philosopher.
On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel with Harper, Brian Gorbett from Microsoft, and Sumit Nijhawan from Infogix. Brian did a great job of summarizing the panel over at Port 25. If you have time, you can check out his video here:
sitting on a open source panel from brian gorbett on Vimeo.
There is a rumor that more video will be posted soon.
Harper and I are giving the keynote address at Northwestern University Entrepreneur Idol.
I wonder what we will talk about this time….
More coming soon.
I don’t have much to add to Harper‘s post on our TechCocktail presentation.
But I can add the rough math we did to compare costs for label printing:
Big Vendor solution:
Ginormous Canon Printer 110ppm – $150,000
(Redundancy? $300,000.)
Service – $1000/month
Print cost per page – $0.005
Part Availability – 10-12 days
skinnyCorp solution:
3 x HP 9040n’s 120ppm – $9,000 (and already redundant!)
Service – $195/month
Consumables – $700/month
Print cost per page – $0.0045
Part Availability – 4 hour on call response (Average response time <2 hours)
We also have Nagios querying the printers for Maintenance kit and Toner levels. When Maintenance kits are low, it pages a printer ninja for service.
I am consistently amazed at how bad customer service can be, but I am especially amazed at how bad it can be around the most basic functions.
Beth’s wallet was stolen a few weeks ago, and the credit card we had associated with the Comcast auto-deduct was replaced with a new card. For some reason, Comcast cannot set up automatic payments over the phone, so they supplied us with our username and password to login to the site to update the card information. Seems easy enough.
We log in to comcast.net, go to My Account, and then View/Pay our Bill. And here’s where everything falls apart.
Clicking that link tells me that I need a Comcast account. Which, of course, we already logged in with, but it asks us to recreate our account. Attempting to recreate the account, tells me there is already an account with our associated information, so it cannot recreate it.
So we call support. Comcast Customer Support literally cannot tell you how to login to your account. I am not kidding, we have been working on this for 45 minutes with a customer support agent, and she cannot figure out what account we login to, how to reset the password, or even which domain (comcast.com or comcast.net, which use different credentials, both of which are required apparently) to log into.
30 minutes into the call, we’re finally transferred to another support person. That person transfers us to another person, who then says we need to supply her with a PIN to continue. Our response… what PIN? And why the hell would we have to give you a PIN 45 minutes into this god damn support call? Finally, this representative tells us that everything that every other rep has told us so far was incorrect, and then gave us the proper credentials to log in. To simply setup automatic payments with Comcast, prepare for a 45 minute conversation with 3 customer service idiots.
I’m currently looking for viable broadband options, if anyone has a good suggestion in the Chicago area. The sad thing is that I know, no matter who we end up with, this is going to remain a problem. It is easier to ditch your service provider and pick up a new one every time there is a problem rather than try to talk to support.
About a month ago, Harper asked me to do a presentation with him at Ignite Chicago. It looked like fun, so I said yes. But then we failed completely at planning anything for it, and it came down to us throwing something together at the last minute today. We found out we would be third to last, and it was scheduled at Debonair, so we knew our slightly intoxicated crowd would be ready for a little break.
I threw together slides, collaborated with Harped via Google docs to work on them, and then just went over and talked. We never practiced or wrote anything to talk about. It was a ton of fun. We started it off with a SMS vote for the topic we would talk about.. but we put up Jason Rexilius’ cell phone number. We checked with him later, and for the record it looks like Mustache wins. I’m sure voting is still open though.
Watch the presentation here. They were taking video, so I’ll post it when I find it. Check out Harper’s post too.
IT infrastructure is my thing. Right now, I think there are 5 smart choices that any IT staff can implement with almost no effort at all.
1. Use Google Apps.
If you are using anything else for email right now, you’re losing out. If you are using anything else for calendaring right now, you are losing out. If you are using anything else for groups and mail lists, you are losing out. If you are using anything else for IM, you are losing out. Not to mention document sharing and plain old vanilla search.
Google Apps is hands down the best and easiest choice when it comes down to implementing small IT infrastructure today. Lets say you have 20 employees. Compare these costs:
Dell PowerEdge 2950 w/ Server 2003 (25 CALs) – $6,000
Exchange 2007 – $4,000
Office Standard – $400×20 = $8,000
Total – $18,000Google Apps – Free.
2. Go wireless.
Copper is expensive and entirely unnecessary. Switches are expensive and entirely unnecessary. You can go with a super cheap mesh solution like Meraki. For something that doesn’t have a completely boned up security model or for that extra bit of speed go for something that supports draft 802.11n.
I personally recommend that you go with an Airport Extreme Base station. Not only does it support 802.11n draft, but you can also use it as a print server and DIY NAS device.
3. Buy cheap storage.
Western Digital MyBook II Pro Edition 2 TB (1 TB with RAID). Buy two of these, connect them to your Airport Extreme. Instant 2 TB NAS with RAID mirroring. Total cost is about $1500.
4. Go low cost and low powered.
Do not buy $2000 desktops. A Mac mini costs $600 and pulls 23-110 Watts of power. You can get a 22 inch LCD monitor for between $200-300 that uses 40-50 Watts of power. Small footprints for both the environment and your pocket book.
Or ditch all that and just use a MacBook for $1000. You can also find good deals on refurbs for less than $500. You do not need the biggest fastest machine to open a word processing app and check email.
5. Use Skype.
Forget phones. Skype Unlimited is less than $3/month, which is probably less than you pay for taxes on your wired line phone right now.
And of course, the unendorsed number 6: Steal your neighbor’s wifi.
I’m reading a book called Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol (read it there). It is a brutal look at the American public education system, and how it reflects racial inequalities and the inequities of how our tax dollars are applied to the school system. It covers the Chicago Public School system circa the late 1908′s and early 1990′s, and discusses the atrocious conditions and lack or resources faced by our public school students.
It made me wonder, are we any better off today?
I am a regular reader of the District 299 Chicago Public Schools’ Blog, and I came across an article stating that nearly 10% of Illinois schools could be classified as drop out factories. It turns out that Wells High School, my neighborhood public high school, has a drop out rate of almost 50%.
While seemingly we have massive gaps in education today, just as in Kozol’s 1992 look at the schools. While we live in a world where 50% of our students, at any institution, FAIL to even graduate… we cannot consider ourselves successful as a society. By any measure, education is failing. Kozol comes back a number of times to recount the expenses in wealthy school districts versus poor districts. I don’t have the research behind me to show if this is still true or not, but it is probably safe to presume.
So while the public schools still struggle and the environment has shown little change, the context of what is available, for very cheap or free, has grown immensely. I ask this question, what resources can now be replaced? How much do we spend, per student, on books and libraries in school? Public school libraries are a waste of time and money, they are inadequate and outdated. Replace them with cheap computers and internet access. Provide free English tutoring (I guess I will plug TinyLanguage here). Give students Wikipedia.
Maybe instead of trying to find resources that aren’t there, and seeking help that just is not coming, we need to reorder how we think of the resources we already have. We may have to let go of some things that we hold as sacred.
Sometimes the largest solutions seems to have some of the smallest problems. Recently, a friend of mine and I have been talking about small wind installations. We have looked at the costs of developing a small vertical axis wind turbine system for installation in the countryside of Illinois. The largest expense in our system is not the turbine or the generator, those are actually fairly reasonably priced. The most unwieldy expense is in the inverter required in order to tie the system to the electrical grid. One device that doubles the cost of the system.
It makes me wonder, how many sustainable and renewable energy system options are held up by one problem?
The unique part of this problem is that ANY distributed renewable system that we come up with will continue to be limited by this problem. There are quick ways around it right now, such as powering DC systems in your home without feeding back into the electrical grid, or using a battery bank and going completely off grid. These solutions don’t address the problem head on, and for distributed renewable energy to become popular, they will have to be grid tied at some point in time.
Maybe we should start a collaborative design project and see if the Internet can solve this problem for us?
Check out this talk at MoMo Amsterdam by Jaiku’s Jyri Engeström.
Jyri identifies the increasing number of sites on the Alexa top 100 based on user generated content as what he calls a “megatrend swiping over web services.” He lays out three topics that he covers in this talk:
1. The case for social objects. What is the motive and driver for actually interacting online?
2. Five principles for building services around them. He formulates working principals for how to create your own site. How do you create a compelling offering online?
3. His take on the next wave
He uses social networks as an example, and examines the tendency for social networks to flourish and die out (FireFly, SixDegrees, the floundering Friendster). Why do so many of these services fail? How do we predict which ones will actually sustain themselves?
He uses Russell Beatties public cancellation of his LinkedIn account as an example. LinkedIn, at that time, was merely another social network. It was a game to see how many contacts each person could rack up, and he who has the most contacts wins.
The sites that work are the sites that are built around social objects. For LinkedIn, this social object is now jobs. Flickr did it with photos. Delicious did it with bookmarks. Amazon did it with books. The focal point of MySpace is music.
So then the question becomes, how do you build a service around social objects? He answers this with a quick checklist:
1. What is your object? How is it defined? How quickly can you understand what this object is?
2. What are your verbs? How do people act upon those objects? Can you create a new verb?
3. How can people share the objects? Can I email a permalink?
4. What is the gift in the invitation? What does the person you invite get by joining?
5. Are you charging the publishers of the spectators? Basic service should be free, people will pay to establish their own space. Charge the publishers.
His answer on disruptive technology is good, but his answer on “what will be the next big thing?” is rather lacking. The preconditions of a disruptive innovations are if the solution is simpler, cheaper, or if it frees the user from inconvenience. He believes that microblogging is part of the “Mass Starbucksization of Nearly Everything.” Social objects to go. He also says that it is like blogging for people with nothing to say.
I can see the angle of microblogging. I previously viewed it as a blogging replacement, but I get a better picture of it now and where it could fit in holistically. It doesn’t have any of the intrinsic values of a normal blog, it has a much more reduced shelf life. It is disposable blogging.
Jyri leaves us with these questions for your own services:
Is it free?
Is it quick and easy?
is it cross-device and multi channel?
Is it everyday?
Does it bring people closer together?
2 months ago, I wrote about Intel’s counteractive response to the One Laptop Per Child program. In the face of the negative press around their actions, and more likely the positive press around the AMD 50 x 15 program (and in turn Negroponte’s project), Intel has taken a step toward collaborating on the OLPC project rather than trying to sink it.
The question is… why? The XO machine runs an AMD Geode processor and is in direct competition to the Intel Classmate. Intel has attempted to subvert the low cost laptop market by offering machines below cost. They have distributed anti-OLPC marketing rhetoric to Negroponte’s target countries. There has been a war of words between the chip maker and the OLPC project founders for at least 12 months.
Intel does support educational programs. They have put nearly a billion of their own dollars into educational initiatives around the world, and it makes them look completely asinine to oppose an innovative approach like OLPC. It is expected of them to support a program like this.
More importantly, Intel has lost this battle, but they do not want to lose the war. The XO is flat out better than the classmate. It has a stronger program, solves the correct problem in an efficient manner, and has a wide base of community support. The market for a cheap laptop is huge, but the profit margins on that market are very thin. The current XO machine and OLPC program only address a small fraction of that market, and evidence suggests that if this program is successful, a laptop made for older students could be in the near future. The XO has a predetermined expiration in a student’s educational lifetime. It is not made for teenagers and adults.
The success of a program like OLPC creates another market for them to expand into. OLPC is sowing the seeds of technology supported educational programs early on in a child’s life and will prove successful with it. What happens when that child goes on to more advanced education without that infrastructure? They are once again put in a compromised educational environment, ripe to be augmented with another cheap laptop solution. If Intel wants to capture this market, a feasibly larger market than the children’s machine market, then they certainly cannot be at odds with the OLPC program.
Intel is making a wise investment in their own future.
Intel graffiti picture by Brooke Novak.