Christopher Herot's Weblog

WebInno16

Tuesday night, the Boston Web Innovators Group held their 16th event at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge.  Like the previous events, a standing-room-only crowd watched brief demonstrations from local startups and stayed to schmooze.  (Who says we don't have a vibrant entrepreneurial community in Boston?)

The most popular of the ""main dish" demonstrations was SpotScout - a web and mobile application for finding parking spaces in the city, whether they be in a garage or on the street.   One of the more interesting and controversial features of the service is the ability of someone currently occupying an on-street space to sell it to another subscriber.  That triggered a comment from the audience that such a transaction would be illegal in New York.  SpotScout CEO Andrew      Rollert replied that they weren't really selling the space but merely the information about when the current occupant planned to depart.  Of course that begs the question about how to prevent some other driver from grabbing the same spot.

The New York City Traffic Rules and Regulations actually prohibits reserving the spot:

4-08(n)(7) Unofficial reserving of parking space. It shall be unlawful for any person to
reserve or attempt to reserve a parking space, or prevent any vehicle from
parking on a public street through his/her presence in the roadway, the use of
hand-signals, or by placing any box, can, crate, hand-cart, dolly or any other
device, including unauthorized pavement, curb or street markings or signs in the
roadway.

So as long as the seller waited inconspicuously until the buyer showed up, there wouldn't be a problem, except maybe in San Francisco where people have been stabbed for saving a space.  In any event, there is no such regulation in Boston, where the mayor tried unsuccessfully to discourage the dubious tradition of placing lawn chairs and other objects in parking spaces once they are shoveled out.

Showing in the back of the room as one of the "side dishes" was MyHappyPlanet which matches up people around the world who want to practice their language skills.  Founder Karen Ong, who is finishing up her last semester at the Harvard Business School said they already have 200,000 subscribers.  Very impressive.

After the demos I had a chance to chat with Jay Batson whose recently started Acquia, Inc. with funding from North Bridge and Sigma promises to do for Drupal what Red Hat did for Linux.  He's hiring.

I also met Greg Boesel of Swaptree.  They've been around for about 18 months and have a web site where you can swap stuff.  I found I could exchange my copy of Stephen Colbert's recent book for 20,328 other items, such as the Borat DVD or the Beatle's Revolver album.   For a site that needs to do that much database processing it's very responsive - apparently written in .NET.

The next WebInno is April 2.

Flash Audio & The Flash Media Server

Much has been written about the relative merits of Adobe Flash vs. Javascript for building rich internet applications, but there is one  area where Flash is uniquely capable, which is the ability to send and receive audio and video without requiring any download, plug-in, or software installation.

Most people know Flash as the technology behind those often annoying animated intros on many Web sites.  Anyone who has right-clicked on a video in Youtube, Comedy Central or CNN, also knows Flash as the ubiquitous video player which has all but replaced Apple Quicktime, Microsoft' Windows Media Player, and RealNetworks RealPlayer for playing video from Web page.  What most people don't know is that the same Flash Player also has built-in codecs to allow sending audio as well as receiving it.  This is the technology used in Adobe Acrobat Connect, Convoq ASAP, AOL Userplane, and many others to enable two-way and multi-point audio and video conferencing.

Adobe has a very clever monetization strategy.  They give away the Flash Player, which has made it ubiquitous, but in order to enable two way a/v one must purchase the Flash Media Server (FMS).  FMS comes in three flavors:

• Streaming ($995)
• Interactive ($4500)
• Developer (free)

The Streaming edition allows the Flash Player on the client to connect to either of two Adobe-provided streaming applications on the server.  One of those applications allows streaming of pre-recorded video files and the other streams live video from the free Flash Media Encoder 2 or another Flash Player.  The Encoder can encode video using the On2 VP6 codec and audio using MP3.  The Flash player is restricted to the older Sorenson Squeeze video and the Nellymoser Asao audio codecs.  The latter is optimized for 8 kHz sampling, which makes it very efficient for voice but not so good for music.  What all this means is that a developer can set up a Flash Media Streaming Server and start streaming video right away with one of the applications that comes in the box, or use Adobe Flex to play the same video embedded in an application.  WIth the Flash Media Interactive Server, the developer can write applications which run on the server that authenticate connection requests, communicate with any other back-end logic by sending and receiving XML documents, and provide the plumbing to connect audio and video from one end-user to another.

In addition to streaming audio and video, and Flash Media Server provides a number of other conveniences:

• Shared Objects - a mechanism for synchronizing data among multiple clients and servers.  Whenever an application makes a change in one place, it is automatically available everywhere else - even across a network.
• Robust Connections - the Flash Player prefers to connect to the Flash Media Server using Adobe's proprietary RTMP protocol over port 1935, but it contains built in code to try RTMP over ports 80 and 443, to tunnel RTMP over HTTP on port 80, and to send it via SSL over port 443.  This mechanism can save you a lot of work if your users are behind a corporate firewall or even a proxy server doing stateful packet inspection.  This is very popular with end users but may earn some scowls from their IT security people who are paid to keep those same end users from trying new software.
• True cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.  Remember Write Once, Run Anywhere?  Sun registered it as a trademark in 2001, but Flash is the only platform that delivers that promise for audio and video.
• High performance.  Since FMS doesn't do any processing of the streams but merely provides the plumbing, a single server can handle thousands of simultaneous streams.

In spite of all the above mentioned advantages, Flash is not the perfect solution.  In order to keep the Flash player small and the Flash Media Server throughput high, Adobe made a number of compromises that leave it at a disadvantage over more specialized solutions such as Skype:

• Audio and video are carried over TCP and not UDP.  TCP is designed to reliably deliver high volumes of data traveling in one direction, such as file transfers.  It also works reasonably well for web browsing since the user spends more time reading the page than interacting with the server.  It evens works just fine for audio and video if you have a high quality network connection.  Thus, you can put together a quick demo of videoconferencing application and show it to your management, customers, or investors in your conference room.  When you start shipping to customers whose "Broadband Internet" is a flaky DSL connection or an overloaded cable modem you'll get complaints that the audio drops out or gets delayed, sometimes for tens of seconds.  What's happening is that the connection is dropping packets.  When they eventually get resent they arrive all at once, resulting in silence followed by delays.  This is the reason Skype and various SIP softphones use UDP and do their own real-time flow control.  Fortunately, Adobe provides a lot of tools for monitoring and tweaking the buffering and bandwidth, but using them requires expertise and it will never be as good as Skype.
• No packet-loss makeup.  One of the things that makes Skype sound so good is the software they licensed from GIPS to fill in for missing audio packets.  They figured out if an audio packet gets lost, it's better to throw it away and make up some plausible sound than to have the speaker go silent and then have the sound show up later.
• No acoustic echo cancellation.  Windows has some really excellent built-in signal processing on the microphone input that subtract the signal previously sent to the speaker.  WIthout this, you speak into the microphone, your voice comes out of the speaker at the far end, it goes into the microphone at the far end and gets sent back to your ear.  Since the delay can be anywhere from 100 msec to several seconds, it can be very distracting.  Adobe chose not to take advantage of this feature of Windows, presumable for cross-platform compatibility.  Instead, they offer a simpler solution which merely cuts the microphone gain when there is output present at the speaker.  The result is that you really need to encourage your users to wear a headset.
• No processing at the server.  This approach makes for a very efficient server, but at the expense of sending lots of data to the client.  Each audio stream is sent unaltered to all of the subscribers to that stream.  What this means is that if you have five people in a meeting, and they all have open microphones, each five audio stream go up to the server and twenty come down, four streams to each of the five participants.  This is not as bad as it sounds, since for usability reasons you don't really want more than five or so people talking at once, but you need to account for the bandwidth.
• Privacy and Security.  The good news is that by being very careful about privacy and security, Adobe has earned a position of trust whereby most users will install the Flash Player and run Flash applications without worry.  The bad news is that Flash applications have only limited access to the local file system and constrained access to devices.  One particularly annoying feature is the "privacy dialog" which pops up and asks the user if he or she really wants to let your application use the microphone or camera.  Not a big deal, but it can be confusing and is a reminder to your users that this is not a native application.
• No access to the stream.  Adobe's a/v model is very simple.  You publish a stream by sending a camera, microphone or a file to it.  You subscribe to a stream by directing it to the screen or a speaker.  The Flash Media Interactive Server does provide a method for recording streams, but there is no way to get your hands on the actual data.

In summary, the Flash Player and Flash Media Server provide a way to build the most advanced cross-platform applications that can be delivered without requiring the user to download or install anything.  You can build quite robust and scalable applications for playing stored media and broadcasting live streams.  Interactive applications that depend on low-latency audio will not perform as well as their native counterparts but can be done if you are attentive to the details and aware of the limitations.

Twitter Broken

First the connection to AIM went away and now this.

Why Expensive Wine Tastes Better

Economists Hilke Plassmann, Baba Shiv, Antonio Rangel, and psychologist John O'Doherty have come up with one explanation for why that bottle of Opus One tastes better than the usual Mondavi Cabernet: knowing the wine is expensive increases the activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and the rostral anterior cortex (rACC), the areas of the brain that experience pleasure.  In a recently published paper, Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness, they describe an experiment in which they put 11 Caltech graduate students in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and gave them five samples of Cabernet Sauvignon to taste.  They were told that the purpose of the study was to measure the effects of degustation time on perceived flavors.  Unknown to the students, there were really only three wines, with two of them being offered twice at different prices ($5 became $45 and $10 became $90).   Not only did the subjects reports that the more "expensive" wine tasted better, but their MOFC and rACC showed increased blood oxygen levels when presented with those wines.  Interestingly, the portions of the brain associated with taste were not affected, suggesting that the mOFC integrates the "bottom up" sensory components with the "top down" expectations, a mechanism similar to the well-known placebo effect.

In the Wall Street Journal Lee Gomes shed some additional light on this topic with some experiments he did at the Home Entertainment Show at CES in Las Vegas.  He set up a room with two sound systems, identical except that one system connected the speakers with $2,000 worth of cable from Monster Cable, while the other used ordinary 14-gauge hardware-store cable.  Of the 39 people who took the test, 61% preferred the expensive cable.  More telling, the audiophiles at the show were more likely to pick the expensive wire, although they found it a just noticeable difference.

It's possible that the wine experiment would have turned out differently if the subjects had been wine experts.  The lesson for the rest of us is that it is often possible to get improvements in quality by paying more money it may take an expert to notice the difference, but if we are given good reason to believe we are getting a better product we really will enjoy it more and not just imagine that we are enjoying it.

You can draw your own conclusions as to how this applies to wine, Starbucks, $1,600 handbags, and Harry Cipriani.

Mobile Phone Novels in Japan

Today's New York Times has an article by Norimitsu Onishi on Japanese mobile phone novels (keitai shousetsu) entitled Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular.  It describes how more than a million novels have been composed on cell phones and made available on sites such as Maho no i-rando (Majic Island).  Some have been become best sellers (5 of the top 10, selling 400,000 copies each) when republished in book form and one has been made into a movie.  The genre has also benefited from the decision by the Japanese mobile operators to offer unlimited packet data, reducing the instances of "packet death" when subscribers got their first bill.

The stories are mostly written by young women such as Rin, who according to the Sidney Morning Herald is a nursery school teacher from Kokura. When offered in the original serialized form the format offers ample opportunity for the readers to comment while the work is in progress and feel involved in the creative process.

The depth of the works are somewhat limited, with lots of dialog and little scene or character development, not just because the need to punch out lines while riding the train but also because of the limited vocabulary of kanji that can be entered from the mobile keypad.   The distinctive style uses short sentences, emoticons and spaces (to indicate when a character is thinking.)   

An except from Satomi Nakamura's To Love You Again:

Kin Kon Kan Kon (sound of school bell ringing)
(space)
The school bell rang
(space)
"Sigh. We're missing class"
(space) She said with an annoyed expression.

While some bemoan the lowbrow nature of the work, these books are reaching an audience whose book reading has previously been confined to manga if they read books at all.

Some details not covered elsewhere, including excerpts can be found in a September article in the Wall Street Journal.

TCHO

I recently had the opportunity to beta test some chocolate from TCHO, San Francisco's newest (and only) chocolate factory.   Wow!  It has more of what I eat chocolate for.  If you like dark chocolate and live in the San Francisco area, you should check it out.

During the beta period you need to order the chocolate on the web site and pick it up in person, so if you are heading to Boston, stop by at Pier 17 and bring some back with you.

Jaron Lanier defends Closed-Source Software

Jaron Lanier, of VR fame, writes a wide-ranging column for Discover Magazine.  Recently, he took on the topic of Open Source, with a piece entitles Long Live Closed-Source Software! and subtitled "There's a reason the iPhone doesn't come with Linux."  He makes the argument that just as biological evolution requires encapsulation of DNA into distinct species, so does the evolution of software.  Open source projects can create highly polished works, but they tend to evolve slowly, generating many variations but not the kind of exponential improvement that can result from a more punctuated exposure to the outside world.

If you like that one, check out his argument for why we probably are not trapped in God's Video Game and how the War on Drugs and the 55 MPH speed limit led to the current spate of unseemly anonymous behavior we see on the Internet.

Vilna Shul panel on local VC industry

The Vilna Shul Speaker Series started off the New Year last Tuesday with a panel discussion entitled "The Venture Capital Industry: Looking Back on 2007 and Looking Forward to 2008."  Moderated by Scott Kirsner, the three panelists were three local VC's: Alan Spoon, Jonathan Seelig, and Larry Bohn.  Given all the turmoil in the financial world, the group was surprisingly upbeat.  As Alan Spoon pointed out, the returns on Venture Capital were still well above other asset classes and the top funds were being offered more capital than they could use.  While the economy may go through some rough patches for the next year or two, VC investing takes a longer time horizon and as Selig pointed out, there are opportunities in down markets as well.  The biggest problem all of them faced was the lack of big successful technology companies in the Boston area that would usually be counted on to train the next generation of entrepreneurs and managers.  As a result, they all travel more than their West Coast counterparts, making investments not only in California but in India and Asia.

Everyone agreed that Boston was the premiere location for Life Sciences companies, and many are investing in that field, but there are also opportunities in clean energy and even in a restaurant chain catering to the growing middle class in India.

Other coverage:

• The organizer of the event, Doug Levin summarized the areas where the panel said they would invest.
• Scott Kirsner wrote a brief summary on his blog.
• Dan Bricklin did a podcast and blog post.

Thanks, Doug for continuing to organize this excellent series.

Scoble + Plaxo vs. Facebook

Ther recent imbroglio over internet celebrity Robert Scoble being banned from Facebook raises some long-overdue questions.  It appears that Scoble used a beta version of a tool from Plaxo to extract his social graph from his Facebook account.  Facebook's automated mechanisms detected a heavier-than usual pattern of access and shut off his account until he appealed.  The account has since been reinstated, but not until it caused a Facebook group Facebook re-open Robert Scoble account !!!!! to gather 539 members and the TechCrunch post to generate 93 comments.  While the comments contained the usual quotient of foaming-at-the mouth, several legitimate points were raised:

• Scoble clearly violated Facebook's Terms of Use, to which of course all users carefully read before they "agree" to by clicking as they sign up.  "...you agree not to use the Service or the Site to...use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site"
• Facebook goes to some lengths to obfuscate the email addresses on a profile by displaying them as bitmaps, which Plaxo cheerfully OCRs back into text.
• While Facebook touts its openness, is it really open if it prevents its users from taking their data with them, and whose data is it anyway?

This last point is the important one.  If I display my email address on my profile, or for that matter if I give someone by business card or tell them my email address, do I have any right to control what they do with it?  While I may have legal recourse if they use it so sent me spam, it's really no business of mine whether they load it into Outlook, Plaxo, or write it on the back of their hand with a Sharpie.  Perhaps the fact that the process is automated may give someone pause, that is only a matter of degree.

If we were to deal forthrightly with the matter of ownership of one's social graph, it might make sense to make a distinction between the nodes and the arcs.  Clearly the arcs of my social graph (who I am friends with) are my property, although one could make the case that the nodes (the information about each of my friends) should be controlled by the people described by the nodes. Ultimately this gets into the area of nondiscretionary controls, which as Ray Ozzie has pointed out, are easy to fake but almost impossible to implement.