@NYC

Civilization Gets More Organized

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An internet pundit wrote a much linked to piece of punditry about how complexity overwhelmed the administrative powers of a few past civilizations, thereby leading to their eventual demise. Last night at a NY Tech Meetup I was feeling incredibly optimistic about the prospects of our own  society.

What’s one of the most vexing problem faced by many Manhattanites? Finding a cab would probably come in pretty close to the top—finding a cab in the rain, a little higher.

So I was starry eyed at a demo of a new iPhone app (which has received media attention recently) called CabSense.

Using GPS data collected by the  New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, AI-machine learning researchers were able to discern patterns in what I  always thought was a random walk.  The result was a mobile  app  that taps into this dataset  and reports back a nearby street corner where you are likeliest to get a cab.

CabsSense (brought to you by start-up Sense Networks) was one of several demos I witnessed last night that in my mind were all connected by a deeper theme.Continue reading

The Rack

iPad:Birth of New Device Genre

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I saw the iPad last night for the first time at Apple’s SoHo store in Manhattan. It is an amazing thing. A bit of futuristic Star Trek-level technology that found its way into the year 2010:  a large-size  tricorder with great video.  (And to think that Spock struggled with that mouseless gadget!).

I watched a few videos (smooth, fluid ), tried one of the book readers (seductive),  and was wowed by a  location-sensitive astronomy app called Star Walk.

It is not a smaller this or a larger that. I remember similar dismissive talk about mini-computers and personal computers. It’s a new genre of touch-sensitive, location-aware multimedia gagdets that will create its own uses—many that we can not even conceive of at this point. With the Epicurious app, I already see the beginnings of a whole new market of kitchen countertop  virtual cookbooks.  If they can just hook in speech rec….Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Pricing a Broadband Bit

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In 2008, Comcast, my internet service provider, instituted broadband caps, setting a  250 Giga byte monthly limit. Time Warner started a trial program that year as well, which has since become standard practice in more cities (Rochester, Greensboro, San Antonio).

Well, how do I do know how much I’m using, so I don’t go over the cap and face the consequences?

Comcast solved that problem (at least in my area)  last week with a usage meter. I now know that I consumed 10 Gigabits last month, which works out in my situation to over $6/Gb.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Meanwhile Back at the Enterprise

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I’ve been so focused on apps and trends outside of the office space that I thought I’d have a difficult time grokking the keynote speeches at  Voicecon 2010.   VoiceCon (now renamed to Enterprise Connect) is the place where business communication vendors announce their visions and initiatives for the coming year.

I’m happy to be misinformed in this case. Consumer-grade social media, open software,  and smartphone-like apps—areas I’ve been immersed in the last few weeks—are pretty much pre-requisites to enterprise communications coursework.  To varying degrees, Siemens, Avaya, Cisco, and Microsoft acknowledge, promote, and  support  micro-blogging, location information, transcription services, SIP, cloud-based software, and slicker interaces in their wares.

I took a quick tour through the recorded videos of the presentations given by Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, and Microsoft. A few impressions after the jump.Continue reading

@NYC

A Little More Fun With Twilio

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I’m been trying to keep up with multiple stories (Sprint-Clearwire “4G”,  Harbinger Capital’s nationwide LTE network , iPad) while running around tending other assignments.  No, I don’t have much of a smartphone,  more of a Bronze-age artifact that came with my Verizon plan.  So how do I monitor my RSS feeds  using my basic cell phone when I’m away from desk?

My only requirement was that I won’t compromise my core philosophy of  applying minimal programming effort to the task at hand. I’m thankful to be living in the right era to help me stay true to my beliefs: they’re so many great software components and productivity  tools available that it’s possible to glue together off-the-shelf parts to produce a useful digital time-saver with minimal perspiration.

As you know from a previous post, I’m excited about Twilio’s VoiceXML-lite hosting service. I will also reveal for the first time my love for a visual-oriented RSS mashup tool from Yahoo, called Pipes.

I just needed to glue a simple Pipes workflow to a little bit of PHP that calls Twilio’s SMS service and I’d have a poor man’s news notifier. Continue reading

Quote of the Day

We’re going to roll out something that we think is appropriate not just for Twitter users but also for the ecosystem. When we develop this …

Archaic Telecom

Sprint 4G is Spelled W I M A X

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Image from Gizmodo

I am very  excited about the new Sprint 4G phone revealed at CTIA 2010: a mashup of Android OS-CDMA-WiFi-WiMAX and encased in an HTC Evo package (see  more sexy pictures here). It should be available this summer.

Why does the phone earn the 4G signifier? Not sure. This smartphone’s high-speed data bits pass through Clearwire-Sprint’s wireless data network (voice is still CDMA), which  is  based on more of a 3G standard, 802.16   or WiMAX.Continue reading

Quote of the Day

UTOPIA is a good candidate to partner with Google in the new project and to bring the experiment to well-prepped ground. UTOPIA has successfully pursued …

Archaic Telecom

The Road to UTOPIA

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In the National Broadband Plan, there is hardly any mention of a wholesale or “unbundled” model of fiber-to-the-home. That’s unfortunate. There are many examples of successful deployments of fiber in which the physical part is built by the public sector (or through public-private partnerships), with private providers stepping in to resell access for voice, video, and data at the retail level. For a nitty-gritty description of one European city’s experience laying fiber under cobblestones and into canals,  you can read about Amsterdam’s CityNet project, written by the company’s CEO.

The US does have many open access projects in which municipalities in underserved areas take the lead in financing fiber’s significant sunk costs.  There’s one deployment that stands out, linking together over 16 cities in Utah and serving about 40,000 households. It’s called the Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency, which acronymized becomes UTOPIA.Continue reading

The Rack

Is CrowdFlower the Future of Work?

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About two years ago while researching a blog post on crowdsourcing, I discovered Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. As a  crowdsourced labor solution, the Turk completely turns around the relationship between computers and people.  Instead of asking silicon to perform complex pattern matching (finding words or concepts in text documents), speech recognition (transcription), or image processing (identifying road signs in photos), why not have software call out for help? That is, we the humans become non-software subroutines that tap into our unique biological processing engines especially suited for CPU-stumping tasks.

Other companies have followed suit delivering what are essentially systems to manage piece-meal work for conceptually intensive tasks.  CrowdFlower is one of them.  They’ve taken the “labor in the cloud” model one step further.Continue reading

The Rack

Freescale's $200 Tablet Supports Multiple OSes

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At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Freescale was showing off what its chips can do. Freescale’s 7″ tablet reference architecture was meant to inspire manufacturers. And to my eyes, I think they’ll generate lots of interest. Since CES, they’ve added Chromium and Android OS to the line-up— at CES, they had a Linux mock-up. The expected retail price for a  Freescale gadget is in the  $200 to $250 range. Check out the demo after the jump.

Updated 3/23/2010: Read James Surowiecki’s article on why low-end (FreeScale-based) and high-end tablets (iPad) will dominate the market.
 Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

National Broadband Plan Has Goal to Study Harder

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That’s not an Onion headline. But after perusing a few key sections of the officially released National Broadband Plan I learned that the FCC recommendations involve either more study or vague posturings on important policy debates that have been raging since dawn of time: broadening the universal service fund (USF) to include VoIP carriers (see weakly worded Recommendation 8.10), wholesale access and pricing (see tepid Recommendation 4.7), openness of mobile devices (no recommendations that I can find), and the overall question of whether we have a competitive broadband market (for what it’s worth, Recommendation 4.2).