That left me with one problem. They cost quite a bit and I didn’t really want to fork over the admission fee. So, I came up with a solution. If you haven’t noticed by now, I love vacuum tubes. I wanted to test the water to see how selling a few of them would turn out and within a few hours, I had a dozen offers for various tubes and by the end of the night had managed to sell quite a few. Score! If you’re interested in any, there are still some for sale at my forum and on Google Groups (both accounts are under my name).

Now on to the hard part – how am I going to wear these things and not look like a dork? This is going to be a challenge but I’m excited. It has been a long time since I’ve been looking forward to a product this much.

There is a lot that I want to learn about the device: specs, developer support, etc. Some of these things have been leaked or talked about by Google but the one thing that is missing from the discussion, in my opinion, is how people will react to them. We know a bar in Seattle has banned them and West Virginia wants to ban then while driving so it is probably fair to say that people aren’t entirely welcoming of the idea and I think it boils down to this: Google Glass, by design, has a camera attached to it.

Think about one of the all time great ad campaigns: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Google Glass is almost exactly the opposite. What happens in Vegas gets broadcast to the world and your parents can watch it live if you’re not careful. People don’t inherently like having a camera pointed at them and when you pair this with the uncertainty of whether it is recording, broadcasting, etc.,. then people will become nervous.

I’m really curious to see how people react to Glass. This is the one thing that will either make or break the product. I’ll report back when I know more

I have scanned the manual, warnings, specifications, and safety checklist in hopes that they may be useful for other hobbyists. I ran all of the PDFs through Adobe Acrobat’s OCR so they should be searchable. Enjoy!

• Omnichrome Specifications
• Omnichrome HeCd 356 Waring
• Omnichrome HeCd 356 CDRH Checklist
• Omnichrome HeCd Laser Manual

As a side note – DC over Thanksgiving is great – few tourists and almost no wait for most of the museums.

[Show as slideshow]

You see, Philips has an agreement with Apple which dictates that you can ONLY purchase the Philips Hue in an Apple store. Not online at apple.com – in their physical retail store. I’m not sure what the logic was behind that but I assume that, given the amount of buzz around this product, that Apple paid them a pretty penny for exclusive rights to sell the products. So, I drove from Ithaca, NY to Syracuse, my nearest Apple store, to buy the kit and extra bulb.

At the minimum, you need the Philips Hue kit. This contains the base station and the three bulbs. It retails for $200 and extra bulbs go for $60. Paying $60 for a light bulb seems insane…but stay with me.

The Hue system is based off of the ZigBee mesh network architecture. The system currently supports 50 devices at once and as of right now, only Hue bulbs. However, because this is ZigBee based, I would have to imagine that it is possible for other base stations to work in the near future.

To clarify – the bulbs themselves are NOT IP based. Each one does NOT sync with your router. Instead, the base station does and each bulb connects to the base station using a simple mesh architecture network. Many early reports stated that they were “internet light blubs” which is not exactly accurate.

The Commercial

Click here to view the embedded video.

Setup

Setup was simple. Plug in the base station. Go to MeetHue.com and download the iOS app. Once you have all of that done, you need to sync the base station with the bulbs and each controller. This is simpler than WiFi – there aren’t any passwords but you do have to press a button on the base station within a set time period. I found myself doing this several times during my initial setup: once for the kit bulbs, once for the extra bulb, once for my iPhone, once for my iPad, and once for the website controls. It was annoying but not a deal killer.

Operation

The iOS apps sync with the Philips Hue website. You create your preferences on one device and they are sent to all others. Interestingly, you can only create light scenes from a mobile device and NOT the website. You can, however, activate scenes from the web.

Controlling the lights can be done over the internet. If you are on the same subnet as the bridge, clicking on the scene button causes the lights to update in about a second. If you are on another network, the command traverses the internet back to your bridge (via Philips Hue) and takes 2~5 seconds to update. You don’t have to setup any special ports or router configurations for this to work. All of this appears to be done using normal web protocols and don’t require any work right out of the box (once the devices are paired with the base station).

Setting the scene

This is a pain in the ass. I’m not kidding. This is, by far, the worst part of the entire system. Now, this is 100% a software issue and can be easily fixed with a software update but the shipping software is terrible. Let me explain:

Light colors and brightness are set via scenes. A scene is generally a photograph where you drag markers representing each bulb to locations representing the color you want that bulb to be. Therefore, a scene is directly tied to specific bulbs. If, like me, you have 4 bulbs, you have to modify each scene to add a 4^th bulb.

But wait, it gets worse.

Scenes are directly tied to bulbs. Therefore, scenes are tied to rooms. So, if you wanted to make this a whole house system, you would need to setup scenes for each room. You would need to create dozens of nearly identical profiles for every room in your house.

Second, there is an “all-off” button. While this feature is great when the Hue system is tied to a single room, it breaks when you scale it up. How many times do you want to shut off all of the lights in your office, bedroom, and office all at once? Probably not that many times.

What is missing is the concept of rooms. The commercials online for the product show it working for an entire house but this system is so poorly designed that it would be a pain in the ass to execute. Not only can you accidentally turn all of the lights in your house/apartment office – imagine accidentally turning on all of the lights in the middle of the night and waking everyone up.

Oops.

The software clearly needs work but this is a version 1. It really is limited to a single room and if you evaluate it like that, the system looks much better. It still boggles my mind that there are no concepts of rooms or sharing scenes between them but until this, or some similar feature comes out, I am limiting my use to the office.

One other annoying bug is that the base station seems to freeze once and a while. For example, I will update the color scene or turn off the bulbs in the app and nothing will happen. This is quickly resolved when I power cycle the base station but I’m not sure if the problem is the base station or my router. Either way  – you shouldn’t have to power cycle anything to turn off your office lights.

In practice

Imagine waking in to your bedroom and then realizing that you can’t turn on the lights because your WiFi router is a piece of trash. That has happened to me twice. Again, it isn’t a deal killer but it doesn’t fit well with how I expect lights to work. I expect there to be a switch on the wall that I turn on and BAM! Let there be light

Philips tries to address this by having the lights automatically revert to a warm-white light when they are powered up.  That is great because I can flick the switch off and on and the lights will come on. However, that defeats the purpose of the lights being always connected. They need power to work so in practice, I leave my light switch on 100% of the time and only cycle the power when I need light now.  If you’re not someone who caries their phone around constantly, this can be annoying.

A note on output

These bulbs are LEDs. This immediately triggered two concerns: PWM flicker and brightness. In completely unscientific terms, the output, at a neutral white light, is about equivalent to a 40 watt incandescent bulb. There isn’t any warm up period like on CCFLs but in a small 15×15 office like mine, I use 4 bulbs to illuminate the area.

PWM stands for pulse width modulation. You see, it isn’t easy to just turn down the power to an LED to make it dimmer. Instead, you turn the power on and off hundreds/thousands of times per second to make the bulb appear dimmer. This is done to allow for color mixing between the internal R, G and B diodes. This is the killer feature of the bulb – the ability to mix colors is what sold nerds like me on the device. However, if it is done incorrectly, for example if the pulse frequency is too infrequent, the lights flicker. Thankfully, these lights DO NOT SUFFER from this. These are solid little bulbs that do not have any of the flicker problems of cheap eBay LED bulbs.

As far as construction goes, the bulbs are heavy glass tops with a plastic mid section and Edison base. They feel well built and are about the same size as ordinary bulbs.

The light output shape is shockingly uniform. LEDs are notorious for highly directional light output and these bulbs are well diffused. The hardware here is top notch.

Overall

I like these bulbs and I have gotten well more than $260 of entertainment out of them. I have had them for nearly two weeks and I am considering adding bulbs to my system. The only thing stopping me is the poor software support that I expect to be fixed in future releases.

Maybe I am suffering from the sunk cost fallacy but I went out of my way to load up on math-heavy classes. I would like to go in to venture capital full time and of the classes on the list, only BRV and MAYBE intermediate accounting will be useful. So why all of the hedge fund classes? Easy: when will I have a chance to take these classes again?

There aren’t many times in life that you have the chance to take classes on derivatives, Alpha, etc. I find public markets fascinating (even though I work on the private end) and as I’ve come to realize – there is a whole world of things that I don’t know. So, I am loading up on classes that I know I need to improve in (accounting, governance) and classes that I find interesting (almost everything else.)

I’m not sure if next semester is going to kill me but at the very least I hope to learn a thing or two.

Final Semester

• BR Venture Fund
• Intermediate Accounting
• Applied Economic Analysis
• Corporate Governance
• Liability Driven Alpha
• The Short end of Alpha
• Investment and Portfolio Management
• Derivatives Securities Part I

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The process I used was to capture each frame at 5 second intervals. I manually set the exposure for each frame prevent flickering as the camera auto-adjusts based on changing scenery. Once I had the source material (about 40GB of images) the scenes were broken in to projects in Aperture and a color scheme was created. Once I had a color effect that I liked, I batch applied it to all of the raw images. From there, the images were cropped to 16:9 and exported as maximum quality JPEG images set to 1080P resolution.

Once I had the series of images, I had to import them in to Apple Motion to convert them to ProRes 4:4:4:4 so I could import them in to Final Cut Pro X. (For some reason, FCPX does not allow you to import image sequences directly.) From there, the scenes were edited together, titles added, and a final video was created and exported to Vimeo and YouTube,

Click here to view the embedded video.

• On Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/42698875
• On YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQavjTnIuC4&feature=g-upl

I know that Highlight isn’t exactly new but I live in Ithaca, NY and no one uses it. Of course, last week when I spent my spring break in Palo Alto looking for a job, Hilight was a different story.

Background for those not familiar with the app: It is an app that runs in the background of your iPhone. It shows you a near-real-time map of all of the other users around you. If you find someone interesting, you can highlight them and you can even message them.

Last Friday, I was on University Avenue and Cowper when I saw Robert Scoble on Highlight. Being the nerd that I am, I had to highlight him. He highlighted me back and asked what I was studying at Cornell. A few messages later, he sent me his cell phone number and said that we should grab dinner.

So, myself, Daniel Shi, Robert and his wife had dinner together in Palo Alto. We had a great (nearly 2 hour) time together where we talked about venture capital, how to identify hot startups before they pop, and even BeOS.

I am amazed at Highlight because when you use it in a hot spot like the Bay Area, it works wonders. It is amazing to walk around San Francisco and have a running list of interesting people that you’ve walked by. Apparently some time on Friday I walked by Woz as well. This app is awesome.

(But the logo has to go!)

That got me thinking, how much is 1 TeV?  Also, what units are they in – is this mass, force, or something else.

For starters, an eV is an electronvolt so we are talking about units of energy. The most common unit of energy we deal with in our daily life is a Calorie (note, that it is a Calorie with a capital C, meaning a kilo-calorie).  Is there a way to convert our 7 TeV to Calories?  Sure.

So how many electronvolts do we have?  Well, the T tells is that we are dealing with teraelectonvolts.  The Tera SI prefix means that we multiply the number of electron volts by 1×10^12 or 1,000,000,000,000.  So, we are dealing with 7,000,000,000,000 electronvolts.  Wow.

Next up, let’s figure out how many eV are in a calorie (1/1000 of a food Calorie).  According to WolframAlpha, there are 3.829294×10^-20 eV in a calorie.  Uh oh.  This is going to be a small number.

So how what is 7 TeV in SI calories?  That works out to be 2.680506×10^-7.  And that is 1000th the size of a food Calorie.  This is getting way too smal to visualize.  Even a TicTac will have way more energy than the Large Hadron Collider.

It turns out that the LHC, running at full energy levels, will be operating with about the same amount of energy that 7 flying mosquitos have (in kinetic energy). 

And people were worried about this machine destroying the world

Click here to view the embedded video.

Okay, so the video is about music.  Sure.  And the interview starts off with “most white people dance to the lyrics”.   He then takes that and breaks it down to catchy bumper-sticker sized bites if words. “Life’s a bitch and keep on truckin’”

His hypothetical song may not win a Grammy but he hit the nail on the head.  The song is catchy, you can sign along easily, it has a single message, and it gets stuck in your head.  He has managed to identify what people like (the lyrics) distill it down to a key feature (the chorus) and build a supporting song around it.  He is not re-inventing some deep Bob Dylan song – he is writing something simple for the masses that people would buy.

Now, let’s look at the top iPhone app sales:

• Where’s my water
• Fruit Ninja
• Angry Birds
• Cut the Rope

*I excluded GTA 3 because of a temporary sale

Let me try to make the connection between iPhone app sales and the Foo Fighters.  You see – most iPhone apps are simple.  They do one thing that people like intensely for a very brief period of time and then move on.

I’m not trying to say anything negative about the software developers (or Dave Grohl).  They have managed to come up with a formula for success: one key feature (the chorus) with supporting content (the rest of the lyrics).

Let’s think about what paid apps are NOT on this list:

• BA II Plus calculator
• WolframAplha
• OED

In other words – the app store favors the Foo Fighters approach to music over the Bob Dylan approach.  Sure, my financial calculator is not exactly Dylan but it is complex.  Explaining what NPV is to someone is a lot harder than saying drag your finger over this imaginary rope on the screen.

I’m not the first person to notice this trend in software development.  The real reason I wrote this post is because I wanted to find an excuse to link to the YouTube video

I think he makes a great point – why does Photoshop need to load every plugin and typeface when the very first thing I am going to do is either open a file or create a new one? There optimizations that can be done to allow me to get to work faster.

But that is not why I’m writing this.

I agree with the author but what stuck me were the comments on his blog. Most were either “You’re going to be fired” or “Buy an SSD”. Is that the best people can do?

Here is what is wrong with the first-world-problem style comments and buy-an-ssd nonsense – they are blaming the user! In this relationship, the user is the man with the money and the software is providing the service. They have the relationship backwards – the software exists to serve me. Imagine going to a restaurant and blaming the customers for the wait.

The problem is that everyone who is commenting is not a product person. We use Adobe products because there are no good substitutes. We use Windows for exactly the same reason. Yes, buying faster storage will help, but why not make the product better? Why not care what the customer thinks? Why not serve him(her) faster?

I finished Steve Jobs and it has this fascinating anecdote in it:

“If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?” [Jobs] asked. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to 300 million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes saved per year.” [Engineer, Larry Kenyon] was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,” [Bill] Atkinson recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.”

If the product sucks – fix it. Blaming the user is for angry software engineers who don’t care about the final product.

And to the commenters who say he is/should be fired – you really missed the point.  Here is someone who cares about the product and the user experience. These are the people you want on your team.

Original Post:

http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2012/02/splash-screens-sloth.html

Click here to view the embedded video.

For example – last week, I posted a Futurama image online that got a lot of attention. I normally use a 1 GB VE server and this time I had to bump it up to a 4GB instance. No rebooting and no downtime. Killer. All I had to do was sign in and click the “upgrade instance” button. A few days later, once the traffic died down, I downgraded to the cheaper instance and was back to normal.

The problem that I’m facing is that hosting this website is starting to get expensive. Keeping it as a VE server and manually boosting the resources. The 1GB instance costs $50/month, the 2GB costs $100/month, and the 4GB costs $250/month. I only pay for the days that I am at the higher level but every bit adds up.

The question:

Is there a cheaper way to host my website. By going with the VE I’m already managing many of the tasks myself. I’ve tried shared servers and their performance has always been an issue. I don’t quite need a dedicated server and doing that would lock me in to a hardware configuration that I can’t easily upgrade.

Are there any other options for someone in my position? I don’t mind managing the LAMP stack but I don’t love it. I like having root access but don’t need it. GoDaddy’s economy Linux dedicated server deal isn’t bad but $90/month is more than I want to pay and I am very hesitant to use GoDaddy. I haven’t found many good reviews about them at all and they seem a little shady.

What does everyone else use?

I moved in to my current apartment in July 2011 and when I signed up for my utilities, one of the mandatory fields was my social security number.  I left it blank.  (In fact, I think I wrote “no way!”)  They still sent me a bill and they still get paid.  My old energy company in Minneapolis was the same way.  I always refused to give them my social security number and every time I talked to them, they told me it was required.  I never once gave it to them and they never once cut off my service.

The point is – don’t give people your social security number, even if they “require it.”

Let’s take a look at their letter

Now, I’ve attached a PDF of the letter below.  I’ve even run it though OCR so Google can find it easier.  I want to quote a line from their document:

While we have no evidence that such data has actually been misused, or that there was any malicious intent..

WTF is that?  The data were just stolen.  I’m not surprised that no one has confirmed that it hasn’t been misused yet. Let’s count the steps that you would need:

1. Your data has to be sold to someone willing to commit identity fraud.
2. They have to setup a line of credit in your name.
3. It has to be approved.
4. It then they have to draw on that line of credit.
5. The account then has to become delinquent.
6. The bank then has to send a warning letter to the victim demanding payment.
7. The victim has to figure out that their identity was stolen
8. find the source of the leaked information
9. definitively prove that it was NYSEG that lost the information and they have to admit what happened.

OF COURSE IT HASN’T BEEN PROVEN YET.

The second half of that quote states that there was no malicious intent.  This is even more ludicrous than then first part. Do people steal SSNs because they like collecting strings of 9-digit numbers?  They steal them because they have value!  What kind of moron PR firm wrote that statement?  That is as dumb as saying that someone steals money because they like the look of it, not because they have any malicious intent.

From the day that the data were stolen until the day that every last NYSEG customer dies, someone will be at risk for identity theft.  This will be a perpetual problem for everyone involved.  We don’t get new SSNs when there is a data breach.  Instead we get a SINGLE YEAR of credit monitoring service that costs maybe $30/customer.

Do you know what I would do if I stole these numbers?  I’d let them age for a year.  Most of the victims will still be alive but you’ll get a higher yield once this monitoring service is over.

And NYSEG is a monopoly so they don’t have to care.

The letter:

NYSEG RG&E PO Box 483 Chanhassen, MN 55317-9678 Dear Valued Customer: January 23 , 2012
We take our responsibility to protect your personal data very seriously. For this reason, we are writing to inform you that earlier this month we discovered that an employee of an independent software development consulting firm (contracted by NYSEG and RG&E) allowed unauthorized access to one of our customer information systems. The customer records contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth and, in some cases, financial institution
account numbers. While we have no evidence that such data has actually been misused, or that there was any malicious intent, we are notifying you out of an abundance of caution so that you have the information and tools necessary to help detect and prevent any misuse of personal information. We have consulted with law enforcement and engaged computer forensics experts. Our investigation is ongoing and we will continue to provide law enforcement with our full assistance. Credit Monitoring Assistance Above all, we ask you to be vigilant in monitoring your credit and bank accounts for any sign of unauthorized activity. If you suspect any incidence of identity theft, please contact your local law enforcement agency or the Federal Trade Commission. As a precautionary measure, NYSEG and RG&E have arranged for Experian to offer you the option of a year of credit monitoring free of charge through ProtectMyIDTM. If you’d like to take advantage of this offer, you must enroll by April 30, 2012. You can activate your membership in two easy steps:
1. Visit the ProtectMyID website: www.protectmyid.com/NYSEGandRGE or call 1.877.736.4495 (toll-free) or 1.479.573.7373 (for international callers) to enroll. 2. Provide Your Activation Code: Your complimentary 12-month ProtectMyID membership includes: • Credit Report: A free copy of your Experian credit report. • Daily Credit Monitoring: Alerts you to suspicious activity including new inquiries, newly-opened accounts, delinquencies, or collections found on your Experian credit report. You can elect to receive alerts bye-mail, text message, or first class mail.
• Identity Theft Resolution: If you have been a victim of identity theft as a result of this situation, you will be assigned a dedicated, U.S.-based Experian Identity Theft Resolution Agent who will walk you through the fraud resolution process, from start to finish. • $1 Million Identity Theft Insurance*: As a ProtectMyID member, you are immediately covered by a $1 million insurance policy that can help you cover certain costs including lost wages, private investigator fees and unauthorized electronic fund transfers in the event of an identity theft incident. Support If you have questions, need help enrolling in the credit monitoring program, or feel that you may have an identity theft issue, assistance is available at 1.877.736.4495 (toll-free) or 1.479.573.7373 (for international callers), Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. (Eastern Time), and Saturday through Sunday, II a.m. to 8 p.m. In addition, you are entitled under U.S. law to order one free copy ofyour credit report every 12 months from each ofthe three nationwide credit bureaus. To order your free credit report, visit www.annualcreditreport.com or call 1.877.322.8228 (toll-free). Additional information about this matter is available on our websites – www.nyseg.com and www.rge.com. If you wish to learn more about ways to limit the risk of identity theft, such as fraud monitoring and security freezes on credit accounts, consider contacting the Federal Trade Commission or your state Attorney General. Federal Trade Commission: 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20580 1.877.IDTHEFT (1.877.438.4338) wwwftc.govlidtheft We take pride in serving you and apologize for any inconvenience or concern that this incident may cause. Please be assured that we take the privacy of customer data very seriously, and we remain dedicated to using our best efforts to regularly assess and adapt our physical, administrative and technical security measures in order to protect such data. Sincerely, Mark S. Lynch President NYSEG and RG&E • Identity theft insurance is underwritten by insurance company subsidiaries or affiliates of Chartis, Inc. The description herein is a summary and intended for infoImational purposes only and does not include all teIms, conditions and exclusions of the policies described. Please refer to the actual policies for tenns, conditions, and exclusions of coverage. Coverage may not be available in all jurisdictions.

Personal atomic clocks.

Seriously.  Hear me out:

There are people who spend tens of thousands of dollars on home audio and call themselves audiophiles.  They buy low oxygen, ancient Western Electric cables to use to connect their speakers.  They buy dedicated amps that offer zero features by modern standards.  And, this market is big enough to support SEVERAL magazines on the topic.

Likewise, there is a market for watches that cost several thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.  Again, everyone has heard of Rolex, Longines and Breitling and these brands regularly advertise in broad interest magazines.

Knowing this, why do people look at me when I say that there is a demand for a personal atomic clock?  The market may not be huge but it is one that is willing to spend money. Even better, they can be made with off the shelf parts for little money. The blunt truth is that someone who is willing to buy used parts and is willing to tinker can make their own for less than $100 from parts for sale on ebay.

Let’s step back for a second.

What is a clock?  Simply, a clock is an oscillator and a counter.  The oscillator moves or ticks at a regular interval and the counter keeps track of the ticks.

An atomic clock is one that derives its frequency reference from some sort of an atomic event.  So, instead of gravity driving a pendulum, you measure the energy emitted from a rubidium source.  Dave Jones of the EEVBlog has a great video on how these work so I won’t go in to much detail here.  Rubidium oscillators are a common atomic reference while cesium standards are the industry standard for precision.

These devices can be small.  The standard rubidium oscillator is a few cubic inches.  Symmetricom has managed to shrink this in to what they call a Chipscale Atomic Clock – a device so small it can be mounted right to the PCB.

http://www.symmetricom.com/csac/

And how much does a rubidium oscillator cost?  About $50 used on eBay.  And how much does a counter cost?  Maybe a dollar if you use a common microcontroller.  The total price may be closer to $30 if you use something prebuilt like an Arduino.

The one last part of the equation that is missing is the display.  If you know me, you already know that I am going to say Nixie tubes.  Nixies would actually be perfect for this application because a modest investment could mean that one manufacturer would own the remaining stock of IN-18s.  Talk about a competitive advantage – no one could produce a similar clock.  There may be one or two popping up on eBay but my rough estimate of the market is that for around $100,000 you could buy the remaining known stock.

Of course, there are dozens of types of nixie tubes and great care must be taken to ensure that there is a sufficient supply for mass production.  Sourcing tubes would likely require several trips to former Soviet countries to meet with dealers and source NOS.  However, initial prototypes could be built with tubes for sale on eBay.

So we now have an oscillator, a counter, and a display.  From an electronics perspective, we now have a minimum viable product.  But we want to make the BEST clock on the market, not just a good one so there are three things that we will do different.   First, we will include a redundant frequency reference.  This will increase both the short-term and long-term stability of the device and will as provide a compelling selling point.

Second, we will include a series of external frequency references – probably 1 PPS and 10 MHz.  Now, if someone has another oscillator or reference that they want to add, they can easily integrate it.  If you’re a lab and have a house reference, this will work perfectly.

Lastly, we will include a bi-directional time reference –ideally both NTP and GPS.  This not only saves the user from having to manually set the time but it also allows them to have an additional frequency reference.  This clock should also act as a frequency reference and output the same 1 PPS and 10 MHz outputs so it can be used as a reference for other devices.

To this point, I’ve only been talking about the electronics.  The last part is the quality of the enclosure.  I am not a fan of the Sony-Black design (I don’t hate it as much as Steve Jobs apparently did) but I am a fan of laboratory or industrial looking test equipment with sharp edges.  I want it to be heavy.  I want people to know that this device is not a toy.

It’s possible to build the BEST clock for the consumer market.  So what?

Well, okay, the point of making a product is to sell it, right?  We would need to perform some market tests but based on anecdotal conversations with serious nixie clock collectors and want-to-be time nuts.  Based on my connection to the nixie clock market as well as to the manufacturers, I believe that a target price is $10k is realistically achievable.  I have been shown proprietary designs of unreleased products that sell for similar price points and personally know many of the buyers who have expressed purchase intent in the unreleased products.

How would one go about building this?  Well, there are two parallel design tasks as far as I can tell.  We will assume that we are using a common development platform like a PIC or an Arduino and that some components, such as the power supply can be built from reference designs or purchase as assembled components.  That leaves the tasks of designing the enclosure and the electronics.

The enclosure can be developed without the complete electronics.  The outline of the major components are known and, ideally, this will be a large enough device to ensure that space will not be an issue.

The electrical engineering task will take some research.  None of the components have particularly obscure requirements.  The nixie tubes require a high voltage current limited power source but that should be relatively easy to engineer.

The biggest challenge will be writing the software.  How does one account for more than one frequency reference?  Do you simply average the outputs?  Do you use one to correct another?  Does one simply act as a backup?  These are not questions with obvious answers but these problems have been solved.  Generally speaking, each frequency reference is used to “steer” another oscillator to produce a more accurate signal.  This synthesized signal is what is used to measure time as well as provide the output reference.

Lastly, and this is a major consideration, the insides of the device must look nice.  After I finished Steve Jobs’ biography I had a new appreciate for the level of design that went in to every product.  I want to carry that same level of detail in to my product.  I want users to be able to open it up and I want them to be able to see the inside workings of their ultimate clock.

So what’s next?

Nixie clocks are inherently limited by the number of tubes on the market.  It may be possible to manufacturer new ones but eventually other display technologies will need to be used.

Aside from the display, it may be possible to create variations of the product.  For example, what about a $1000 alarm clock that is based off of the Symmetricom Chipscale device?  There are many other options and those will be the subject of another blog post.

How rubidium oscillators work

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you use this image elsewhere, please link back to this post.

An hour ago I got an invitation to their launch party.  They are ready for them to start rolling off the assembly line.  They received their first batch of pens in from the manufacturer and passed quality control and the earliest backers should have their pens any day.

I’ve seen many nasty comments on the Kickstarter page and it bothers me people are so harsh or critical of the team.  The fact is that they have been open with the backers about what the delays are, the problems they’ve had with their first few manufactures, and they genuinely care about the quality of the final product.  They have an insane attention to detail and the product that I wish more companies would adopt their method.

Sure, a little more experience may have helped speed up the process but I don’t care. I want to see what their second product is.

Congratulations CW&T!

• Kickstarter Project
• CW&T

The Cornell Venture Challenge (CVC) is Cornell University’s prestigious Business Plan Competition. On April 19, 2012, during the Entrepreneurship@Cornell Celebration event a select group of applicants will get the chance to pitch new and exciting business ideas to a panel of professional investors and entrepreneurs. The winners of the competition will earn a $10,000 cash prize (non-dilutive funding) to push their ideas forward.

This competition provides a way for burgeoning entrepreneurial ideas/teams to gain experience, exposure, and financing to help launch successful ventures. The teams selected to compete will receive pitch experience including preparation and feedback from seasoned professionals. In the past this unique exposure has led to follow-on investment and formal advisor relationships.

The competition is sponsored by BR Venture Fund (BRV), a student-run venture capital fund at Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management.

Awards

• 1st: $10,000
• 2nd: $2,500
• 3rd: $1,000

CCTEC (Cornell Center for Technology Enterprise and Commercialization) may double the prize money by applying the Cornell Technology Transfer Prize to winners who use intellectual property developed at Cornell and disclosed to CCTEC before CVC application submission.

Please visit the CVC homepage for timeline and application details!  Feel free to email Zach Casavant at ztc5@cornell.edu with any questions.

Applications are due by March 2nd, 2012!

Read Part 1

The other day I posted an article about my aversion to using outsourced software development firms for new product development. Well, I got a few private emails and comments (which didn’t make it past my filter) telling me that I was wrong. So I thought I would take a minute to respond. My video response is below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

My main argument is this – yes, outsourced development may work for back-end non customer facing work or common tasks like setting up a WordPress blog. I still assert that it is a horrible idea for you to build your business on their work.

• Product development is nearly impossible – you can’t write the perfect specifications in a vacuum
• Incremental improvements are difficult – every change or modification generates a change request and billable hours
• Responding to bugs is slow – ideally, your technical lead would be able to identify and fix problems in an early stage company. Instead, you have to document the bug, assign it a priority, have the developers generate a change request and bill, agree to the terms, and THEN fix the bug.
• Your incentives are not aligned – You need someone who will be up at 3 AM worrying about the product. They will watch your site at 3 AM and bill you for the privilege. If the product fails, they will move on to another client. If the product fails, you will have to deal with angry shareholders.

The video was shot at AOI’s office in Minneapolis and the above photograph was taken in my office by Amanda.  Bill is one of the lead authors; he is the one in green.

Go have a laugh at my expense and watch the video

Click here to view the embedded video.

Believe it or not, a lot of people want to be involved with a start up.  Of those, most people don’t want to take any of the risk.  Of course, they still want to take all of the credit for success and that creates a problem for you.  You will find many people, generally middle-aged men, who want to help out.

Free labor – awesome!  Not so fast.  You’re idea may be cool but you have to keep the perspective that if they could have done a start up, they would have.  I think the expression goes “success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.” In other words, people want to be associated with something cool but will only want the upside.

Okay, so the worse case scenario is that people help you only when times are good.  That’s not so bad, is it?  Well, when times are good, sure.  But dependable people are incredibly valuable to a company and especially an early stage venture.  You, as the CEO, need to know whom you can count on.  When people do not have a vested interested in your success beyond bragging rights (which they are going to claim regardless of their effort) they do not have the proper incentive to work as hard as you do.  The net effect is exactly what happens at the Salvation Army – they have way too many volunteers, but only on Christmas and Easter.  The rest of the time they are understaffed.

And there is a darker side to this equation.  Some people do want to take an equity stake in your business in return for their work.  Be careful here.  I encountered many people who were more than happy to help me come up with a “fundraising strategy” where their payment was in a percentage of the cash and an equity stake.  Oddly, they still wanted a ton of cash (on top of the percentage) for me to fly them out to California and were even reluctant to help me pitch.  Needless to say, I didn’t engage people like that.

But sadly, it does get worse.  I found another group of eager people who were happy to help you with your business.  This group of people was generally made up of has-been traders from third tier shops looking for any work they could find.  These people tried to sell me on their “industry experience” and their ability to raise money.  Of course, they wanted a huge equity stake for their token efforts and provided little real value.

Making matters even worse – when someone has an equity stake, no matter how small, they feel entitled to exert significant pressure in how you run your business.  (As an aside – if they have options, they technically have zero say until they exercise them.)

So, we have three groups of people:

• People who want to say they helped
• People who want to help but take no risk
• People who want to take advantage of a young and dumb entrepreneur

Okay, so take the population of people who want to help and filter these three groups out.  Who is left? Well fuck.  Pretty much no one.

Don’t misunderstand me – there is value in having someone help you with fundraising or to give you advice as a new entrepreneur but be careful who you choose.

So how do you pick your first few founding members?  Try this exercise – go on a car trip with them.  In my case, that is a drive from Ithaca, NY to NYC.  It is about 4 hours and I can guarantee that within the first 20 minutes you will know if you can work with this person.

LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO WORK WITH PEOPLE YOU DON’T LIKE

What to look for in your first few employees

• Do you like them?
• Are they do-ers or delegate-ers?
• Would you trust them to watch your house?

Seriously.  That is the primary criteria that I would use to find a short list of potential co-founders.  The people in the first group were automatically weeded out by the very nature of their person and the three questions above.

Technical ability or business is important, but they are worthless if the above three criteria are not met.  You can correct a poor corporate structure.  You can recover from poor product decisions.  You cannot recover if your team splits.

The reality is that you probably already know your co-founders.  You probably have someone in mind.

My (bad) Advice:

If you have a great idea but you cannot execute it by yourself and you don’t trust your team – DON’T DO IT.

In a previous post I talked about the perils of outsourced software development.  I mentioned that in one case we worked with a development team who took an equity stake in our company and they were, for all intents and purposes, co-founders.  And, I hated their founder from day one.  I actually got in a large argument with my to other “real” co-founders and adamantly stated that I would rather not start Rovrr than to work with this firm.  In the end, I was convinced to use them (primarily because of the lack of other options) and all I have to show for it is a few wasted years of my life and an ulcer named ******* *****.

Founding a company is like a marriage.  If you don’t think the partners are going to get along, don’t do it.

The headline might sound like a bit of an exaggeration but in the last 8 years of my life working on and with startups, I’ve found plenty of examples why fully outsourced IT has failed but no good example of when it has worked out as planned.  Sure, there will be bias in my analysis but, ceteris paribus, it is a recipe for disaster.

I’m not going to preach or try to give logically reasoned arguments.  I like to tell stories so that is the approach I am going to take. I may fudge details slightly to hide identities but I have first hand experience with the anecdote below.

Hear me out:

First Story:

I was looking at a company for a potential investment and we all agreed that the market was sufficiently large and that it appeared, at least on the surface, that the company had a minimum viable product.  They had some people with domain expertise which to us, seemed like a critical factor.  So far, so good.

Then they drop a bombshell.  “We have outsourced our software development.”  Let me see – they are selling a software product and do not actually engineer it.  But it gets better.  “We don’t currently own the exclusive rights to the code.”  Okay, now, not only has this company invested time and money in to developing the software, they don’t explicitly own it.

It is true that the work-for-hire principles will provide them some protection but they are missing one key element – EXCLUSIVE rights to it.  In other words, they are fucked.  Based on their contract, the development firm has as many rights to use the code as the company we were looking at.  The development firm can rebrand the product, use the same code base, and sell a competing product.

To make matters worse – the development firm was “negotiating” with the company that we were looking at for the exclusive rights to the code.  You don’t need to do a Porter’s Five Forces analysis to see who has the upper hand here.

PASS

Second Story

This event takes place a few years before story one but this happened to me.  I was developing an advertising platform (Rovrr) and we did not have the funds to hire an in house developer.  We did not have the sex appeal of Facebook so we couldn’t attract developers that way.

After much debate, we decided to go with a software firm that would end up taking an equity stake in our company in addition to cash payment as we received funding.  We though that the equity stake would align our interests and ensure that the software firm would be working with us.

Again, big fucking mistake.  The abridged version is that as we were raising funds, the software firm was worried that we would dilute them and they weren’t happy with our payments to date.  They knew the risks of the venture and yet they wanted an investment with a low Beta and a high return.  It doesn’t work like that.

So what did this firm do?  They held our code hostage.  That’s right.  They locked us out of Subversion and threatened to take our servers offline.  I personally walked over to the firm unannounced and convinced the moron in charge that turning off the hosting was a bad idea.  That solved the immediate problem but the long term problem was that they were asserting ownership over the code.

Believe it or not, VCs are somewhat risk averse.  They want to minimize risk as much as possible and a company where ownership of the intellectual property and assets are disputed is, not shockingly, unattractive.

The development firm’s halted our institutional funding and eventually killed the company.

Final Story

I was working at a company where the substantial portion of the IT was outsourced and no one was ever happy with the work we received.  The majority of my time was spend overseeing and reviewing their work and creating painfully explicit documents with pixel-level precision to prevent any unintended interpretation of my instructions.

I used still screen captures, screen recordings, videos, audio notes, thick decks with notes and diagrams on every page.  I tried writing out long Word documents explain what we were doing.  I had nightly phone calls with the developers to make sure that they were on track.  And in the end – things still weren’t right.

This wasn’t specific to any one firm; it happened with everyone we hired. It was a huge waste of time and, sadly, on two occasions we decided to kill projects instead of finishing them because of the cost overruns.  The budgets were always exceeded because the developers never got anything right the first, second…. or thirtieth time.  They kept accruing billable hours and taking their sweet time.

We tried mitigating the issue by instituting milestones and checkpoints.  We would review the developers work with the head of the firm and still, the problems kept happening.  We could never (with any firm) get a fixed price per project to mitigate our risk and even with the signoff procedures in place, things still look longer than we could afford.  Launching a product a year late is not a great start to any business or new product.

Epilogue

Outsourced developers serve a purpose and not all teams are equal.  Some are intuitive and produce great work the first time.  Other firms need 500 revisions to get anything usable.

The problem stems from misaligned incentives.  When you have someone who gets paid by the hour – you are paying them to make mistakes and paying them to fix this mistakes they created.  There isn’t the same level of accountability that there is with internal employees.

I want to clarify that this is NOT a rant against developers.  It is about misaligned incentives.  For brevity I omitted many of the things that I tried to do to address problems.  I have had positive relationships with some development firms but by central argument that a firm should not wholly depend on third party developers still stands.

Lastly, if you do outsource your IT, you – and no one else – must own and control the software version control and the hosting.  You don’t want to be taken hostage so don’t give anyone else that power.

Update: Read Part 2

• GPS (1.57542 GHz, 1.2276 GHz)
• GLONASS – Russian GPS-like service (1602 Mhz +/- 4Mhz)
• WiFi (2.4Ghz)
• Voice & Data (800, 850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100 Mhz)
• Bluetooth –(2400-24800 MHz)

That’s an impressive collection for such a small gadget.  Now let’s think about what else is in your apartment.

• WiFi router b/g/n  (2.4 GHz)
• WiFi router y (3.6GHz)
• WiFi router a/h/n/j (5GHz)
• Digital Broadcast Television
• Analog Radio (AM)
• Analog Radio (FM)
• XM Radio
• Satellite television
• Baby Monitor
• Cordless phones
• Family Radio Service (462.5 MHz)

But why stop at that list?  There are tons more things streaming though your house even if you don’t use them.  For example

• GOES satellite communications
• Police/Fire/Ambulance radios
• WiMax
• Microwave radio
• Military communications
• HAM radio

I spent 5 minutes writing this list and I am probably missing 90% of the wireless spectrum in use.  If you notice that I stopped listing frequencies it is because some of these use large swaths of spectrum and operate on hundreds of channels (digital television).

Okay, so what is the point of this?  Well, I believe it is inevitable that we will have to start investing in alternative forms of wireless communication.  If you don’t believe me, consider this example:

AT&T was willing to pay $39 Billion for T Mobile.  Sure, the customers were part of the value but AT&T really wanted T Mobile’s spectrum.  In other words, AT&T was willing to pay $39 Billion to enable it to expand its wireless data offering.  Since the deal has fallen though, AT&T has stated that it is competitively disadvantaged and will look for spectrum licenses from other sources.

Right now, few people hit their 2 or GB data cap from their wireless provider. But that will change and it will change quickly.  Pandora’s major growth is from wireless subscribers. (Source: Pandora’s S-1 ) Do you think that Netflix will have similar trends?  Probably.  What about older sources of data use – has your email box gotten smaller in the last 5 years?  Have you started browsing the web less?  Have you cut back on your YouTube use?

So what’s the solution?  There are two large and under-loved areas of investment.

Radio Technology – When I say radio technology it usually conjures up sepia toned images of Marconi in his lab surrounded by large loops of wire in a crude setup.  Of course, that is only tangentially what I mean. Specifically, I am talking about devices like software-defined radios.

Software-defined radios are devices that have minimal hardware requirements and replace much of the signal processing with software. (Wikipedia Overview)  This means that you can switch frequencies, modulation techniques or even offer improved radio capabilities with a simple software update.  Imagine a device that intelligently selects a slice of spectrum with minimal interference based on its physical location.

Another area of radio technology that needs more attention are, what I will call, precision radios.  These are devices that intelligently filter out noise and can operate within a strict slice of the spectrum and are not subject to interference from neighboring broadcasts.  Right now, the spectrum is allocated and buffers are built between frequency ranges to prevent one device from interfering with other devices.  In practice, this means a huge percentage of usable bandwidth is just discarded because manufacturers want to use cheaper radios and poorer quality designs.

A great example of this is the whitespace debate.  The National Association of Broadcasters hired world-renowned physicists like Dolly Parton and the Dixie Chicks to talk about how allowing unused frequencies will ruin live performances.  The NAB lost, the frequency was reallocated, and concerts and theatrical shows everywhere continued on without problems.

Optical Networking is one more area that needs more attention.  More specifically, I mean cable-less optical networking.  The proliferation of LED lighting has enabled manufacturers to introduce data transmission capabilities in to overhead lighting.  They operate at a modulation frequency too high for humans to see but provide enormous bandwidth potential.   For a great overview, see this MIT Technology Review article.

The basic principle is that your laptop may have a few LED’s and receives on it.  They would likely be infrared and invisible to you.  In fact, they can be hidden behind a layer of black glass (think about your MacBook bezel) and completely hidden.  The receiver/transmitter would be the overhead lighting in your office and the communication would be largely local.  In other words, you would not be broadcasting to everyone in a 1,000m radius – only devices nearby could receive the signal.  Not only does this increase security but it enables bandwidth optimization.  You are no longer competing for 50Mbps WiFi bandwidth with 100 other co-workers.  You are now just competing for a slice of 1,600Mbps of bandwidth among 10 users.

Alternatively, companies like LightPointe are building optical data bridges between buildings.  Imagine a University campus or a company with multiple buildings nearby using devices that look like small microwave transmitters to connect across campus at multi-gigabit speeds.  You would no longer need to acquire the spectrum license and you would not need to dear up any ground to lay optical networking cable.

Neither of these optical technologies are new but they have not been positioned to reach consumer and small/medium businesses.

I am not in a position to develop an investment theme (I’m currently a student) but it strikes me that alternative data communications and radio technology could be a fruitful technology given both the bandwidth superiority and the impending bandwidth crunch. If I were starting a new fund, this is an area I would seriously consider investing in.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Official site: http://joesparks.com/radiskull/episodes/e01/playback.htm

The logo idea came from Robert Rudelius and I were at a whiteboard sketching out a few designs, capturing them with a camera phone, and sending them to the designer.  (The Metadata for the original sketch below show it was taken at Friday, December 21, 2007).  The original version was a knockoff of the old Engadget logo

There are still some critical issues to overcome – for example parsing images to tell what people are talking about is a major challenge.  Services like TinEye may be able to help with that but the core concept is still valid.  People talk about products, influence their friends, and create value.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(For reference, here is a demo video we made for Rovrr.  More can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Rovrr/videos)

Click here to view the embedded video.