Christopher Herot's Weblog

Iowa Hack Heats Up

The battle between Cingular/AT&T Wireless and various users of the Iowa Hack has opened on a new front.  AT&T has started blocking access from its subscribers to phone numbers belonging to FreeConference.com.   AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel has been widely quoted as saying the action is appropriate because under its wireless terms of service agreements AT&T’s wireless service is for calls “between one person and another person, not between one person and many.”  I haven't been able to find that language on AT&T's web site, not have I seen any links to it.  I think most of AT&T's subscribers would be surprised to find that they were prohibited from using their phones to make conference calls.

Siegal also admitted that AT&T objected to companies such as FreeConference.com making use of an anomaly in the FCC-mandated termination charges that allow rural carriers in states such as Iowa to charge several times the average rate for connecting calls from AT&T to subscribers (or partners such as FreeConference).

FreeConference is not taking this sitting down.  The company, which also does business as Global Conference Partners LLC and FreeConferenceCalls.com  has filed a lawsuit (1:07-cv-00574-PLF) in the U.S District Court for the District of Columbia alleging that AT&T has violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Communications Act, by not connecting the calls or paying for the calls it has connected.

Meanwhile Free Conferencing Corp, creators of FreeConferenceCall.com (not to be confused with FreeConferenceCalls.com), has been alerting bloggers to the opening of its own blog which says that they, too, have been cut off by both Cingular and Sprint.

In related cases, AT&T has filed an answer to the suit filed against it for non-payment in New York and filed a motion in Iowa to have the New York case decided there along with its original suit.

Why We Don’t Understand as Much as We Think We Do

Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.
--Thomas Wolsey, 1471-1530

That quote was the inspiration for a talk by Jonathan Drori at TED University on the topic of Why We Don’t Understand as Much as We Think We Do.   For the second consecutive year at TED, the conference was preceded by a series of twelve-minute "courses" on everything from How to Fly a Helicopter Indoors to Making the Most of Web 2.0.

In his talk, Drori offered some examples of problems where intuition leads most people astray:

• When a seed grows into a tree, where does most of the material come from?  (Wrong answer: the soil.)
• How do you make an electrical circuit with only a battery, a light bulb, and one piece of wire?  (He showed a video of recent MIT Electrical Engineering graduates who couldn't figure this out.)
• Why is Winter colder than Summer?  (Wrong answer: because the earth is further away from the sun in Winter.)
• Draw a diagram showing the shape of the orbits of the planets.  (Wrong answer: they are ellipses.)

When I tried these same questions on most people, they got the answers wrong, but in defense of MIT, all three people I know who went there got all three answers correct.  Perhaps being out in the real world for a few years gave them the practical experience to apply their theoretical knowledge, or maybe I've just hired people who fooled around with electricity before they embarked on an education filled with more math than hands-on experience.

The correct answers:

• The mass of the tree comes from the air.  If you recall photosynthesis from high-school biology, the energy from the sun enables the chlorophyll in the leaves to separate the carbon and the oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the air.  The  Carbon is combined with the much lighter hydrogen in the water to form hydrocarbons which are the basis of all organic materials, including wood.
• To light the bulb, touch one end of the wire to one end of the battery.  Wrap the other end around the threads of the bulb.  Then touch the other contact at the end of the bulb directly to the other contact at the end of the battery.
• The seasons are caused by the angle of the earth.  The rays in the Summer hemisphere strike more directly than the rays in the Winter hemisphere.
• The orbits are pretty much circular.  People often draw ellipses for two reasons:  1.  They have seen all those illustrations in books that try to look three-dimensional by projecting the circular orbits on a plane not parallel to those orbits; and 2. they think that the Earth must be further from the Sun in the Winter, not thinking about how it's Summer in the other hemisphere at the same time.

At the end of the class, Drori handed out a small plastic toy which I later learned is called a Rattleback or Rebellious Celt.  If you spin it counterclockwise, it rotates well enough, but if you spin it clockwise, it turns a few times before it starts to rock back and forth and then, astonishingly, start to spin in the other direction.   You can see a video here.   The physics have intrigued scientists for at least a century until Hermann Bondi published a The Rigid Body Dynamics of Unidirectional Spin in 1986.   Jeremy Webb attempts to explain it here, but you can't really understand it without doing the math.

Why TED Works

I will post some more in the future about some of the most memorable presentations at the recent TED conference, but first it is worth contemplating why the conference is such a success - why 1,000 otherwise busy, accomplished individuals will commit a year in advance to spend the better part of a week in Monterey, California, pretty much disconnected from email, conference calls, and the demands of their day jobs.  It comes down to three things, the program, the audience, and the venue.

While the list of speakers this year included the occasional mega-celebrity, such as Bill Clinton, Paul Simon, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Richard Branson, most of them are more likely to be known within a select community, such as Murray Gell-Mann (Nobel Prize in physics), John Doerr (known to everyone at in the computer industry), and Erin McKean (known to everyone in the dictionary business).  Sometimes the work is better known than the author, such as Michael Pollan's Omnovore's Dilemma, J.J. Abrams' Lost, or Maira Kalman's New Yorker covers.  Regardless of one's profession, some talks will be directly relevant (for the computer industry, the BumpTop and Multi-Touch user interfaces), some will be thought-provoking (John Maeda on simplicity), and others will be mind-expanding (Murray Gell-Mann on beauty as a criteria for judging scientifc theories.)  The sessions are no longer than two hours, and the speakers can be counted on to stay within their allotted times (usually 18 minutes) and refrain from sales pitches.  The most warmly received are those that give some insight into the speaker's passion for the subject, whether it be curing hunger or shooting things into outer space.  This year the program included a number of shorter talks that were slotted in whenever there was five minutes to spare.  Some were quite memorable, such as John Doerr's presentation on amateur rocketry or John Flowers' pictures of a Thai temple of the afterlife.

It has often been said that TED is the only conference where the attendees are even more impressive than the speakers.  Certainly the audience includes many founders of big internet and software companies (Amazon, Google, eBay, PayPal, Priceline) and a smattering of movie stars (Cameron Diaz, Goldie Hawn, Meg Ryan, Forest Whitaker), but actually one can turn to any attendee at random and be guaranteed of having an interesting conversation and perhaps finding a future business partner or even a new lifelong friend.  The two most common questions (recommended as conversation starters) are:  "Have you been to TED before?"  (usually yes) and "Are you coming next year?" (almost always yes, although this year with a sigh about the price tag which has gone up to $6,000 for next year.)   The new management of the conference has made an effort to keep the TED momentum going throughout the year, with local events, periodic mailing of books, a growing web presence, and the TED Prize which supports several projects of potential world-wide import.  Far from diluting the impact of the conference, the new initiatives have given it a sense of purpose and fostered a community which gets people returning year after year.  The latter has become a high-class problem, with the next year's conference selling out a week after registration opened and increasing the pressure to expand the conference.

Since its inception, the TED conference has been held at the Monterey Conference Center in the Steinbeck Forum.  This 494 seat theater has no center aisles.  Instead, it has a wider than usual space between the rows and plush, comfortable seats, each one with an unobstructed view of the stage.  The paradoxical effect is that more interaction occurs among the participants - think of how on an airplane you are more likely to talk to someone if you aren't jammed in next to them in the middle seat in coach.  In recent years, the "simulcast room" was added to hold an overflow crowd of another 500 attendees.  Originally these were people who signed up at the last minute, but the distinction has blurred as the conference has sold out earlier and earlier.  Fortunately, this space has an attraction all its own - outfitted with comfortable furniture (including a bed with monitors on the ceiling), large HD screens, and interesting interactive exhibits of art and technology, such as a Tesla electric car.  Attendees with simulcast room badges are allowed into the main hall if space is available.  While this has led to some grumbling, it does eliminate the depressing effect of half-empty halls one sees on the last day of most conferences.  There has been some discussion of finding a new, larger venue but it will be a challenge to find a place that will provide the same level of intimacy that has kept the TED community going all these years.

I'll write some more on the conference highlights.  In the meantime, Bruno Giussani has covered the conference extensively on his blog.

 

TED 2007

As I was at the TED conference, there have been no posts for the past week.   TED is the only event I've been to where people stand in line to be admitted to each session and no one wants to miss a single presentation.  That doesn't leave a lot of time for answering emails, calling the office, or writing posts to the blog, all of which I will resume on the flight back to Boston today.

In the meantime, a sampling of the highlights of the conference:

• Taking the new hydrogen-powered BMW 750hl for a test drive.
• Carolyn Porco showing photographs of Titan from the Cassini spacecraft, showing rivers and lakes of methane.
• A demonstration of the BumpTop multi-hand user interface.
• Jan Chipchase showing his photographs of how communications technology is so efficiently employed in the developing world.
• JJ Abrams describing how he came up with the ideas in Lost.
• Richard Branson telling how before he left school at age 15 he was told by headmaster that he would either become a millionaire or end up in jail.
• Hearing several amazing stories from Ben Dunlap.

ETel - Why Let Web Developers Have All the Fun?

Trevor Baca summed up the spirit of the Emerging Telephony (ETel) conference when he said "Web developers have all the fun.  Why can’t the phone be as easy?"  Indeed, the conference was all about employing Web 2.0 concepts such as Web services, mashups, and open source in order to enable new ways to use the telephone.  ETel brought together more than 250 practitioners, mostly from small companies, for three days of presentations, discussions, and exhibits at the San Francisco Airport Marriott last week.  The big legacy carriers were conspicuously absent, with the exception of British Telecom and France Telecom.  The handset manufacturers were represented by Nokia and Motorola, and the big Web properties by Yahoo and Microsoft.

If Telephony 1.0 was The Phone Company providing a monolithic experience encompassing everything from directories, to handsets and the network connecting them, Telephony 2.0 is a more diverse set of applications and the underlying services.  These applications encompass the traditional phone call, but calls are more likely to start with a name or a web link rather than a phone number, can be routed in any number of innovative ways over a variety of networks, and can be delivered to a wide range of devices.

A taxonomy of Phone 2.0 features:

• Addressing.  In the 1.0 world, you dialed a number you knew from memory or looked it up in a directory.  Mobile phones popularized the shortcut of dialing straight from the directory listing, whether in the handset itself or through an extra-cost directory assistance service.  In the 2.0 world, the phone number is just a low-level address and may even be hidden to preserve the privacy of the called party.  The caller can start with an identifier such as an iname (e.g. =cherot) or from a web site such as a social network or discussion forum.  An application can enable the caller to go directly from a request such as "find someone who can answer my question" to ringing a phone of an expert without requiring the intervening steps of looking up a list of recipients, finding the associated phone number, and dialing the phone.
• Call Initiation can take place by "dialing" a number at a traditional handset, but it can also be performed by an application that may reside in that same handset (e.g. TalkPlus), in a web page (Jaduka), in a personal computer (Skype), or anywhere in the phone network. 
  
• Filtering.  In the old days, everyone had a secretary, or wished they had one, to decide which calls to put through and which ones for which to take a message.  Then came answering machines, voice mail, and caller-ID as primitive filtering mechanisms.  Now applications such as GrandCentral can filter calls based on calling number, called number, time of day, and the schedule of the recipient.  Calls can be put through to the intended caller, deflected to voice mail, or even connected to a fake "out of order" tone - the latter reputed to be a means to get removed from automated telemarketing calls.
• Routing.  The same parameters that can be used for filtering can also be used to select one or more addresses (phone numbers) to which the call should be delivered.  Some services allow the call to be extended to several numbers at once, with the call connected to the first one that answers.
• Call presentation.  Just ringing the phone is so last millennium.  Near the end of the 20th century ringing bells were replaced by computerized beeps, ringtones of popular songs, and in a retro moment, the digitized sound of a mechanical bell.  Those sounds are still with us, but the call may delivered to a PC before or in lieu of being delivered to a phone next to it on the desk.  In addition to making noise, the PC can display a pop-up window or toast containing any number of relevant facts, such as the caller ID, caller's name and (in the case of calls initiated from a web application) what web page the caller is looking at.  While the call is being set up, the caller can be informed of the progress of the call by ringback tones, recorded messages, and (in the case of web-initiated calls) visual displays.
• In-call services.  The basic phone call is still a voice connection between two parties, but that call can include any number of callers, be recorded, and be carried over channels with considerably higher fidelity and/or lower cost than the traditional phone network.  The call may also include other collaborative activities such as showing a presentation or sharing a screen, e.g. Convoq's ASAP.
• Post-call services.  Phone companies have long generated billing records which can be used to generate reports and databases, but these databases can also be used to enable follow-up activities such as returning the phone call.

Making all of this possible is a dramatic change in the way phone applications are developed and deployed.  What formerly required a substantial investment in specialized telephony equipment and circuits can now be performed with standard servers connected over the public Internet.  Companies such as Global Crossing and Level 3  will accept calls over the Internet in SIP and deliver them for pennies to any phone in the world.  They will also provision local or toll-free numbers anywhere and deliver them to you the same way.  You can process these calls with any number of commercially available software packages or go open-source with Asterisk.  If you don't want to operate your own servers, you can send VoiceXML and CCXML to Voxeo or SOAP to Jaduka.  The last bastion of this revolution is the mobile phone network, especially in the USA where the handset business is tightly controlled by the mobile operators.  While Apple is trying to upend that model with the iPhone, it has yet to embrace any commitment to openness of the platform.  Meanwhile there are efforts to product an open-source, Linux-based mobile phone: the Qtopia Greenphone and OpenMoko.

As the motto of the ETel conference states:

Opportunity doesn't always knock.
Sometimes it calls.

Frankencode

As I was enthusing to my friend and former business partner Doug Levin about the quantity of open source telephony software I saw at ETel this week, he remarked about the amount of open source that was Frankencode - software of dubious provenance and unknown reliability.  Doug should know.  His company, Black Duck Software, is kind of an automated policeman to track an organization's software assets.  I guess asking him about software is like asking a cop about human nature - he sees all sides of it.

That said, there is a sizable movement behind Asterisk and the company behind it, Digium, attracted $13.8 million from Matrix Partners last summer.  And there are a number of open source handset projects, including the Qtopia Greenphone and OpenMoko.  However, as Alex Russell pointed out at the conference, the wireless operators view such efforts the way the characters of Shelley's novel viewed Dr. Frankenstein's creation.

Emotional Adoption Curve

One of the most interesting and useful presentations at ETel was not about telephony at all, except in the most general sense.  Jeff Bonforte of Yahoo had to abandon his original presentation at the behest of his lawyers and instead gave an excellent discourse on understanding the emotions behind consumer adoption of new products.  In an update of Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, Bonforte called attention to the emotions behind the behavior of each segment of the adoption curve and gives them new names:

• Lovers
• Irrational
• Efficient
• Laughers
• Comfortable

The Lovers (Innovators in Moore's lexicon) are the techies who buy the product because they find the technology intrinsically interesting.  They can send misleading signals to the seller because their emotional response to technology is the opposite to that of the larger population.  They look on solving tough technical problems as fun.  This 3% of the market is likely to acquire product X through the "X Club."

The Irrational (Early Adopters) feel the same emotions are the general population, but feel them with more intensity.  These are often negative emotions such as anger, fright, or loneliness.  The strength of these feelings can lead to buying behavior that is not economically rational, such as installing Skype because one hates the phone company,  The good news is that once the technology improves, ordinary people who feel the more moderate versions of the same emotions will also be motivated to buy.  There are plenty of targets for these emotions, such as taxes, banks, telcos, health care providers, government services, airlines, lawyers, Microsoft, the opposite sex, and "The Man" so there is plenty of opportunity.  This 22% is likely to purchase product X at The X and Y Store.

The Efficient (Early Majority) will purchase when the technology becomes practical.  This 25% goes to Best Buy.

The Laughers (Late Majority) are Yahoo's core constituency.  This 35% goes to Costco.

The Comfortable (Laggards) are the 15% who go to Walgreen's or Safeway because the Costco parking lot is too confusing.