Christopher Herot's Weblog

Apple iPhone Problems - Last Stand for PR 1.0?

Apple has recently suffered a rash of complaints from customers that the new iPhone 3G is more prone to dropping calls than other GSM phones, even on the same network.  There have been various theories bandied about in the press.  Richard Windsor of Nomura Securities blamed it on an "immature chipset" from Infineon Technologies.  Claes Beckman, a Professor at the University of Gävle in Sweden was quoted that countries leading technology magazine, Ny Teknik as saying that tests from an anonymous testing laboratory revealed the phone's "nominal sensitivity" was below the GSM standard, probably due to consistency problems in manufacturing.  Peter Burrows in Business Week surmised Apple's software may be at fault.

True to its usual Soviet-style PR philosophy, Apple was stonewalling on the issue.  This attitude may be causing strains in the relationship with AT&T, according to an account in today's New York Times which reported that at the wireless operator there are "those who think Apple is too controlling with information and those who think Apple can do no wrong."

Perhaps the real clash is between the wireless industry, which no matter how good its technology must deal with the vagaries of RF propagation (e.g. people walking into buildings) and a manufacturing company which prides itself on perfection.  The wireless operators have figured out they can't make people happy 100% of the time and have learned, as a Verizon executive put it, to offer refunds "or maybe toss in a free ring tone and a couple months of free service.”  Apple's approach has been to preserve its image of perfection, even if it means denying the existence of problems long after they are visible to everyone.  In a "PR 2.0" world where customers can band together and make themselves heard, how long can Apple hold onto its 1.0 ways?

Daily Grommet

Yesterday, I stopped by the new offices of the Daily Grommet, a company for which I am an adviser.  The company will do live blogging of the discovery of interesting and unique products and services which they will offer from their site.  The site, being built in Ruby on Rails, is coming along nicely for the launch in November.

Shown at right are Jules Pieri, CEO and Joanne Domeniconi, Chief Discovery Officer.  They've been assembling an impressive collection of potential grommets.  If you know of something unique, interesting, and/or tasty that would appeal to their target demographic of women 25-45 let Joanne know.  They are especially interested in things that have an interesting story about their creation or creators.

BGP Hijacking Vulnerability

Just when you thought it was safe to go outside...

Wired and Slashdot reported yesterday on The Internet's Biggest Security Hole.  This time it was a long-known problem with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) which was given a new twist by Alex Pilosov and Tony "Xam" Kapela at the most recent DEFCON.

BGP, as you will recall, is the protocol that ties together the different networks making up the Internet.  While Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) famously described the Internet as a "Series of Tubes" he wasn't that far off.  The reason it's called the Internet is because it is made up of a series of interconnected networks.  These networks, referred to as Autonomous Systems (AS) have numbers (ASNs) and provide connectivity to a set of computers that are assigned a range of IP addresses. While both the ASNs and IP addresses are assigned by an official organization (ARIN in the US), the actual mapping between the two is done by a network owner using BGP to "advertise" to other networks what range of such addresses it contains.  Usually network owners are ISPs and large corporations, but we had our own AS at Convoq and used BGP so that our servers could be connected to the Internet via multiple, redundant links.  The problem is that since all such network owners are considered trustworthy, there is no widely used mechansim for verifying the validity of the advertisements.  Anyone can claim to own any range of addresses and cause the rest of the Internet to send it traffic intended for those addresses.  This happened last February when the government of Pakistan attempted to prevent its citizens from viewing a YouTube video by advertising a route for YouTube that led to a black hole.  While they probably intended that route to apply only within Pakistan it was automatically redistributed throughout the Internet and took YouTube off the air worldwide.

Something as dramatic as making a web site globabally unavailable is usually noticed and repaired fairly quickly, but what Pilosov and Kapela discovered was a way to take the traffic one purloined and then forward it on, unnoticed, to its legitimate destination, perhaps copying or moidfying it in the process.  They outlined a fix but as it will take a lot of effort and computing power to implement, most likely nothing will happen until there is a major attack and ensuing scandal.  In the meantime, it is wise to do as people in high-security government positions are taught to do, which is regard all your communications as being open unless proven otherwise.

SnapYap

While I was writing about the new wave of personal video calling companies around the world, I heard from one right here in Boston, SnapYap.  It joins Userplane and Tokbox as a free, no-download service based on Flash.

The product is probably the simplest I have seen yet.  You don't even need to sign up to call someone, just enter their URL in your browser, e.g. http://www.snapyap.com/call/cherot and you can have a video call.  They also provide a widget you can embed on your own site if you want to receive calls.

I called "John" from the company and was impressed with the quality of the audio and video - better than I remembered from my experiences with Flash.  According to John, SnapYap is just one of several projects the six-person company is working on from it offices on Termont Street.   It's written in ActionScript 2 (my sympathies to them) but they have an updated version coming out soon.  I look forward to trying it out.

Vidtel

Since last week's piece on videoconferencing, I've come across another company with big plans for personal video communications, Vidtel, Inc.  Founded by Broadsoft veteran Scott Wharton and communication industry veteran Wayne Willis, Vidtel has plans to make video calling (a term they prefer to videoconferencing to describe one-to-one conversations) as easy and ubiquitous as the telephone is today.

In a manifesto Wharton penned shortly before founding the company,  he observed that the falling of the traditional barriers to video calling: bandwidth, technology, price, and usability.  What is missing is someone to put all the ingredients together into a service that's as simple to use as the telephone.  Given Wharton's previous stint as VP of Marketing at a VoIP platform company he must have a pretty good idea of how to do that.

Now all they need is a way to get over people's inherent shyness in front of the camera.  We take the phone for granted today, but when it was first introduced no one knew what to do with it either. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison even debated the proper word to use when answering the phone, which for the first time enabled conversations between people who may never have been properly introduced, or even met in person.   Bell favored "ahoy" but Edison won out with "hello."  We may need to develop similar practices around video calling.

What Did Obama Gain By Announcing His Running Mate Via SMS?

There has been much speculation on what the Obama campaign gained by announcing the choice of Senator Joseph Biden as Obama's running mate in what CNN's Rich Sanchez dubbed "the most anticipated text message in history."  Certainly Obama added to the tech cred he established with Facebook (1.4 million supporters vs. McCain's 218,000), MySpace (20,871 vs. ???), and Twitter (65,000 vs. 0) but he also harvested a quantity of cell phone numbers that the Wall Street Journal estimated sat 1.5 million and others have doubled.

The biggest winner may he the company that powered the Obama Mobile web site, Distributive Networks and their SMS aggregator SinglePoint.  The Journal reported that 18-person Distributed, which has 4 staffers dedicated to the campaign has already been paid $150K.  And of course the wireless operators not only got paid for the messages but made Americans more aware of a service that has been commonplace in the rest of the world for years.

Did NBC Miss an Opportunity with the Olympics?

NBC created a pretty sophisticated web site for the Beijing Olympics, using Microsoft Silverlight to provide stored and live video of multiple events.  Still, a lot of the video that NBC shot was not available live, including some high profile events.  This is somewhat puzzling as the Olympics, with its multiple, parallel venues is the ideal event for the kind of on-demand access that the Internet is so good for.

Did NBC do this out of fear that the Internet coverage would subtract from its conventional TV revenues?  A recent report from eMarketer Inc. suggests NBC may have missed a big opportunity.  According to the report, NBCOlympics.com will generate only $5.75 million in video ad revenue, which is only 1.1% of the estimated 2008 US online video ad spend.  In contrast, CBS Sports brought in $23 million for its streaming of the NCAA's March Madness basketball, according to the Wall Street Journal.  Of course none of these numbers are anywhere close to the $894 million that NBC paid for the broadcast rights or the estimated $1 billion in advertising revenue.  The unanswered question is whether NBC could have had its cake and eaten it too.  We may have to wait for the Vancouver Games in 2010 to find out.

Phweet

Twitter exists somewhere in the middle of the continuum between real-time, synchronous communication such as the phone and instant messaging on the one hand and asynchronous communication such as email on the other.  However, Stuart Henshall and David Beckemeyer observed that a surprising number of Twitter conversations escalate to real-time.  (Try doing a Twitter search on "Skype".)  The result: Phweet.

Phweet allows you to invite a fellow Twitterer to a real-time voice conversation which can be any combination of Flash-based in the browser and plain old phone connections.  The invitation is sent as a Tweet containing a URL which the intended recipient can click to enter the conversation.  There is an option to send this URL via Twitter Direct Message, but a more interesting usage is to send it out on the public feed.  Although the user interface asks for the Twitter handle of the intended recipient, anyone can answer, and if more than one person replies they are all joined in the conversation.  The result - a "Tweetup".

The implementation is "Alpha" and thus still a work in progress, but it works as advertised.  The actual conversation is carried by the TringMe widget and TelEvolution service which supports both Flash and SIP, although I have only tried the Flash version so far, and it worked well on my RCN cable modem.  Check it out.

Thanks to Jeff Pulver for bringing this to my attention.

Daily Grommet

Jules Pieri muses on her blog whether her startup Daily Grommet (for which I am an advisor) is "real" yet.  Given the progress to date (raising capital, hiring employees, renting office space) they are already real in the sense that multiple people are invested in their success.  They will only continue to become more real as they launch their site and, hopefully, go public or get acquired some day.  The question is a little like asking when one's children are grown - is it when they graduate, when they move out, when they have children of their own?

At this point it's the slope of the curve that matters, and they are certainly on an upward trajectory.

Non-competes Really Are a Problem

A few months after the Harvard Berkman panel on non-compete agreements in Massachusetts, Professors April Franco and Matthew Mitchell at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management have published a study, Covenants not to Compete, Labor Mobility, and Industry Dynamics that shed further light in the situation, explaining how non-competes can help a region get established but limit its growth in the long run.  They show how in 1965 Boston's Route 128 had three times the technology emplyment of California's Silicon Valley, but by 1990 the proportions were reversed, primarily due to California's proscription against non-competes, which encouraged more spin-outs.  They cite previous studies which show that not only are spin-outs more successful than other new companies, but that the firms that spawn them are also more successful than their competitors.  The contribution in the new study is a model of the "contracting problem" between an employer who wants to retain its workforce and an employee who make more money by starting a new firm.  Since an employer can't know in advance which employees plan to leave, in an environment without non-competes, the employer must either pay them all more or see more of them leave.  Using more math than I can go into here (and unfortunately, more math than most politicians are willing to consider) the authors show how non-competes can increase profits of companies in the short term but decrease the growth of the enire region in the long run, hence SIlicon Valley's success.