20061029

LEDs are the future of lighting

To many of you, this is probably obvious by now. I'm convinced that, in the not too distant future, all lights will be LED (or some similar semiconductor based) lights. We finally have come to a point where LEDs can be manufactured in white or near-white variants, and that was the big roadblock.

The advantages are many. LEDs are incredibly robust, with MTBFs (mean-time between failure) in the 20,000 hr. range. That means 20 YEARS of average use! Further, LEDs consume much less power than incandescants, and even less than those low-power flourescents we all thought would take over the world a few years back. Oh, well, that never really happened, did it?

Wanna try out this new frontier of lighting easily and cheaply? Then get some LED-based night lights. These little cuties can be had for around $4 apiece. Check out this one offered through one of my favorite online sellers, Amazon:


You can get these at most hardware stores like Home Depot also. The cool thing about going with an LED nightlight is that you'll probably never have to replace it! Yep, since they plug into the wall, there are no batteries, and the photocell and LED will last virtually forever. You'll probably move or die before needing to replace this bugger (now that's a wierd thought).

What's really wierd is the notion that, in a few years, ALL your lights could be like this! Imagine never replacing a light bulb!

The really interesting thing is:

No matter how many of these "timesavers" we seem to impliment in our dailiy lives, we remain way too busy...figure that one out and then we'll have something to discuss.

20061020

Why buy a KRZR ?



I recently decided to buy a new cell phone. Like most folks, I wanted something as small as possible. I wanted a really good phone. Something that was tested and used by a lot of folks. Buying the latest and greatest tech is the best way to be disappointed.

I had decided for a while now to buy a RAZR. They've been out since 2004, and MOT has sold millions of them. They work great as phones, and are still one of the coolest looking designs out there.

Then, right before I decided to make the purchase, MOT came out with the KRZR. This phone was originally hailed as being the "latest and greatest" and even smaller than the RAZR. What a dilemma.

After checking out both phones, I decided to get a RAZR. I learned through several reviews that the KRZR is essentially a repackaged RAZR V3m, so from a functional standpoint there was very little difference. That left only the size metric to consider. I REALLY wanted a SMALL phone.

So how much smaller is the KRZR? Well, here are the facts:


RAZR: 14mm x 53mm x 99mm which gives a total volume of 73,458 cubic millimeters







KRZR: 16mm x 42mm x 103mm which gives a total volume of
69,216 cubic millimeters




--> This implies the KRZR is 4,242 cubic millimeters smaller than the RAZR, which represents a mere 5.77% reduction in volume.

So, let's review:

1. KRZR is the same phone internally as the RAZR V3m.
2. KRZR is 4mm longer and 2mm thicker than the RAZR.
3. KRZR is only less than 6% smaller in overall volume.
4. KRZR costs at least $100 more!

Therefore, I feel that unless you HAVE to own the "latest and greatest", or you need a skinnier (albeit longer and thicker) version of the RAZR V3m, seems like a no-brainer.

RAZR still has legs!

I've had the phone for over two weeks, and think it's great!

20061009

Phone companies - from Ma Bell to God Awfull...

Back in the day, you did not have any "choice". Ma Bell was the only option. You either dealt with her or had no phone service. As a result, the phone company had absolutely no motivation to make customers happy. You constantly got the run around for service. You felt frustrated, like you never got your money's worth. The "phone company" was the butt of many a late-night joke. You had no choice...you were "locked-in".

Well, we've come a heck of a long way in 30 years. Granted, now we have many different "phone companies" to choose from. But are they any different? Service is still a joke. I still feel very frustrated whenever I have to deal with them. Subsidies aside, I STILL do not feel like I get my money's worth. Instead of paying $20/mo for phone service like we did 20 years ago, we now have three bills from three different companies, and pay $100/mo for phone service. Factor in the fact that technology dramatically lowers the cost of electronics over time, and that is an amazing number. Somebody, somewhere, is making a TON of money on all of us.

Now, instead of feeling locked-in because there is only one phone company, I'm locked-in because, some fast-talking bottom-feeder salesman (who clearly works on commission and is spiffed by pushing certain phones over others) gets me to sign a 2-year "committment" with an outrageous "early termination fee".

I think it's incredibly convenient that all of their "satisfaction guarantees" expire way before you ever get a bill. That way, once you pick your jaw up off the floor, it's too late to do anything about it.

Thanks, deregulation. Some improvement. From "no-choice" to indentured servitude.

20061004

MIT Emerging Technology Conference MITETC - Day Two

MIT Emerging Technologies Conference
Thursday, Sept 28, 2006
Cambridge, MA

Day two of this conference was decidedly different than day one. While day one was comprised of more light-hearted, even optimisitc viewpoints about techy topics such as web services, online applications, how to define and nuture innovation, and what AOL is up to, day two was much more sobering.

The day started with an interesting, if not optimistic, talk from George M. Whitesides. George discussed the recent senate committee report on competitiveness in the U.S. Here are the high (uh, maybe low) lights:

  • The U.S. is now a net importer of high tech products
  • U.S. companies are now ranking lower with respect to high tech patents than ever before
  • U.S. students are now doing worse compared to their peers outside the U.S.
Recommendations given to deal with this reality include:

  1. Capital - increase teacher, student support, strengthen funding for basic research
  2. Labor - get the best teachers, increase teacher status and salaries
  3. Energy - clearly the most controversial recommendation, to create a DARPA-like organization whose goal was to fund advanced energy-saving research. Called "ARPA-E" by the committee, I can't for the life of me understand why this recommendation did not fare well. Seems we need to push and reward BIGTIME efforts to do amazing things among alternative-energy solutions. My cynical view: legislators are either too ignorant to know what to do with this organization should they create it, or they have been bought-off by existing energy interests to act this way.
My take is that we are and have been in a true innovation crisis in America. We only support incremental and/or piecemeal solutions that, while being cheap and attainable, are woefully inadequate. We will only achieve big when we think big. Seems all the big thinkers are dead. Incrementalism will never get us where we need to go.

Former VC Roger McNamee, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Elevation Partners

This guy was truly one of the best and most exciting speakers in the entire two-day event. He talked on almost any subject, and kept the audience engaged constantly. Here are some of his most notable quotes:

"People don't want software, they want outcomes."

"Technology will make a difference [at least first] through media."

Although the Internet has done a great job in aggregating information, it does not prioritize it effectively so people can easily get at what they want.

I totally agree with this one. In fact, now that any 13 year-0ld can create a web site, you can't really tell if someone is an expert (like me ;) ), or a nut-job (take your pick). This is why the Internet is the "great equalizer", or more appropriately, the "great medocre-maker". We truly need, as Roger says, to "move up the stack from 'information to wisdom' ".


Big issues with moving up the stack are tackling things like personalization, trust, and authority. We need to KNOW that the info we get is the best info, most relevant for our needs. In accordance with my comments earlier about incrementalizm, Roger states that:

"We are harvesting our national economy." -

This is exactly right. We are doing nothing to plan the great things of the future. We are merely milking the cash cow of the present for our own current needs, and to Hell with the future.

--> As if this was not enough to chew upon, the next panel was even more disturbing:

Panel Discussion on Global Warming

As I said in an earlier post, this discussion was really depressing. Here are the basics:

Once countries figure out the reality and danger of the global warming crisis, reducing carbon emissions will be THE central focus for investment in the future. There will be simply no alternatives. This was the premise put forth by a group of esteemed experts on the subject. All were in agreement as to the dire nature of this threat. Problem is, we only have between 10-20 years to act, and most countries are not convinced of the threat yet. They seem to think that, by the time we all figure this out, it will be essentially too late to do anything about it.

Since you need to stay below 500ppm of carbon atoms in the atmosphere to avoid an irreversible global catastrophe (their assertion), called a "tipping point", if we act too late we will not be able to avoid this. Apparently this is due to the fact that it takes 3000 years to get carbon out of the atmosphere once it gets in. All of this stuff is essentially cumulative, and we are already dangerously close to the limit.

IF you believe all this stuff..it's very scary indeed.

Next topic ended my day on a lighter, albeit more frustrating, note.

Panel discussion on DRM: "Making PCs safe for Hollywood"

Discussion of activities around the Trusted Computing Group's efforts to create HW and SW DRM that works. Newest version of this is called the AACS, for "Advanced Access Content System". This basically will allow a certain number of "managed copies" of an asset to exist simultaneously on different media with different devices, so one person can listen to music, say, on portable devices as well as PCs.

I believe that this DRM stuff is basically the music industries' attempt to "hold back the ocean". My opinion is that it will work, but we will all be made miserable in the process. I personally resent being made miserable in order to prevent something being done by a small minority of people. However, this is not the first time in history this has occurred, and it won't be the last.

That's it...all in all one of the most interesting and thought-provoking conferences I've attended in a while. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

20061003

MIT Emerging Technology Conference MITETC - Day One

Finally here are my highlight notes about this conference:

Last Wed and Thursday, Sept 27 and 28, 2006, I attended the MIT Emerging Technology Conference on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA. This two-day event brought speakers from around the world to discuss the key technologies that will impact our world. It's scope was broad, and the speakers were varied. The one thing they all had in common was a passion for key technologies of the day. Here are my recollections from Day One:

MIT Emerging Technologies Conference
Wednesday, Sept 27, 2006
Cambridge, MA

Keynote - Jeff Bezos - Chairman and Founder, Amazon

You can view the Jeff's entire keynote on video here.

Jeff talked about how Amazon is providing web services to developers. They are "eating their own dog food", by developing web services that they are using internally for the Amazon web site, and offering these services to developers for their own web applications. The fee structures are very appealing, with zero startup cost, and usage fees that are essentially linear, so small startups can start small with very little money, yet use the same services to scale to super large proportions with no changeovers required. Jeff calls this process one of commoditizing "undifferentiated heavy lifting", what Bezos calls "muck". Offered services:

1. Mechanical Turk - encoding human intelligence. Using humans to answer questions. This is like Microsoft Live QnA.

2. S3 - Simple Storage Service - web service that ASP can use to store data in the cloud. Redundant, 24/7 storage/backup. Smugmug uses S3 today. Cost: $0.15/GB/mo to store data.

3. EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud - web service that provides CPU cycles on a standard platform.

4. Amazon fulfillment services - just launched.

--> for more information. check out www.aws.amazon.com.

Bezos quote: "We make muck, so you don't have to."

another good quote from Bezos:

"In the future, the best applications will be a hybrid of client-side code and server-side code. "


John Miller, CEO, AOL

John gave an "OK" overview of the Internet industry, and focussed mainly on AOL's new video distribution business, ostensibly an effort to get in on the YouTube phenomena. His message was while consumption is being disaggregated by all these new web sites, the monetization of video and other media is actually being aggregated by a small number of companies. I guess John hopes that AOL will be one of them. After hearing his talk, I'm not so sure...

Panel discussion lead by David Faber of CNBC, with reps from CNET, Reuters, etc. - Interesting but not particularly ground-breaking discussion.

Panel discussion lead by the CTO of Motorola. Another (barely) interesting discussion about innovation in various types of companies. Some of the notable statements:

- Innovation - can it be taught? Interestingly the moderator stated at the end that the group "concluded" that yes, indeed, innovation can be taught. This is of course garbage, as the group clearly indicated that, although the basics of innovative processes can be presented/taught, and examples can be given, and innovation can be nurtured, this is just like any other talent. Some people have it, and some clearly don't. So in my opinion the entire question was a red herring (much like most of these panel questions, because they want to generate discussion, not necessarily answers).

- Behavior - You get what you measure and reward. If you want a certain outcome, you need to measure it and reward it effectively. I really agree with this one. Way too many times people wonder why they dont get something when they are not measuring/rewarding what they want!

- The most interesting panelist by far was Jay Walker - had many great comments. One of his best was:
"Leadership is like soul - it can get 10X output from 1X input." This guy really gets it.

Panel discussion - "Online Application Wars" - reps from Google, Salesforce.com, Amazon and two small ASP companies (37 signals, Goowi) discussing how online apps will fare in the future. Microsoft was invited to send a rep but did not. Interesting title since on nearly every topic, all the panelists were in violent agreement. It was interesting, but it would be nice to have such strong, articulate minds engaged in more controversial, passion-inducing topics of the day. Here is my quote of the day:

"Life is too short to talk about the things we all agree on..." - Tom Berarducci.

That's it for day one...

MIT Systems Engineering Conf - Sept 26, 2006

Finally getting around to blogging about the conferences I attended last week.

Last Tuesday, I attended the MIT Systems Engineering conference at the MIT media lab. Billed as essentially a "supply chain" conference, it seemed like it might be a royal yawn. Boy was I wrong! I never , ever saw engineering and supply chain issues brought more alive. The speakers were dynamic, and kept the topics interesting and relevant. Many of the issues were broadened to encompass general business, and even life, issues.

Here are the nuggets I mined from the day's events:

Yossi Sheffi - Author of The Resilient Enterprise.

www.theresiliententerprise.com

- winner of the "best quote of the day" award:

" 'A' people hire 'A' people, but 'B' people hire 'C' people." - Awesome.

and another good one:

"Focus on those few aspects of your products that your customers find most valuable, and [commoditize] the rest." - great advise for all of the engineers out there...

Professor Levenson -

"Safety is an emergent property." - This can be of course extended to almost anything. The key point here is that we need to strive in our systems, product designs, etc. to create "emergent properties" that are more than the sum of the parts. This is where true value lies. A more contemporary example would be "Style is the emergent property of the iPOD." It seems bigger than the simple little music player itself. Very cool.


Professor Nightingale -

Book that invented the term "lean" was:

The Machine that Changed the world

...did not get to confirm this one.

Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld -

Lateral Alignment in Complex Systems - interesting talk about how to relate horizontally systems of vertically integrated organizations.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger -

"Highly Visual interactive interfaces" - discussed how we are now moving past the simple desktop metaphor into more graphical, interactive interfaces. "Second Life" was his example of something which is on the forefront of this initiative.

And last but certainly not least:

Dr. Michael Hammer -

www.hammerandco.com

- This guy was a riot. Basically talking about organizing the enterprise for the next century. I never thought a talk about organization could be so amusing, entertaining, and educational at the same time. His premise was that all the organizational metaphors we are using are based upon antiquated techniques which were invented a century ago. Instead of simple functional organization, we need end-end process organization. Very interesting stuff.

If you can ever hear this guy speak, go and see him!

That's it. All in all a very interesting day.