Engineering, Product Marketing and Program Management
This review of the components of Amazon Web Services is a must “listen” for anyone interested in how to quickly deploy a service without having to make a huge investment in infrastructure… Amazon has done it for you…
Jeff Barr, Senior Manager, Web Services Evangelism at Amazon.com is interviewed by Phil Windley and others for Phil’s personal podcast, “Technometria”. A great listen, right on the page noted in the link and with further links for more detailed reading.
As some of you might know, I often write about technology topics in Telecommunications or Electrical Engineering. Today, however, I thought it important to pick a slightly different slant…
This weekend, I was listening to my backlog of podcasts and included in what I listened to were two different podcasts forTechNation where
In both cases, as I’m hearing and reading many other articles on diverse topics, it may be because our country doesn’t support the basic science research enough. For example, in the latter podcast, the point was made that there is a mountain of data out of the human genomics project that really needs detailed analysis; e.g. we know what a gene does, what we don’t know is exactly how it does it. Or considered another way, the genes that a human shares with a mouse is really a high percentage, something approaching 98%+, but what makes the difference between the human and the mouse is when and how the gene does it’s job.
Without interested people, without post-doc programs to provide research topics, … well, would you work in a field that is apparently drying up? But, it’s not really drying up, other countries, like Korea, China, and Australia have tremendous programs for this sort of thing. We are giving our best and brightest lost of reasons to leave this country.
The lack of sensible policy at the federal level, the lack of proper funding, in cross-disciplined approaches, to projects that are going to benefit us all, … well, I fear for the future (next couple of decades)…
You might say this isn’t important, but you’d be missing the point. The direct investment that DARPA, NASA, and other agencies had with science and technology research provided some glamour for the space program stuff of the 60’s, but it also lead to communications satellites and other mundane things like cellular telephone networks and devices.
Some like to say that Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise “invented” the cell phone, because of the use of the communicator on each Star Trek episode, but the fact of the matter was that the imagination of a whole generation was sparked, because of the believability of those episodes, and a market demand (for cell phone technology) was later satisfied, not only by companies trying to make money, but by a whole generation of engineering and scientific students that brought a passion to creating not only the mobile phone technologies we take for granted today, but the internet, the progress toward improvements in the cancer situation (many people can live out their lives today in remission, whereas 20 – 30 years ago, cancer was a death sentence) and countless other technologies we so easily take for granted.
We need to continue to improve upon this situation. Can you imagine a world without Diabetes? Did you know, we stand on the brink of figuring out how to accomplish this? This isn’t a would it be nice thing to do, there are huge costs in both medical support and human suffering associated with just this one disease. Make the investment – reap huge benefits; just like we did in mobile phone and internet technologies.
I’d like to ask you today, to write your congressman, tell them this is important to us, as a country, to change this situation. Invest in science. It doesn’t have to be preachy, it doesn’t have to any more than a 1-2 minute phone call or a 1 paragraph email, but do something to be part of the solution to change from an almost anti-science policy to one where, similar to the 60’s, we are on the road to great things.
Just saw (via Reuters) that Sunrocket appears to have closed down.
Recently, I posted about the perils of IP and the US Patent office, and Vonage was still holding on.
Hype has to be balanced with flawless execution, which is certainly a hard thing to do. If you have more money, you can weather some large mistakes. We’ll have to see what the news is as this story develops, certainly at this early stage almost anything could be “blamed” for what has happened to Sunrocket. The Truth will probably take some time to come out.
According to The Business VoIP Report, DECT technology is now shipping from Siemens.
Siemens has begun shipping to the U.S. a variety of cordless phones built around the Digital Enhanced Cordless Telephony (DECT) standards. The new Gigaset models include the S450 IP and SX762 WLAN DSL gateway. While DECT phones have been on the European market for over 10 years, the new models represent the first DECT devices Siemens has brought to the U.S. The line includes both IP and non-IP devices, and brings a wide variety of new features and feature-delivery mechanisms to the U.S. market.
Noting other news sources earlier, I had written about this interesting trend (about 8 months ago) in which a European technology innovation was finally getting to our shores after 10 years of maturity. Actually, some early Gigasets where able to be purchased back then, so with a little more fanfare, we have a DECT device offering that is being broadened.
I really, really love the web.
Just about any resource you’d like to find is there, and predictably, someone else will show you the way to find it. In this case, Marc Andreessen, yes that Marc Andreessen.
Link here- Essential HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, and miscellaneous cheatsheets
I was looking for some other piece of information, but stumbled, instead, upon this gem of a film from 7 years ago.
This film, produced in 2000, was 3 minutes long, took 4 months to make, before the kinds of film making tools that are available today. Still, this work, rivaled what the major motion picture studios could produce.
Excellent story about the Space Station astronaut’s problems after the Columbia Disaster
Tech Nation
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1124.html
from GigaVox,
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with NASA’s Christopher Jones, the Director for Solar System Exploration, about the hair raising return to earth of the astronauts left aboard the International Space Station after the Columbia disaster.
I’m a little behind on my podcast listening, but I caught one just this weekend, The Kojo Nnamdi Show, Tech Tuesday, is a technology review radio show, which is recorded and available for the public as a podcast or a web download. Often, his shows depict the social aspects of technology and how society shapes technology.
A typical Tech Tuesday always includes the political or social implications of any new innovation, and explores the unexpected ways in which change creeps (or steam rolls) into our lives.
This particular show, from 5/22, had a few guests on the program, one gentleman from India and his efforts to bring internet to the public in less than metro areas of India, via wireless internet kiosks (not your typical internet access) for the farmer to provide agricultural product pricing, access to government services, for example… A second man talked about his company’s efforts in Cambodia, to bring a higher class of work to people there, via simple data entry jobs, since the work can be outsourced practically anywhere now…
This piece should remind us that our view of the “internet” resource isn’t necessarily the only one. Even mobile phone technology can be deployed differently in the 3rd world and allow different types of “applications” to be deployed. As an example, forget the “near” 100% coverage we have here in the U.S., think instead about coverage that might be “good enough” – and coupled with lower infrastructure costs as technology has improved, and you have a fixed-wireless phone system that doesn’t rely on mobility so much, but does indeed provide basic telephone service to a rural area, since to provide “real” fixed telephone service, with fiber, copper wires, and traditional telco switches is just too costly, indeed it’s unreasonable to consider in this environment.
Myself, I’m reminded about a deployment of SMS related technology I did for my last company. The scene: an African tribal herdsman. The problem: Moving his herd of cattle from one place to another. Why? Because of hoof and mouth disease, all cattle movement is strictly controlled by the government. The herdsman has to go to a government office, fill out some paperwork, come back the next day for his permit to go from point A to point B with his cattle.
These native African herdsmen are fiercely independent, often they’d rather distrust the government, but the hoof and mouth disease problem is endemic in parts of Africa and the situation does need to be improved upon.
The solution? My company worked with one of the local mobile phone companies to deploy an SMS based forms system that interconnected the farmer with the government. The technology was off the shelf web servers, so that “SMS applications” could be deployed with simple HTML tags in the basic web pages of a web app that already existed. What we added was a network based browser that rendered this HTML, on one side, and interfaced to the mobile provider’s SMS gateways. The special HTML tags identified specifically the text that was meaningful in the SMS messages, whereas the remaining text would be worthwhile to the typical computer screen.
So, how did this all work? Like this…
So, the government gets to monitor herd movement within their country, the herdsman didn’t have to go to any government office, he simply used a tool he already had (his mobile phone). Even the guards didn’t have any paperwork to fill-out and submit. Everyone makes out for the better.
The interesting thing is this was deployed about 10 years ago, with existing SMS technology. Today, people might be thinking about web browsers in the phones, and a traditional web app or a mobilized web app, but the point is – for this service, we used an existing web app, modified HTML slightly, and inserted our network server, which
No “special” phones or WAP browsers, just plain ole text msging.
Now don’t ask me about how the herdsman would charge his phone, while I suspect he had a solar charger, I never did find that out for sure.
I can’t remember where I read this, but now that VoIP is a pretty common technology offering and that more and more of the common man is aware of what it is and what it does, it’s fair that new terms are coming to the forefront…
Nothing really new here as far as content, these security issues have been discussed before, what’s new is the “catchy” terms themselves.
Catching the listener feedback for Technorama show 170, timezones and watches, well – it made me think about Richard Sears, who founded, with Alvah Roebuck, the whole Sears, Roebuck & Company mail order catalog industry.
Richard Sears was a station agent for the Railroad that 
ran through North Redwood, MN, not far from where I grew up. In the 1880’s, when he was in his 20’s, he was intrigued with the idea of products manufactured in one part of the country and sold (and delivered) to people in another part of the country. After all, his job as a station agent was somewhat in a value chain similar to this, in that farmers brought their grain to the railroad (no elevator companies existed right next to the railroad at that time; the grainery elevator’s eventual purpose was to “cache” the grain for bulk transport at a later time). Among other things, Sears helped to get that grain shipped by rail to the mill, where it was processed into other grain products, like flour and cereals.
Many give him credit for observing other products being shipped via rail, through his station, and him getting the idea that if people could look at a product on a piece of paper, order it, have it delivered to them, well then such a company could revolutionize commerce. While this is somewhat true in hindsight, my father, who also was a small businessman inMinnesota, often talked about stories his grandmother had talked about when Richard Sears was doing his “thing” a few miles to the north of where I grew up.
Farmers had to get their harvested grain to the railroad, where someone loaded it onto a railroad car, and off it went. Railroads ran on a schedule, farmers ran by the sun, and as this was before cars/trucks; grain arrived via horse drawn cart. Sears had seen companies that were trying to sell pocket watches to the stores along the railway line, but the problem he was trying to solve was making sure the farmers got their grain to the railroad station on time. These watches were the answer, but he couldn’t afford any inventory, no money… so he got this idea of putting pictures of watches, along with a marked up price, in a loose leaf sort of book, which he planned to show to the farmers when they came to the station.
About this same time, a wholesaler had shipped an un-ordered consignment of pocket watches to a local retailer. This was a common practice at the time; wholesalers would then “offer” to sell the goods to a local retailer at a lower price, rather than have the goods shipped back. In this particular case, the retailer refused the entire consignment of pocket watches and Sears stepped in, offering to sell the watches for the wholesaler, but without having to pay for the consignment up-front.
Since he was a railroad station agent and when all the watches were sold, the farmers would look at his pictures of watches, trust him with taking an order, give him the money for the pocket watch, which he, in turn, used to purchase the watches, which were delivered by the railroad to him, and he delivered to the farmer.
He pocketed a profit of about $5,000 (good money at the time) from this consignment business and had these “orders” for more. Eventually, he moved to Minneapolis to start his company, which initially was putting advertisements in farm publications and ultimately developed a standalone publication, the Sears, Roebuck & Company catalog itself.
During this time, merchandising transactions in the United Stateswere very risky (think unscrupulous sellers trying to fleece prospective buyers, ala the eBay issue of today). Bartering was the normal transaction and banks were just starting to come to rural parts of the country to handle larger money transaction exchanges (as escrow services do today).
I think that because of his railroad association, the “Eureka moment” of acting as the middle man between the watch maker and the farmer, and solving a common problem between the railroad and the farmer, this was the impetus for the mail order business becoming launched, indeed almost all commerce where money changes hands first, and goods later. The “deferred transaction” in commerce, where there is a time delay between money and merchandise changing hands, I believe started with Sears. (Of course, the refused consignment and his success at selling those pocket watches first, helped greatly because it gave him a financial “seed”.) I have never heard of an earlier example of the deferred transaction model, and I have looked. As you probably know, Sears, Roebuck & Company eventually sold just about everything, including houses.
The famous Sears guarantee and a Cash-On-Delivery option helped to sway those who might be suspicious of unscrupulous merchants. Reputation still counts, after all… Indeed, Sears hired Roebuck at the very beginning in order to repair watches (so the guarantee could be met). Roebuck, of course, later became one of the company founders.
And all this from watches, being on-time, and the railroad.