorati) that allowed an "editor" to create a feed of information that could be reviewed by subscribers.

There's a fantastic amount of information out on the web but having to share it via email links is hard work and doesn't lend itself to group conversations. I think FriendFeed is a great step in the right direction.

Converting Thought to Speech

I have just seen one of the most amazing demonstrations of my life – a combination of hardware and software that converts the thought of speech to audio.  The inventor of this technology is Michael Callahan, a young entrepreneur who is one of the members on Chris Shipley's panel "Through the eyes of the young innovators".

Michael is the founder of Ambient, the company that has developed this product called Audeo.  Audeo targets people who have lost the ability to speak through disease or injury.  You can see the company web site at www.theaudeo.com – there are some videos of the technology in operation.

Eventually the company wants to extend the application of this technology to provide human to computer communication as an adjunct to a keyboard, mouse etc.

Although the product is still in development the demonstration was spectacular and forgive the pun, leaves you speechless!

WOW!

Dante’s 9th Level – DELL HELL!!!!

If Dante had been alive today and written his epic "Divine Comedy", I'm sure his different levels of Hell would have featured computers and associated software. The deepest level of hell would have been for those unfortunate souls having to grapple with Dell Computers and software problems – Dell Hell.

Over the years I've gone through a cycle of building computers from the ground up (you know, case, power supply, motherboard, peripherals, etc.) to buying readymade machines from Dell and IBM and back again. Unfortunately, when it comes to laptops, it's tough to go the ground up approach.

Growing up around computers and being capable of field stripping and cleaning a PC in the dark while half asleep has its draw backs – I'm the family IT department. For better or worse, we're a PC shop and a couple of days ago, one of the laptops went unstable – DLL problems, unexpected application terminations and error messages suggesting a re-installation of Windows. The laptop was made by Dell.

After digging around in the stack of CDs, I "found" the OS re-installation disk and thought this was going to be a piece of cake – little did I know. I booted the laptop from the CD, started the OS installation and then the problems started… The OS installation complained it couldn't find USBEHCI.SYS on the CD and asked me to locate it – surprise, surprise, I couldn't find it either. The installation proceeded without it and when I finally got a desktop up on the machine ("39 minutes" later), a) the machine was unstable, b) the network drivers were missing and c) I realized that this wasn't the right re-installation CD for this model of laptop (I'd had a number of Dell machines over the years, each with its own CDs and none of them labeled as to the specific model of machine).

After a lot of futzing around trying to get various network drivers installed (let me see, FLASH drive not recognized, USB not active,…) I resorted to Dell technical support – after all, I had a "next day" support contract. My entry into Dell Hell had begun.

The support tech was very polite – asked my problem, updated my contact information and then told me I needed to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows – this after I had described in detail what had happened and that I didn't have the right CD for the installation. As this wasn't my laptop, I knew that the hard disk had data on it that wasn't backed up and so I flatly refused the reformat request. Besides – you don't need a reformat to reinstall and repair Windows.

I'll spare you the rest of the 2 hour and 19 minutes I spent on IM with the Dell tech (and his supervisor) – including the one hour humoring them to test the hard disk using the Dell diagnostics, before they a) pointed out that my "next day" support only applied to hardware issues and b) agreed to send me a replacement set of installation CDs for this machine.

Then they asked me to give them feedback on their customer support…

I'm sure the tech followed the training he'd been given but it was flat out wrong. If I'd followed his advice, I'd have wiped my disk, re-installed Windows and STILL had the same problem. Fortunately I knew how to say NOOOOOOOOO!

Sorry for the rant but the moral of the story is clear – just like when a Doctor gives you a diagnosis you don't like, ask a lot of questions, get another opinion and don't believe what the first guy says until you get corroboration.

Perhaps it's time we swapped the laptops to Macs...