Christopher Herot's Weblog

Angela's Café

The only thing more annoying than New Yorkers complaining about the lack of a good deli in Boston is listening to people from California and the Southwest saying that we don't have authentic Mexican food. I am glad to say that, finally, they are wrong.

A quick trip through the Callahan tunnel will bring you to Angela's Café, a tiny (24 seat) family operated gem in East Boston that serves the best Mexican food this side of Puebla where Angela Atenco Lopez cooked before joining her son Luis Garcia in Boston.Luis handles the front of the house while Angela can be seen in the kitchen. Both seem to thoroughly enjoy their work - an enjoyment matched by patrons who seem to be a healthy mix of East Boston locals and people who venture from downtown and the suburbs.

Luis reports that crowds have grown considerably since a laudatory review in the Boston Globe. I won't try to duplicate that here, but will say that you should be sure to try the mole and anything that is on special when you are there. Despite their success we still managed to get a table on short notice on a Saturday night, although the place was full when we sat down, so check it out.

Angela's Café
131 Lexington Street
East Boston, MA 02128
617-567-4972
Reservations Accepted
24 seats
Parking - street (but easy to find)

Mass Innovation Night 2

Tonight, Boston marketing impresario Bobbie Carlton held the second  Mass Innovation Night at the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation in Waltham, Massachusetts. This showcase of local high tech companies drew several hundred attendees and eight companies ranging from raw startups to...IBM.

Tonight's lineup:

• AllFocus isayusay
• Clickhealth
• IBM LotusLive
• hubUnity
• Mixandmeet
• Nexiwave
• Pixily
• WherePhone

I had a chance to visit with a few of these.  IBM?Lotus showed off its latest Software as a Service offering built on the Notes/Domino platform: LotusLive. Offering the social networking capabilities of LinkedIn and Facebook, the document sharing capabilities of Domino, eRoom and Sharepoint, and the collaboration features of WebEx and Sametime, LotusLive can connect people inside and outside the enterprise for $45/month.

Pixily is a good example of the simple but useful type of service enabled by cloud computing.  For $14.95 a month, Pixily will let you send them a postpaid envelope of documents. They will scan them and store them on the Web (using Amazon S3) and then either shred the documents or return them to you.  They also OCR them, so you can search by content. They were handing out green Tyvek envelops good for a month's service.

Nexiwave was not giving a demo, but they were describing a new voice conferencing service that does speech recognition on the conversations.  (They claim 85% accuracy).  While they aren't yet available in real time, the transcripts offer the capability of searching for keywords in a meeting - shades of the omniscient computer from Star Trek that could play back any scene.

The venue for the event is interesting in its own regard. Housed in Francis Cabot Lowell's factory in Waltham, the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation houses exhibits of the watchmaking business that once dominated Waltham, a collection of early steam engines, and part of the Whirlwind computer.  I put some pictures here.

The next Mass Innovation Night is June 10, 2009.

Zombie Invasion!

According to WCAX News, someone hacked a trailer-mounted dynamic message sign in Colchester, Vermont to warn motorists to turn back or face an impending zombie invasion. To add insult to injury, the hackers protected their message with a password, requiring the construction company to turn the sign around until they could consult the manufacturer to get the master password.

While some of these signs can be programmed remotely, according to news reports, this instance was a case of someone leaving the key in the lock at the site.  According to the literature from many of the manufacturers of these signs, they can be programmed by plugging in a laptop, perhaps with proprietary software.  One wonders if that means it could be the work of a current or previous construction or highway employee, but it does point out how much we depend on some combination of security through obscurity and most people's innate goodness.

There was no word of whether the sign was previously dormant or had been warning of some other hazard, but authorities are not laughing, saying the hackers could face charges, including "making a false report."

This incident follows similar reports from Austin, Texas, Collinsville, Illinois, and Lubbock, Texas. Let's hope the National Transportation Communications for Intelligent Transportation System Protocol (NTCIP) that networks the increasingly common permanent signs is more secure, or we will be seeing a lot more of these.

What’s Next in Tech

"There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning."
                        -Louis L'Amour in Lonely on the Mountain

      Gartner Hype Cycle

In preparation for an upcoming event,  Scott Kirsner, columnist for the Boston Globe and observer of the local high tech scene, challenged participants to come up with what they thought were some of the biggest growth opportunities right now in technology.

My first thoughts were to look to life sciences and clean energy, but both require enormous capital outlays, which are in short supply these days, and/or scientific breakthroughs. That seemed to put the time horizon beyond Scott's "right now" requirement and led me to William Gibson's observation that the future is already here - it's just unevenly distributed. I just needed to sort out where various things were on the Gartner Hype Cycle.   So in preparation for answering Scott's question, here are some thoughts on the hot areas of the moment:

Social Media. Mary Hodder may regret having popularized the term now that it seems everyone you meet is a "social media consultant," your Mom is on Facebook, Ashton Kutcher has a 1.5 million Twitter followers and Oprah is catching up fast, but Twitter and Facebook don't seem to be anywhere close to their peak.  Sure it's possible that some new company will improve on the concept and eat their lunch (anyone remember Alta Vista?) and Twitter will probably get sold for a billion dollars before anyone figures out its business model, but people will always want to keep up with their friends and, more importantly, tap into a web of people they trust to find information and make decisions. A local company that I am advising, Daily Grommet, is applying this concept to e-commerce, which may be the way someone finally figures out how to make money with this stuff.

Cloud Computing. The idea that the heavy lifting of computing could be centralized and professionally managed has come and gone and had more variations than anyone can count: mainframes, time-sharing, client-server, thin client, Application Service Provider (ASP), Software as a Service (Saas).  Most of these never took off because they couldn't match the responsiveness of a personal computing device given the available bandwidth.  Cloud Computing is different in that instead of trying to persuade the end-user to give up his PC, it is aimed at getting the IT manager to give up his server.  The advantage is not just the economy of scale but the convenience of being able to quickly ramp up that scale without making major capital investments.  I knew cloud computing had arrived when one of the engineers I'm working with decided to postpone installing the server he was building and just pulled out his credit card and put the app he was building on Amazon's EC2. Boston has always favored IT infrastructure companies and should offer plenty of opportunity as IT managers everywhere look for ways to manage their applications in the cloud.  We'll know that cloud computing has finnaly reached the Plateu of Productivity when Google either abandons its proprietary platform or opens it completely to the outside world.

Voice and Video over IP.  Boston has a long history in the telecommunications industry, going back to Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. As I wrote previously, voice and especially video has been through multiple cycles but now that bandwidth is cheap and easily available it is taking off.  The opportunity here is not just in saving money over plane tickets or toll calls but also in the integration of communication into everyday applications.  VSee Labs, is in a good position to do both.  While it is mainly a west coast company, I am holding down the Boston office.

Mobile Computing.  This is another area that plays to Boston's strengths. The tight control the wireless operators have traditionally exercised over the platform has made innovation difficult, but Apple's iPhone and Google Android have started to open things up. There is still the problem of how to make money - although there are thousands of apps in the Apple App Store, they don't sell for a lot of money and the average user doesn't use most of them for long, but as mobile platforms become more powerful they will supersede the PC for many applications, especially for advertising and commerce.

When in doubt, keep in mind what Roy Amara, past president of The Institute for the Future, said:

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

The event:

What’s Next in Tech: Exploring the Growth Opportunities of 2009 and Beyond

Thursday, June 25, 2009 from 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM (ET)

Boston University
School of Management
595 Commonwealth Ave.
Boston, Massachusetts 02215

register: whatsnext.eventbrite.com