Phil Windley's Technometria

May 8, 2008

VC Meetings Next Thursday

I’m going to be in the Bay Area next Thursday (May 15) with the day free and would love to get a few meetings with venture firms who might be interested in hearing about what we’re doing with Kynetx. I don’t know many VC’s in the Bay area well, so if you wouldn’t mind doing an intro to your favorite Bay Area VC, contact me.

New IT Conversations Design

IT Conversations redesign!
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Doug Kaye has been working for months to redesign the infrastructure for the Conversations Network, including It Conversations. Much of that work hasn’t been visible to IT Conversations listeners, but it’s made the management of the network and production of shows much nicer. Now, that hard work is showing on the site as well with today’s launch of the new IT Conversations.

The new design is cleaner, brings lots of features, like ratings and playlists, out to the homepage, and automates things like “current series” and “topics” so that they’re more up to date. Ratings are also more reliable in the new system—I’m already seeing more meaningful ratings data come through. The old Personal Program Queue has been updated and is now called a Personal Playlist (under “My Programs” on the top menu bar).

With all the great changes to the homepage, you might be tempted to stay right there, but take time to click through to the program detail pages. They’ve also been reworked with better ways to comment and share programs with your friends. Also, the new recommendation box on the right hand side shows other programs you might like.

As with any launch, there will undoubtedly be things that don’t work. Be sure to let us know and we’ll try to get things fixed as soon as we find out about them.

May 7, 2008

Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for April 2008

In doing this month’s top ten for IT Conversations, noticed two things:

First, since Doug put in our own code for ratings, the number of ratings per show is way up. I think with the new homepage design (oops! Did I let that slip?!?) we’ll see even more ratings. We’ve not had enough in the past for me to put a lot of confidence in them, but that’s changing.

Second, the number of overall downloads is down. We recently had to update the feed URL and this didn’t get propagated correctly in all feedreaders and podcatchers. Please take a minute to check right now and make sure you’re still getting IT Conversations on your MP3 player. The correct feed URL is:

http://feeds.conversationsnetwork.org/channel/itc

Or just head to feed subscription page and resubscribe.

The following is the list of the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by number of downloads) for April 2008.

Phil Libin - Personal Outboard Memory (Rating: 3.69)
Phil Libin was the CEO of CoreStreet when he appeared as the first guest on Interviews with Innovators. Now he’s back as CEO of EverNote, a company that aims to build the memex, or personal outboard memory, that Vannevar Bush famously imagined in his 1945 article “As We May Think.”
Scott Sigler - Infected (Rating: 3.39)
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Scott Sigler, who talks about his bioterror thriller “Infected.” While it’s based on the premise of a biological weapon on the loose, he’s actually a modern day Charles Dickens.
Amory Lovins - Energy Efficiency in Buildings - Part 2 (Rating: 4.79)
Well-designed buildings not only conserve energy and reduce costs but also create conditions for better health and wellness. Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, uses several examples to show how the right mix of materials, resources, and expertise can create structures that celebrate living. From MAP.
Wagner Au - The Growth of Second Life (Rating: 3.44)
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Journalist Wagner Au, who embedded himself in the virtual 3D online world, Second Life, and talks about its incredible growth.
James Reinders, Dirk Hohndel - Exploiting Parallelism with Multi-core Technologies (Rating: 2.90)
There has been a lot of talk about the difficulties of parallel programming, but Intel has decided to do something about it. Intel representatives announce the open sourcing of Threading Building Blocks, a product used to simplify parallel development. TBB has been around for several years as a proprietary tool, and Intel hopes that by opening it up, it will reach a broader audience and be adapted to more situations.
Jeff Hawkins - Why Can’t a Computer Be More Like a Brain? (Rating: 4.20)
Despite amazing strides, computers are still relatively poor at performing high level activities that come naturally to the human brain. Co-founder of Palm, Inc., Jeff Hawkins, describes recent breakthroughs in the modeling of brain functions based on the theory of Hierarchical Temporal Memory. New insights into how the neocortex supports cognition, inference and prediction can be applied to a variety of problems using Hawkins’ Numenta computing platform.
Matt Zimmerman - Ubuntu Technical Roadmap (Rating: 3.20)
Matt Zimmerman delivers exactly what his title promises: a technical roadmap of where Ubuntu has been and where it is going. He discusses the collaborative development process, an overview of past and future releases, the expansion of Ubuntu from the desktop to server and mobile environments, and what’s next for Ubuntu. Highlighting key features of the latest releases, this presentation will be of interest to existing Ubuntu users as well as anyone considering migrating to this popular linux-based operating system.
Werner Vogels - A Web-Scale Computing Architecture (Rating: 3.83)
Developers are increasingly using Amazon, not only as a source of technical books, but also as a web services platform to build robust and scalable infrastructure. Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels, reveals how to make the most of the popular S3 service and uncovers some of the features underpinning the new EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) service. As a bonus for Conversations Network listeners, there’s even a cameo appearance from our own Doug Kaye, who explains how Gigavox Media is exploiting the web services functionality Vogel describes.
Jamais Cascio - Metaverse Singularity (Rating: 3.55)
Technology is becoming more entrenched in every part of our life, and we need to be aware of where that might lead us. Jamais Cascio gives four possible scenarios based on whether technology is used to augment or simulate reality and whether it is internally or externally focused. Because of the human bias inherent in any technology, he argues that we need to democratically include all of the world’s stakeholders to avoid having these scenarios become dystopias.
Fred Krupp & Miriam Horn - Earth: The Sequel (Rating: 3.22)
Today a complement of new energy technologies exist, but are they economically feasible? Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn, from the Environmental Defence Fund, about their new book, “Earth: The Sequel.”

May 1, 2008

Fusion 1.1.2

VMWare released a new version of Fusion last week: 1.1.2. There are a lot of little fixes that if they were a problem for you you’ll be very glad to have fixed. If not, you might not notice much difference. I’d been bit a few times by Fusion refusing to release USB resources when it quit. Bottom line: if you’re not having any issues, no rush.

April 30, 2008

IIW Is Just Around the Corner

If you are wondering what the Internet Identity Workshop is all about we have a new articulation posted on the main wiki page for our upcoming conference. It goes into the range of topics covered along with the technology and social issues. This is our 6th event and I think it will be a great one.

MONDAY IS FREE (beginning at 1PM)

We have Monday’s program figured out and Monday afternoon is FREE to anyone who wants to come and check out the emerging field. We will open at 1pm.

We will open with a ‘newbie’ perspective from Ryan Janssen who has been an amazing active reader of the community blogs and writing about it as Dr. Star Cat

Everyone will get a hand out of all the community project one pagers.

Presentations will then follow about five centers of gravity in the community that we see:

The VENN OF IDENTITY

OpenID - David Recordon
SAML/Liberty Alliance - Paul Madsen
i-cards - Pamela Dingle
Data sharing/linking - Drummond Reed
Vendor Relationship Management Project - Chris Carfi

Between 3:30 and 4:00 we will be all together - considering “what useful things can we do” along with other questions please be there for this if you feel all up to speed on “everything”. We think that the presentations will be informative for those already familiar with the landscape it has moved forward since we last were together - so we encourage you all to get there at 1PM.

We are working on a blog push on Thursday May 1st - blog about it that day- (if you miss that day - blog about it anyways over the weekend)

April 29, 2008

Gin and Television: Using Our Social Surplus

Clay Shirky has posted a transcript of his Web 2.0 talk “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” In it Shirky argues that television was the safety valve that society used to sponge up all the excess cognitive capacity that we developed after World War II. In effect, the mindless activity of watching television kept people from going crazy with all the spare cycles that they had.

Shirky says that with the Internet and Web, we’re starting to re-use that capacity for social good, finding ways to create value from what was previously wasted.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

From Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody
Referenced Tue Apr 29 2008 09:36:02 GMT-0600 (MDT)

Pretty interesting stuff. Go read the whole article.

April 25, 2008

Web Authentication with Selective Delegation using SRP

Bryant Cutler and Devlin Daley developed a methodology for adding selective delegation to relationship-based identity systems. This afternoon I presented that work at WWW2008. The talk went well. There were probably about 40 people in the room. There were some good questions afterwards, so all in all, I’m pleased. Here are the slides (PDF) if you’re interested.

Tyler Close: Using Promises to Orchestrate Web Interactions

Tyler Close answers questions after his talk
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Tyler Close of Waterken fame presented a way of using promises to produce succinct JavaScript (and Java) code for doing multiple asynchronous requests with a Web server. The idea of promises in asynchronous systems was developed by Barbara Liskov in the late 80’s. Tyler has a tutorial online. I also found this description from Brian Lothar of Web calculus which discusses promises in that context. Very interesting stuff. I think this was my favorite presentation of WWW2008.

April 24, 2008

WWW2008 Conference Dinner at Great Hall of the People

Great Hall of the People
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We just got back from the WWW2008 conference dinner at the Great Hall of the People, China’s parliment building and center of state ceremonial activities. How the conference got permission to have the dinner there, I don’t know. I do know it wasn’t cheap. Extra tickets were $150 and they said that was cost.

In any event it was quite an event. The banquet hall was huge, the food was first rate and quite varied, and the entertainment well planned. I enjoyed the whole evening. I’ve posted some pictures of the event. Unfortunately, they told us we couldn’t take a real camera, so all I had was my iPhone. Given that constraint, they didn’t turn out too badly.

April 23, 2008

Computational Advertising

Andrei Broder of Yahoo! Research
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I’m in a talk by Andrei Broder, a Yahoo! Fellow and Vice President of Computation Advertising on, what else, computational advertising. I was drawn to the talk by the title.

Find the “best match” between a given user in a given context and a suitable advertisement. Context could be click stream, page content, or something else. Key ideas:

The financial scale is huge. Small constants matter.
Advertising is a form of information
Finding the “best ad” is a type of information retrieval problem.

Classic advertising falls into one of two camps: brand advertising that is projecting a message and direct advertising that is attempting to elicit action. Coupons are a classic example of direct marketing.

For advertisers interested in online (keyword) ads, the key issues are

what words to buy
how much to pay
spamming is an economic activity

For search engine owners, the questions are

How to price the words (auction)
How to match ads to content

The problem with matching is that it’s not purely syntactic. For example, an ad for Seattle hotels ought to match “Alaska cruise starting point” but not “Seatlle’s Best Coffee Chicago”. Finding the right ad is a query problem, but the ad database is smaller than the database of web pages. The the entries are smaller pages (less content). An ranking is not just based on matching, but also the bid.

There’s been a lot of progress on this problem in recent years. Matches are not syntactic. What’s not solved? Filtering for relevance. Ads on a page about Scotter Libby’s testimony included entries for Libby Shoes.

We’re moving from an explicit demand for information driven by a user query to active information supply driven by user activity and context. This requires the increased use of semantics and context. An information supply engine looks at user profile and context, the activity context (browsing) and the ad inventory, and provides an ad. User action then feeds back into the system.

There is a different quality (utility) factor for publishers, advertisers and users. The ad agency has it’s own economic interest. Different types of ads (text, graphical, multimedia) are not easily compared.

One technique is to allow the searcher to peak at the result to determine what a query is about. For example viewing the query “TFM-PCIV92A” doesn’t give you a lot of information about what this is about, but looking at the results tells you this is about 56K baud modems. Note that if you do that search in Google, you don’t see any ads for modems. If you modemsearch modem, you’ll see all kinds of sponsored ads. Why isn’t Google figuring out the first search is about modems? (this is at least true from China…)

Finding better approaches requires interdisciplinary techniques: machine learning, optimization, information retrieval, statistical modeling, microeconomics, and so on.

Taking Search to New Frontiers: Dr. Harry Shum (Microsoft)

Harry Shum
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The Web can be divided into three components: content (pages, images, videos, blogs, feeds), people (readers, writers, creators, commenters), and actions (queries, clicks, pageviews). Current search engines have taken advantages of “keywords” to link those three components together. But the keyword model has reach it’s limits.

One phenomenon that’s challenging keywords is the explosive growth of content. Multimedia content is especially difficult The scale requirements are huge. Another challenge is that the Web is becoming more dynamic: people want to interact. Search engines have a long way to go to satisfy user needs. To make progress, we have to stop worrying about just the content. We need to consider the context.

Users are not anonymous, but they form a community with specific interests. Actions are not random, but are driven by intent. Semantics is important. Extracting semantics is difficult.

There is a practical approach to semantics: understand->extract->expose. It should be data-driven, incremental, and interactive. We need to derive concepts from content, people from users, and intent from actions.

Understanding content has three vectors: intra-page intelligence, inter-page intelligence, and temporal understanding.

The technologies more useful for understanding users as people have been personalization, collaborative filtering, and analyzing social graphs. Personalization has failed to live up to it’s promise. Harry demos Gianxi, a Microsoft Research project that searches the social network. This isn’t online yet as far as I could see. Reminds me of something Rohit Khare shoed me at the last WWW in Banff.

Harry Shum (right) and his demo partner Graham (left)
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Deriving intent requires contextual intelligence, mobile awareness, and intent refinement. The better we d with query classification, the better we do with user intent. Is there commercial intent? Is it location sensitive? Harry shows a demo (actually it was his trusty sidekick “Graham”) where user action (dragging a particular picture to a special zone on the page) reorders the search results and filters them according to additional user action. This is a great example of how understanding intent give much better results than mere keywords. “Give me things that look like this…” This demo actually generated applause from the audience.

One of the demos was actually hobbled by the “Great Firewall of China” according to Graham. Interestingly it was searches of video from Hillary Clinton. The demo extracted the most relevant portions of long videos and showed just the relevant snippets. Seeing the relevant portion, viewers could then select the whole video.

In order to get more out of search, we have to understand semantics, extract it, and then expose it to the user for further refinement.

Runaway Daemons in OS X

This morning, my MacBook Pro was hot—the fan was running—and sluggish. A look at the activity monitor revealed that syslogd was consuming all of one CPU (apparently it’s not threaded) and the other CPU was taking all the load. A reboot would have fixed it, of course, but I like to find ways to fix what’s wrong without resorting to restarting the machine when I can.

First thing to try: just kill the process. OS X is pretty good about recognizing when critical processes are down and restarting them. Unfortunately, simply restarting syslogd didn’t solve the problem. There was something causing it to run.

A little searching revealed that sometimes Time Machine will cause this problem. Time Machine logs information and there’s apparently something wrong with how it does it under certain circumstances. So, the fix is this:

Disable Time Machine in the System Preferences
Kill syslogd from the command line (killall syslogd) or using activity monitor—OS X will automatically restart it
Re-enable Time Machine

After that things were normal. I’ll note for the record that my Time Machine drive wasn’t connected at the time and hadn’t been for days since I’m in China. Maybe that’s part of the problem. I’m not sure. In any event, all’s well now.

Trust-Based Recommendation Systems

Reid Andersen from Microsoft Research is talking about trust-based recommendation systems (PDF). To build a personalized recommendation, you need a trust graph among users. What system should you use to determine the recommendation? The researchers use an axiomatic approach.

The context of their axiomatic system is social choice theory (see Arrow’s impossibility theorem for voting systems from 1951). More recent treatments are Webpage ranking systems (Altman, Teeneholtz, ‘05).

The details are fairly complex, but the basic idea is that by proposing axioms until you get an inconsistency in the axiom set and then backing off and exploring other axioms to add to the set, you can generate unique recommendation systems that have a provable set of properties.

The overall model is simple, but there are several nice result including being able to show incentive compatibility which avoids self-interested bias in the recommendations. For details, see the paper (PDF).

April 22, 2008

Planetary-Scale Views on a Large Instant-Messaging Network

Collect 150Gb/day of compressed log files from MSN instant messenger over thirty days (June 2006) and you find on a typical day you get 1 billion conversations, 93 million users logged in with 65 million of those actually engaging in a conversation. This is the basis of research by Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz.

The demographics of MSN users shows that, not surprisingly, they’re far younger than the general population. The probability of any two users having a conversation with each other isn’t largely affected by their repsective ages or genders. One interesting finding is that people are more general to have conversations with a range of people in all ages as they get older. Older people talk the longest, but the trend isn’t monotonic. Middle aged people have shorter conversations than older and younger talkers. Young people type faster (more messages per unit time).

There’s little gender bias. Any two random nodes are as likely to be talking to the opposite gender as the same gender. Cross gender conversations are longer and there are more messages per conversation.

Generally people talk less as they live further apart. You can see peaks in the data that correspond to continental distances. Most conversations happen between people within 50-100 km of each other.

Only 8% of US population has MSN IM. For Iceland, it’s 35%. When you look at the map with users per capita, the world map pops out, but there are some bear regions. Interestingly the western US is very high. No analysis in the talk on why. You can plot axes of conversations between world areas and see heavy connectivity between US and Europe and less between other areas of the world.

Over the course of June 2006, 180 million people exchanged messages and there are 1.3 billion edges in the graph (each user does 6-7 conversations on average). Over 30 billion total conversations. The number of buddies follows a power law distribution.

Analyzing connectivity confirms the 6 degrees of separation theory. The average length of a path from any two users in buddy lists is 6.2. 90% of people can be reached in less than 8 hops. People are very close together.

When you removed nodes (given some order like number of links, total conversations, total duration, etc.) you can see the strength of the network. Not surprisingly, removing people with the most links makes the network fall apart fastest. But removing them according to the average conversation length causes the network to fall apart even more slowly than removing them at random.

So, in conclusion,

People who communicate are similar (except gender)
The world is well connected (small world theory)
The network is very robust. Many random people can be removed and the network is still connected.

Cloud Computing: Dr. Kai-Fu Lee of Google

Main hall where keynotes were held. I love the red slip covers on the chairs. They were more comfortable than your standard hotel chair.
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The opening keynote at WWW2008 is Dr. Kai-Fu Lee of Google.

Before the keynote, we were treated to a presentation that featured dancers in blue Spiderman uniforms, a dancer in what I assume was traditional dress, and a guy with a “Welcome to Beijing” banner running through them all. Somehow, it seemed to fit perfectly even though it was the first of it’s kind at any tech conference I’ve been too—especially one that’s essentially academic.

We received a welcome speech from Dr. Yong Shang who is the Vice-Minister of the Ministry of Science and Technology. It basically said “thanks for coming, China’s pushing forward with Internet technology.” No mention of the firewall. :-) As an aside, the fact that I can find him and his ministry on Google in English speaks louder about what he was saying than his actual words. No doubt the Chinese government understands the power of the Internet. That said, in terms of eGovernment, there was mostly information there, not much in the way of services I could see.

The Internet connectivity has failed and we’re not even 30 minutes in. Hopefully it will come back up. I was planning on watching Twitter for news of the Pennsylvania primary. The opening ceremony has gone on for 40 minutes now. Finally we’re ready for Lee’s keynote.

Cloud Computing: Dr. Kai-Fu Lee of Google
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He starts out asking what people want. Many of his answers were specifically about accessibility and it’s control. There are four key attributes of cloud computing

Data stored in the cloud
Software services are increasingly moving to the cloud and accessed through the browser
Based on standards and protocols
Accessible from any device

Interesting that this is more or less the Google’s core set of beliefs. Companies often distinguish themselves from Google in departing from these principles. The world has moved from hardware-centric to software-centric to service-centric.

Six ideas driving cloud computing:

User centric Data is stored in the could and follows you and your devices. Data accessible anywhere and easily, safely shared with others. He mentions several obvious examples of Google services that meet this definition.
Task centric People don’t want to make spreadsheets or write documents. Rather they want to plan a curriculum or collaborate on a business plan. Right now, of course, all Google’s examples are simply documents or spreadsheet with collaboration built in.
Power Lots of computers in a cloud can do things you can’t do with a single PC. Google search is faster than desktop search because there’s lots of computers on the task. Cloud computing isn’t just about moving things off the desktop, but bring more data and compute power to bear on the problem.
Intelligent Intelligence comes from data mining of massive data. “A ton of data is more valuable than an ounce of algorithm.” I’m not sure that says much. Machine translation is a good example where feeding lots of good translation data into a learning algorithm leads better translation of general text. Storage + analytics = intelligence.
Affordable Of course, this all uses a lot of computers and that gets expensive. Google’s strategy is to use cheap machines. 1000 CPU PC-Class machines cost about the same as on 64-way high end machine and give 30x the performance (warning: data may be out of date). The actual numbers at Google are even greater since Google builds it’s own hardware. Faulty hardware can be overcome with a sophisticated software layer. This is the heart of engineering.
Programmable How do you program 1000’s of flaky servers? Fault tolerant distributed disk storage, distributed shared memory, and a new programming paradigm. Google uses GFS for file storage: every piece of data is replicated three times. Anytime a server holding on of the three chunks dies, the others notice and make another copy. The shred memory architecture is Big Table. The programming is done using MapReduce, a way of creating parallel algorithms. Between Mar 2005 and Sept 2007 the number of processes using MapReduce went from around 72000 to over 2 million!

Cloud computing requires new skills. This is very true. We don’t do enough to teach these skills to students. We ought to be introducing parallel computing in the cloud as the second programming course—ensuring that the first emphasizes the building blocks for the second. This probably means it’s not in Java.

John Breslin has an excellent write-up of this speech as well.

Exploring Beijing

Parking attendent
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I’m in Beijing for WWW2008 which starts tomorrow. I came out early (last Saturday) because I find conferences much more enjoyable when I’m not suffering from jet lag. I’m pretty well adjusted now and I’m looking forward to the talks tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’ve taken some time to explore Beijing a bit. Sunday I was quite tired and other than going to church, a fun experience in Beijing, stuck close to the hotel. It was rainy both Sunday and Monday, so the weather wasn’t up to outdoor activities.

Because of that, I decided that the best use of Monday was to do some shopping. I’d been told that I ought to go to the Silk Street Market, so that’s where I headed. What an experience. Six floors of stalls crammed with everything from clothes to watches to electronics to luggage. Most of it is branded with famous brands. Not many of them real, of course.

More workmen
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The stall vendors are very forward, even clinging to you to get you to come into their stall. The first price you get quoted is 4, 6 or even 10 times what they’ll settle for. I’m not very comfortable negotiating and don’t like it, so I probably didn’t get the best possible price, but I did pay significantly less than the first price quoted. I got some fun gifts for my family. I won’t name them here for obvious reasons.

The sun was finally out in the afternoon and since the hotel I’m in is close to some of the Olympic venues, I walked around a bit and took some pictures. I was fascinated to see the workers. For example, they were working on a sidewalk in front of the Bird’s Nest stadium (where the opening and closing ceremonies will be held). There were at least a dozen of them all working with hand tools—picks and shovels. No power equipment of any kind being used to build a sidewalk hundreds of yards long.

Rain spout
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Today I took a tour of the Great Wall and the Ming Dynasty Tombs. The best part was getting out of Beijing proper for a bit and seeing some of the country side. There is beautiful country not far out of Beijing. Of course there are still people everywhere. The Ming Tombs were amazing in size.

I went to the Badaling area of the wall. This is not a wall over flat terrain, but up and down mountains. I scratched my head in wonder when I thought about people hauling all that stone up those mountains. I hiked up to the top the section where we were and it was very steep. I’m sure my knees will be reminding me tomorrow of the journey.

More pictures of how steep it is
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We also spent a little time at a jade factory (refactory, I supposed since the original factory was the earth) and had lunch in a cafeteria at the back of a Friendship Store (government run store for tourists). I’ve had better food. The people making the jade pieces and Ming vases were working in almost unthinkable conditions from an OSHA perspective. But I’m sure they’re very well paid in compensation for the danger (sarcasm).

Tonight I went to the Microsoft Research Asia reception at Microsoft’s Beijing facility. The food was just so-so, but I enjoyed seeing the demos and talking to the researchers. There were some very fun projects.

The only one I went to that had a handout and a Web page, was the Excel Web Data add-in. This is essentially a very sophisticated screen scraper that puts its results in Excel and can refresh them as the Web page changes. I don’t think it runs on Excel 2007 on OS X—at least the installer is a .exe. Maybe I’ll fire up Fusion and give it a go later.

Another one that was pretty cool was a mobile application. Imagine two mobile phones streaming separate copies of a movie. When they get close together they both start streaming and showing just half the movie—combining their screens for more pixels. Swap their location and they swap the half of the movie they’re showing. The amazing thing is that this coordination isn’t done with radio signals, but with sound. The phones chirp to let the other phone know where they’re at.

I’m having fun trying to decipher characters. I knew around 250 characters when I lived in Japan. Many of those are coming back and are similar enough to recognize. Of course there are thousands of characters that an educated Chinese knows, so a few hundred doesn’t do much good. Even so, it’s fun and helps with getting around some.

So far, China has been amazing. The amount of industry and innovation you see everywhere is beyond belief. This is a country that’s movin’ on up. Of course, everything is being spruced up for the Olympics and there’s plenty of poverty around, but the message that comes through loud and clear is that people are working their way up.

I’ve taken a bunch of pictures. You’ll find them all in my photo album for WWW2008.

April 18, 2008

Following Up on MacBook Pro Memory and Freezing

Almost two weeks ago, I wrote that I suspected that a memory issue was causing my MacBook Pro stability issues. I bought a new 2Gb memory stick ($70) and haven’t a single problem with my MBP freezing. Maybe the old memory was bad, maybe it just wasn’t working well with the MBP (memory can be finicky), or maybe it was running hot and causing a thermal problem. I don’t know. But for now, replacing a single memory stick seems to have solved the problem.

Starting a High Tech Business: Getting Five Clients

I’m starting a new business called Kynetx. As I go through some of the things I do, I’m planning to blog them. The whole series will be here. This is the thirteenth installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way—if so, please let me know!

Sooner or later when you’re starting a new venture, you need more money than you can raise with your credit card, a second mortgage, or selling your plane. Maybe you’re tapped out personally and need to start taking a salary or maybe you need to hire help.

Whatever the reason, raising money is not very fun. Let’s face it: you didn’t start a business to raise money. You started a business because you saw a problem, figured out a solution, and you’re passionate that your solution is going to change the world. Nothing is worse than weeks or months of meetings and legal work when you’d rather be creating.

I see three solutions to getting more money:

Get more clients: the is “customer funded” development
Extend your runway with friends and family or angel money
Go to a traditional venture capital firm

I’ll admit upfront: I’m no expert. I’ve been around a lot of enterprises raising money, but never done it myself. I’ve always had the luxury having someone else do that part while I kept coding and solving client problems. Not this time.

Clearly option (1) is the best—if you can do it. But most startups reach a point where an infusion of cash can lead to more growth and better client service than you can reach with just customer money. If they last long enough, most end up at option (3) sooner or later.

So, the real question is when’s the right time. Everything I know tells me that the right time is after you have traction, including at least a few good clients. You have to work to that point, either self funded or with a healthy dose of money from option (2). In parallel, you have to plan for option (1) in case the funding never happens. Pursuing options (1) and (3) in parallel—with all the energy you have—is all you can do. Option (2) is the safety value to extend runway.

At Kynetx we’ve focused our thinking with one simple question: what do we have to do to get five clients. Why five? No special reason. But thinking about the answer to that question—in everything from sales to infrastructure to customer service—gives special clarity in most prioritization questions. That’s vital in a startup where there’s always more to do than you have time for.

The good news is that if you work toward that goal, then you’ll be aggressively pursuing option (1) while preparing in the best way for option (3). Heck, if you can establish that kind of traction, the VC’s might start calling you and wouldn’t that be a great position to be in?

April 17, 2008

Google App Engine at the CTO Breakfast

Not Getting Things Done
(click to enlarge)

There was a pretty big crowd at this morning’s CTO Breakfast. Sam Curran had spent some time building an application on Google App Engine, so we had him demo his app and show us the code.

Overall, Google Apps looks like a very nice piece of infrastructure for building Web applications. The database integration with Big Table and Google’s authentication platform add some good tools for quickly building applications.

We got into a pretty large discussion of the pros and cons of Google Apps, Amazon Web services, dedicated hosting, and so on. None of these services are directly competitive. They’re complimentary in many respects. You could imagine many applications that would make use of all of them.

Speaking of Sam’s application: a few days ago, I mentioned to Sam, Bryant and Devlin, that I liked putting things on lists because then I could get them out of my mind and if I lost the list, I never had to do them. A guilt-free way of not getting things done. The problem with online todo lists is they don’t forget. I hate that! Sam picked up on that for his app and created a task list for people consumed with the guilt of unfinished tasks: Not Getting Things Done. Just put your tasks on the list and forget about them!

April 15, 2008

Utah CTO Breakfast This Thursday

It’s time for another Utah CTO Breakfast. This Thursday at 8am at the Novell cafeteria (building G). We’re a little early this month due to my imminent trip to China. Please bring any topics that have struck your fancy this month.

All are invited—the only entrance requirement is an interest in high-tech companies and products.

Here’s a schedule of future events:

Apr 17 (Thursday)
May 30 (Friday)
June 27 (Friday)
July 18 (Friday)
No breakfast in August
Sept 25 (Friday)

I have created a Google Calendar with dates for the CTO breakfast that you can subscribe to.

Or if you’d rather subscribe from iCal or Outlook, here’s the iCalendar link.

April 14, 2008

NewsGang Fantasies: The Dream Team

I enjoy the News Gang, The Gang, the Gillmor Gang, or whatever it’s called. Actually, I think Steve’s starting to call it all the Gillmor Gang again and that’s good. That’s the right name and brand for Steve’s podcasts. I usually listen to the Gang, as I can, while I’m driving.

There’s quite a flow and I can’t listen to them all (after all, I have all the IT Conversations stuff to listen to). So, I usually just pull up the latest. Today that was Friday’s show.

I found myself laughing out loud as it devolved from a discussion of Shel Israel and his puppet alter ego to a liberal fantasy where Cheney and Rumsfeld are tried for war crimes by President Obama. That wasn’t enough, in this flight of fancy, Hillary is the veep, Bill is the Secretary of State and both Kerry and Dukakis (yeah, him) are given cabinet posts. Not sure how Mondale fell out of favor, but he didn’t get a mention that I heard.

What really cracked me up however was someone’s comment that this would be awesome. Hillary could do health care, Bill could do foreign policy and Obama could do….then there was a long pause. The speaker couldn’t find a role for Obama. I guess he can make speeches, exhorting them all to have hope and work for change.

The Democrats always seem to find ways to lose elections. This conversation was an indication why. Do they really not understand why the nation rejected people like Dukakis and Kerry? Are they so blind to that that they would seriously consider them part of the dream team? Yes. They are.

Between Obama and McCain, I’m actually split. I’m sure I wouldn’t like many of Obama’s policies, but I relate to him more generationally and sometimes that makes a bigger difference than politics. But if I had any inkling that any one of the people mentioned in the “dream team” were going to be part of the cabinet, he’d never get my vote and I think that’s true of many. Hillary, even as veep, is poison to the Democratic ticket. Don’t walk—run!

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