5 Finishers in the DARPA Grand Challenge

I was fortunate enough to find time in my schedule to swing by the DARPA Grand Challenge in Primm, NV. Impressively, 5 teams finished the 132 mile course. Stanford Racing Team's Stanley came in with the fastest time, thus winning the $2M purse.

Deconstructing US Mobile Operators' Dominance, Part I

I don't trust my mobile operator, do you? I believe this sentiment comes from a loss of control: I'm locked in because of my term contract and I have no idea what my bill is going to be at end of the month. Prior to phone number portability, my phone number and therefore my identity was held hostage by my mobile operator. This anxiety has caused me to minimize my relationship with my mobile operator. I've opted not to adopt their menu of new services (e.g. data plans) thinking that each additional services is another opportunity for them to milk me on overage charges. The mobile operators, wanting to improve their ARPU ("are-pooh", Average Revenue Per User) and reduce churn, are really working against themselves by fostering a sense of distrust with their subscribers. Unfortunately, I don't think they'll change their business tactics. So I ask, why are mobile operators in the US able to exert such control over its subscribers? And in follow-up blog entries, we'll assess why their power stiffles innovation and what will cause them to losen their grip?

Why are Mobile Operators so Powerful in the US?
In my simplistic view of the world, there are two primary reasons for this uniquely American phenomenon. (1) We consumers fall for the free/subsidized handset bait, and (2) the myriad of network types makes it nearly impossible for consumers to purchase a handset independent of the mobile operator. The two reasons are interwined. Because most handsets and given/subsidize/sold by mobile carriers, third-party handset vendors in the US are essentially non-existent. And if you can find one, the handset costs are astronomical ($300-$800).

Mobile operators are smart business folks. They calculate the lifetime value of a customer ($40 x 18 months = $720) and figure out how much subsidy they can give up to bait in a new customer ($100). So the average Joe consumer files into the carrier store asking about the free phone promotion. He is hustled a calling plan with a 1 or 2 year term and accepts by providing his credit card. At that point, the mobile operator has got him good. If Joe read his contract carefully, he would have noticed that the cancellation of his contract amounts to about five months of service ($200). However the $40 plan is just the beginning. The sales person will try to "up-sell" him additional services, $2 here, $10 there. Before you know it, he's up to the $70/mo plan. An oh there's more, they're hoping that Joe can't count...minutes, kikobytes [sic.] and SMS messages, so they can charge him $0.35/min after he exceeds his calling plan. In fact, this is such a powerful subscriber "lock-in" model, all the US mobile operators are essentially playing a variant of this game.

The complexity and incompatibility of mobile networks, though not necessarily by design, have given mobile operators another mechanism to control subscribers and a disincentive to unify connectivity across networks. Why change when the going is so good? Because US mobile carriers are buyers of 90+% of the handsets, they control the features and capabilities of the handsets. As a result, they have specified handsets that are incompatible across networks and made it extremely difficult to introduce/distribute content onto/from the handset except though the mobile operator's "walled-garden." (Walled-garden content is a euphemistic term used by industry insiders that translate into: a means for mobile operators to charge toll for every transaction carried out on its network.) The net result of these tactics is that mobile operators can control handset distribution by maintaining incompatible, jargon-ridden networks. They have no incentive to distribute a handset that gives users the freedom to operate outside of their walled-garden.

Am I missing something here, please comment below.

Wikipedia: All the World's Knowledge for FREE

This is not a new revelation, but a recap of one the most interesting Open Source projects. While Open Source typically refers to software development projects such as the Linux kernel, the essence of Open Source movement espouses that knowledge belongs to humanity and not corporations. Wikipedia is a web-based encyclopedia that utilitizes volunteers from all around the world to contribute, edit, and comment on entries. The technology is based around a Wiki, which is a collaborative application that places editorial control to the community at large rather than a select group of editors. Editors are redefined to be contributors who provide "house-keeping" services to the Wiki community.

Wikipedia is a truly global effort in terms of topics, languages and points-of-view supported. The system's strength is in its cross linking capabilities. Just about every noun in Wikipedia is hyperlinked to another entry. The most amazing aspect of the Wikipedia community is the rate at which entries are updated. Today (November 1, 2004), just for kicks, I reread the entry on Osama bin Laden and an asute community member had already updated the news that bin Laden had claimed responsbility for September 11 just a week before. Beat that Brittanica!.

In terms of time scale, Wikipedia is nascent given that it aspires be a continuous chronical of life on Earth. New topics from different cultures, from different times can be appended to this massive fountain of knowledge as contributors with new information discover Wikipedia.

I personally believe that Wikipedia is as important to the internet as Google's search. Google's strength is to provide a sense of order and access to all the world's information (Google's claim anyway). Wikipedia provides structure and a self-sustainable way to organize all the world's knowledge. A powerful concept and tool indeed.

Sharing Photos with Family and Friends

Ever since the dot-com heydays, there have been a plethoria of companies founded to help us share our digital (or digitized) photos with our friends and family. Depending on each service's business motive, the features and annoyance factor varies. I'm going to provide a quick canvas of the tools I'm familiar with and will provide more detailed analysis of the ones I really like in a separate blog.

Photo Sharing Services

Service	Description	Target Audience	Revenue Model
Flickr	A web-based photo sharing service built with collaboration in mind. Beyond just viewing pictures, Flickr encourages its community members to "label" parts of a picture (e.g. "uncle joe") using their novel Flash-based client.	With a "zero-install" client and intuitive user interface, Flickr is targeted towards non-techie users who have the time and interest to organize, label and engage others with their picture collection.	Flickr offers a free basic service and a premium service for high-volume users. It's most likely going to add contextual ads based on it's richly labeled photos in the near future.
Gallery	A server-side application built with PHP. It has a strong role-based permission system and allows viewers to add comments to individual images. There's even a neat utility that integrates iPhoto with Gallery aptly named iGallery.	The installation of this software requires an intermediate level systems administrator. You'll also need access to your own publicly accessible web server running PHP.	Gallery is free (open source) software.
iPhoto + mac.com	iPhoto is Apple's OS X photo organizing software. It connects seamlessly to mac.com, Apple's web service, which includes image hosting.	iPhoto is a simple to use software, which makes it suitable for casual users. Unfortuanately, it's only available for the Mac. For advanced users, iPhoto doesn't process large image files very gracefully.	iPhoto comes free with your Mac. A mac.com subscription is $100/yr. There are no other commerical motives.
Mirra	Mirra sells a computing appliance that you install in your home to backup and share your digital content. Once the files are "mirra'd", you can easily create a web-based photo album. Mirra provides a directory service where friends and family can locate your Mirra server even if it's connected to a transient broadband connection.	If you don't mind spending $400-$600 and have a broadband connection at home, this solution is both easy to use and powerful. It does require that you install an application on each home computer in order to "mirra" your files.	You pay a one-time fee for the hardware and then the basic web service is free. I'm sure they're cooking up ways to upsell you additional services though.
Ofoto	An online photo printing business, which is owned by Kodak and marketed by Amazon.com. You upload your images via a web browser or a small downloadable application. You create galleries to share with friends but only at low-resolution.	If you still like to collect and receive prints, Ofoto is a reasonable service. However if you want to share/distribute original quality digital images, this is not the service for you.	Simply put, they help you "share" your pictures in hope that your friends will purchase prints. If you don't purchase from them after a couple of years, they'll threaten to delete your photos from their system.
PBase	Essentially a hosted version of Gallery where you create albums and share them with the rest of the world (read: no private galleries). They have a global user base and are especially popular amongst digital camera enthusiasts.	PBase is intended for intermediate and advanced users who want to share original resolutions images. If you are concerned about digital copyrights of your images, be sure to downsize your images before uploading them to PBase.	PBase is free for 30 days and then is reasonably priced at $23/yr per 200MB. They even have a feature where random visitors can purchase professional quality prints of your images. There is no advertising component to PBase's business.
Photo.net	More than just a photo sharing site, Photo.net is the original online photo community founded in 1995! There are lots of great tutorials and forums for you to sharpen up your skills and give a helping hand to beginners.	This site is geared towards photo hobbyists. The shared files are typically reduced in size to save storage space and prevent IP theft.	Photo.net is largely a free service funded by "patrons" who donate $30/yr, unobstrusive advertising, and affilate revenue from camera retailers.
Google/Picasa	Recently acquired by Google, it's not clear what Picasa will become. Currently, it's just a mediocre version of iPhoto, which allows you to organize your photos.	For Windows users who need a bit more functionality than Windows Explorer to organize their photos, Picasa is a good start. Knowing Google, web connectivity is forthcoming.	It's free for now, but I'm sure Google is plotting how to monetize photo sharing.
Shutterfly	The original online photo printing service, Shutterfly's service has been aped by Ofoto. They claim better digitally enhanced prints, but it's hard to tell the difference these days.	If you like to share printed photos, Shutterfly is a top-rated service for that. They only offer low-resolution thumbnails for sharing, so their sharing feature won't satisfy the power user.	They make money when you order prints, mugs, albums and calendars. In contrast to Ofoto, they will keep your photo collection online indefinitely.
Webshots	Recently purchased by CNET, Webshots claims to be the most popular photo sharing website. You have to download a client software, which in turn connects to their web hosting service. BEWARE though, their software essentailly takes control of your desktop.	Though geared towards a casual user, I found the Webshots user interface un-intuitive. Webshots upload service also aggressively (over) compresses all the images, which will not satisfy the high-end user.	They're trying to figure out a hundred ways to make money. Banner ads, pop-ups, spam, resetting the homepage on your browser--you name it, they'll try it. I'm going to uninstall this software after this review.

Privacy Settings for Furl

I was playing around with Google's Desktop search today and in the process discovered that Furl allows Google to index my saved pages on Furl! (Just google "furl + userid" and you'll see what I mean) In my opinion, this is a significant privacy violation. So after poking around, I recommend you change the default settings on Furl.

1. Go to http://www.furl.net and login.
2. Click on the "My Settings" tab.
3. Click on the "Preferences" link right underneath the tabs.
4. Change the default privacy setting to "private."
5. Uncheck the "Allow Spiders" option.
6. Click the save button.

These settings should be the default! And they sure don't make it easy for you to make these changes. From this point on, your newly furled pages will be marked private. To convert your current public pages to private pages, follow these instructions:

1. Click on the "My Archive" tab.
2. Click the "Select all" checkbox.
3. On the "More actions..." drop-down, select "Make private."
4. Click on the OK button.
5. Repeat this step for your other furled pages.

A collegue of mine complained that Furl was too hard to use because of all the fields to fill out when you "furl" a page. Well, why catagorize when you have search? I recommend using the "Fast Furl" shortcut instead of the standard "Complete Furl" shortcut. Unfortunately "Fast Furl" doesn't work on all pages (e.g. NYTimes), but they're working on it. In the meantime, I have both Furl buttons on my Firefox shortcut toolbar.

My Furl Wishlist

• default privacy settings to "high"
• support PDF and major binary formats
• detect duplicate pages by content & timestamp and not by URL
• indicate in Firefox if a given page, by URL, has been furled and offer a "refresh furl" link
• understand that some content stories have multiple pages, so group them together
• offer Google search results next to MyFurl instead of Looksmart's
• "GroupFurl" features (more in a later blog)

The Desktop Search Challenge, Part 1

I have been doing lots of testing and thinking on desktop search lately. Since my thinking is constantly evolving, I decided to snapshot some thoughts in my blog as new ideas emerge.

Essential Requirements
1. Quality Search Results
- integrate and correlate search results from all my data sources
- rich file format support including pdf, mp3, photos, zip &c.
- rank results first by date, than by "topic"
- quick preview of a search result

2. User Experience
- multi-modal user interface (more later...)
- UI and visualization to help me discover hidden data relationships
- gentle on system resources
- easily accessible privacy controls
- no "unwanted" ads

3. Data Mobility
- federated search across my computers and web archives
- indentify duplicate documents and deduce document version
- optional sychronization (index or content) with cloud-based storage

4. Outlook Integration
- thread e-mail messages; needs to be more robust than gmail (I don't understand why Outlook still stores "sent mail" into its own separate folder.)
- a threaded message becomes the "document," which provides better context than a individual e-mail
- a learning thesaurus for nick names and abbreviations (e.g. M$ == microsoft)
- select which mail folders to index...Google Desktop Search (GDS) doesn't offer this option today
- index contacts, to-dos, and calendar items

5. Privacy
- no personal data get transferred beyond my computer except during an authorized, federated P2P search
- authenticated user; respect the application or file systems' security settings in search results
- deleteing a file or message triggers the removal of the file from the index
- permit user to "blacklist" certain file, folder, and file types from the index
- select which file folders to index...GDS indexes the entire disk today
- verified identity and strong encryptions for P2P communications and data transfer

New tools for 2004

Here's a quick run down of the most intriguing software that I've run into year to date.

Mozilla Firefox Browser
I've been using Firefox (ne Firebird) since version 0.3. The latest Firefox 1.0PR is stable, speedy and ready for primetime. If you're still using IE, it's high time to switch. Download the latest version at www.mozilla.org. So what makes Firefox such a good browser?

• User-centered design returns control of the browser back to the user
• Tabbed browsing reduces window clutter
• Built in pop-up blocking & Google search (or any search for that matter)
• Fine-grained control on security and privacy
• Ad blocking, Flash animation suppression
• Lots of extensions to customize your browsing experience
• Good performance (though memory footprint is a bit on the heavy side)
• Fewer security vulnerabilities than IE

Copernic Desktop Search
I've tried them all (as of Oct 2004) and Copernic rises to the top simply because it gives the most predictable search results. X1 is similar to Copernic in performance, but Copernic is a better value (it's free). Lookout, recently acquired by Microsoft, provided good results, but had a nasty habit of crashing Outlook. Blinx is cute, but its "conceptual search" technology doesn't always yield the best results. Google's recently released Desktop Search beta is a good first attempt, but the browser based UI and their desire to conform to the "Google search results look" made it hard to use. I do like their client-server architecture though. There's room for much more innovation in the desktop search arena. However, in the mean time, I need a reliable tool to search my volumious e-mail archive.

Furl Bookmarking Service
Furl is a bookmarking tool that not only saves the link but also the entire page content onto Furl's "cloud" service. They're allocating users 5GB of cloud storage! If you do lots of web-based research, this is the must have tool. It allows you to access your saved pages regardless of which computer you're using and it supports both PCs and Macs, IE and Firefox. After you install Firefox, remember to install the Furl extension. It allows you to switch the Google search box into a Furl search box so you can search your Furl archive without having to go to Furl's website.