State0 Blog

David Walsh is a serial entrepreneur in the telecom space. He also happens to be my office neighbor. He has made Austin his home base to start a new company StarView that is focused on delivering VoIP and Data to the enterprise. One of the interesting things we talked about was how telecom innovation is starting to be about software these days. It is no longer about the physical infrastructure. It is interesting that this is happening as we are seeing the same kind of revolution with wireless communication.

The StarView solution is a simple one that I have always thought should be more common. You plug your ethernet jack into their standard looking office phone and it works as your office phone where ever you are. Why is this not more common? I think it is absurd that we have to bring a technician into the office every time we want to move a desk or redirect a phone line.

Most interesting though is that David has set StarView up to donate a 10% of profits directly into a non-prof. It is cool to see responsible entrepreneurship here in Austin. The more that our corporations start to look like non-profits and our non-profits begin to look like our corporations the better we will be as a society. I have been reading Social Velocity recently and Nell seems to be of a similar opinion. You should check her blog out if you are interested in Austin’s social entrepreneurship.

(I had to film this interview on my webcam because my wife stole my car and my camera and ran off to DC. Scandalous.)

I got Brandon Wiley on camera at the Dorkbot party at SXSWi. He is one of the best evangelists for our beloved Austin. He is involved in almost everything startup. The next day he pitched his service (ringlight) to a panel at the Bizspark Accelerator event.  (ringlight) is a cool new way to access, organize, share, and publish your files. The secret sauce is that the files are hosted by you on your machine but available anywhere. It is currently in private beta but you can go to the site to sign up for a chance to check it out.

I have used Yahoo! as my email provider for the last decade. Until today, it was the only personal email I had ever used. I am about as loyal as they come and now I am gone. The service has become too unreliable and the banner ads have gone too far. What is absurd is that I ended up paying for Yahoo! Mail Plus to get off of the service. I feel like I have been held ransom. There was no other way for me to get my email off of their servers. I thought blackmail was illegal in this country? I am pledging to never use a domain I do not own again. Yet, the last decade has been a good one. Farewell, Yahoo. No hard feelings. Use my $20 wisely.

*BGP* on flickr

I have been using Pivotal Tracker to manage a project I have been tinkering at recently. Pivotal Tracker does not track time (directly). It tracks how many points teams can muster in a single iteration (period of time). Teams only get points for stories (tasks) that are features, not bugs or chores. This helps teams focus on the work that adds value. It also does predictive scheduling based on how fast teams work and the order of stories in their queue. It is a cool Agile tool. However, it is not the awesome agility of Pivotal Tracker that I am enjoying most; it’s the points. I love points! Everything in life is better with points. Moreover, you can add points to anything. Driving, cooking, shopping, exercise…

If I cannot find a rational reason for why someone should do something for me, I usually offer them some arbitrary number of points. Often, even if there is a rational reason, I still need points to get them moving. It works like magic. For example: 

• Useful - “I will give you 100 points if you make me a sandwich also.”
• Daring - “I don’t know, but you will probably get 1M  points if you can hurdle that bench on the first attempt.”
• Humorous - “I will give you a rare 32k points if you poop on that.”
• Networked - “Tom, will you give Jerry 15 points if he organizes an intervention to stop Mitch from beating Timmy so often at Wii Boxing?”

When we added points to our tours at BarZ, it doubled (maybe trippled) the value of the product. It is a visible difference. Users smile when they take tours with points. They tell people about their score and laugh when they do things that cost them points. All that for the price of a few points a tour. 

If you step back, way back, you will see that points are as good as money if not better. They are equally as arbitrary as a flipped bit on a bank computer, only lacking an arbiter, for now at least. If I told you that you could have as much money as you wanted would you save it all up or would you spend it? 

What are you doing right now that you could improve by adding points?

Alas, the inauguration was too late and the leap second struck before the Units Czar could be sworn into office. At least we can all rest safe knowing that it will be abolished before it can bamboozle us again.

Why do we have leap seconds? Who decided that we should obey to the whims of the Sun so judiciously? The whole idea offends me. 

We have been working on a new version of our software in the office recently. We have had significant issues keeping time synchronized over data, files, machines, servers, handhelds, etc. My two worst enemies are timezones and daylight savings. Both are evil and when they combine forces they are villainous. For instance, a part of the new platform has detailed reports on product usage.  When building reports we have to take into account the timezone of the user, the timezone of the server, the timezone the data was recorded in, and whether any of those were, or are currently, saving daylight. We also have to decide what timezone the data should be reported in: mine, yours, the server’s? Really? Why have we made time so complicated?

It is time for change. I would like to propose a new system. The technical specification can be found on the whiteboard photo above. I am also be willing to consider a base 2 system.

Obama will be announcing me as Units Czar in the next few days.

kkalyan @ Flickr

I went to a Texas Ventures event last night on the UT campus to hear Jonas Lamis, founder of SciVestor, speak on the future of technology.  I will not transcribe the entire lecture here but hopefully I can give you enough that you will be encouraged to go talk to him about his thoughts. He started the event by using The Legend of the Ambalappuzha Paal Payasam to illustrate Moore’s Law which states that the power of transistor technology will double every two years. He expanded that to say that perhaps it applied to all technology, all technology will grow at an exponential rate. 

I got the impression that  Jonas expected this kind of growth to continue almost indefinitely. While I would like that to be true, I have my doubts. Most things eventually exhibit diminishing returns. In fact, Moore himself does not think that this kind of growth can continue indefinitely. From what I know, we are at the electron level already in transistors and are attempting to use spin angle get a few more states out of each electron. There are also rumors that graphite will extend Moore’s predictions, but I fear that here also, Lord Krishna will go away disappointed. 

However, Moore’s law was not the primary theme of the talk. The inevitability of singularity seemed to be the thesis. This is a point I agree with. My computer will soon be “smarter” than me. That will bring with it many advances. Here are a few that Jonas cited:

• The internet will switch from finding to doing. Google will not just find what you want but also process it and produce the result you expected. This goes hand in hand with…
• The semantic web will contextualize and enhance all experience and computer interaction. With the advent of the semantic web..
• Advertising will die. I look forward to this and to…
• Robot cars which will be able to drive us from place to place. Cars already have some automation built in. When automated driving becomes safer than human driving, insurance companies will demand it. Then you can ride while your car drives and you can pop your…
• Designer drugs that will be made to fit your genetics. 

I have not posted in a while because I have been offline while moving into our new house. We used to live in the westlake area. That area only gets internet from Time Warner. When I first moved in, I thought, “How is this possible?” I am living near every dellionaire in Austin and I only get served by Time Warner, the most hated of all internet providers!? However, I swallowed my pride and had them come set up our internet.

The service was seemingly good while I lived in that house, probably because I had low expectations. However, it is quitting TimeWarner that is the horrific part. They make getting in very easy and getting out very hard. I now have to take my router to Breaker and Mopac during the working day to get them to stop billing me for bits they are not transferring to a house I do not live in. Until then, I am paying $45/month instead of the original $30 because of the bait-and-switch billing programs.

Needless to say, I was excited about getting new service in my new house in Terrytown. That was until I started calling folks like Grande, AT&T, and Comcast only to find that none of them serve my area. In the end, I went with EarthLink, which is just another name for TimeWarner. Screwed again. When the Time Warner guy showed up to hook my “EarthLink” modem up. I asked him to take in the TimeWarner modem back for me, but obviously, that would have been too similar to customer service to be an option.

All this to say that, in my opinion, everything that is good about the internet is bad about internet service providers. But how can this be? How can a city like Austin continue to thrive as a tech mecca if we do not even have decent internet services? I am in pain. Why is someone not stepping up to make money off of my pain? I am certain this is happening on a national level. Someone needs to innovate us out of this.

I turn 26 in a couple of hours; not a tremendously momentous birthday. It is not divisible by 5 and, as far as I know, I will have no new liberties. However, it is a birthday, and so I have to look back and be agitated by all of the things I have done poorly in the past. One thing that comes immediately to mind is that I have not been involved enough with the tech community here in Austin. I am trying to fix that. This blog is intended to help. Hopefully, it will do more than bring to light how ignorant I am of most things. At best, I hope it will be entertaining and inspiring.

Perhaps sometime tomorrow I will consider the things I have done well.