Attention, all you (Guerrilla) Marketing type out there. I had a moment of inspiration this morning and wanted to share a new idea with you!

The idea involves adding a company’s advertisement, brand, or message to company email addresses through the use of subdomains.

For example suppose you had a company with a new product… you could change everyones email addresses to something like: jdoe@check.out.the.cool.new.widget.at.obility.net or Jane.Doe@voted.number.one.in.customer.satisfaction.is.obility.net. Or you could even advertise/reward your top performing employees by doing something along the lines of John.Smith@employee.of.the.month.for.July.2007@obility.net. Just think of the reach your brand/message could get using this form of advertising.

Ok, maybe its a little silly and complicates writing emails, but that has yet to be sufficient reason to prevent advertising/marketing folk from implementing a marketing idea.

If you have any questions about this post, you can reach me at Joe.Scharf@is.the.coolest.blog.poster.in.the.world.at.dt.obility.net

Just now installed the Me.dium update to their firefox plugin. What a great makeover - seems a lot more intuitive and the “talk” area has been cleaned up quite a bit. Seems it’s more obvious who is saying what, from where, and also has some nice hover effects. It also seems that the web cloud/map is much more responsive to navigation across different links/pages.

Now I wonder if it would be possible to have a plugin mode that takes up less browser real-estate. My browser side-bar is becoming a coveted spot, and apparently can only handle one site/plugin at a time. I’ve been using the SlimTimer sidebar to track some work I’ve been doing, and this conflicts with the Me.dium plugin.

Perhaps a simple option to show the number of sites in the cloud, along with number of people at those sites in the Firefox status bar. That way you could probably get a good indication if you’re in a high traffic area worth investigating by invoking the me.dium plugin. Additionally, the ability to send messages to others browsing in your area is nice, but not always necessary and I believe the important information is contained in the sites around you as well as the number of people visiting those sites.

Just my two cents, FWIW, but kudos to the me.dium folks for the shiny new plugin.

For around a year now, I’ve been using a external USB hard drive to store backups of my two year old’s DVDs. Streaming the video from a hard drive is the only way to ensure the integrity of the movie as my two year old has a tendency to quickly render the physical DVD unreadable. Anyhow one of my biggest concerns with using external drives is the fact that there is no redundancy to the data. Sure I could manually backup my entire video collection to another external hard drive, but that seems way to inefficient to be the best possible solution.

That got me thinking that it would be great to have a device, similar to your standard USB Hub, that had RAID capability built in. Connect one end to your computer, and connect two (or more) drives to the available ports on the other side, configure the device to your desired flavor of RAID (1, 5, whatever), and start filling it up with your data, knowing the whole time that should one of the drives fail, your data will be safe.

Sure, a USB-RAID mechanism might not be the speediest thing out there (due to the USB bottleneck), but if you’re using it to store media (video, music, photos) that don’t change very often, speed might not be such an issue as most of the time you’ll be reading the data rather than writing it.

Infrant is a cool company that I’ve been following for some time now as well as recommending their ReadyNAS line of products to individuals that have mass storage needs. Looks like they were just purchased by NETGEAR for $60 million in cash and a $20 million earn-out over three years. Nice. Infrant’s mission statement says that they’re “…dedicated to bringing enterprise-level storage technology to the masses at affordable prices”

The ReadyNAS line of products (especially the ReadyNAS NV+) offers network attached storage (up to 3TB) as well as RAID 0/1/5/X-RAID capabilities. It has four bays for SATA hard drives, and is a lot sleeker and smaller than it looks in their promotional material. They also have ability to add third-party software “plugins” such as the Slim Devices Slim Server to allow the ReadyNAS to seamlessly integrate your music collection into your music distribution system. Personally, I think the ReadyNAS guys should really focus on this plugin capability and continue to build out support for other applications out there.

Going forward, I believe there are going to be more offerings (such as the ReadyNAS) that narrow the price/feature gap between the enterprise and the masses. If Google doesn’t buy you out, I think your hardware vendors such as Netgear, Linksys (Cisco), etc. are watching and waiting to pick the right upcoming companies at the right time.

So I’m on the second season of 24 and I was contemplating the show the other day. This lead me to think about things of a counterintelligence nature such as the common practice of “wearing a wire.” And then I got to thinking, why can’t normal people wear a wire every day around the clock? In fact, why can’t you have the equivalent of Tivo for your own personal day-to-day interactions? And not so much to secretly gather intelligence or hold people to their word (although it could be very useful for that) but to be able to rewind, replay, or store pieces of your daily life for replay, analysis, or sharing with others.

I imagine this device would be a discreet wearable piece of consumer electronics about the size of the new iPod Shuffle. It would have an embedded microphone, some flash and a minimalistic user interface similar to the iPod Shuffle. The MeVo as I am calling it for purposes of discussion would record the conversations and events of the user’s day on a continuous loop. If the user wanted to save a piece of conversation, the user could repeatedly press a button on the interface indicating the amount of conversation he/she wished to save, say in increments of 10 minutes or so. A confirmation beep would indicate that this piece of the conversation has been stored to a special area of flash. The remaining flash would then be used to resume continuous looped recording of the user’s day. Perhaps a deluxe model would allow immediate review of the conversation with an attachable headphone and rewind/fast-forward buttons. Now if I could only figure out a way to get the MeVo pause button to bring life to a stand-still while I go to the fridge to grab a beer…

I was reading Liz Ryan’s column in Business Plus this morning, “Who’s lucky anyway?” and she hit the nail on the head regarding resume gaps and returning-to-the-workforce moms. I quote:

“It’s absurd, Employers behave as though moms managing busy kids and households are utterly without marketable skills. That gap on the resume is as off-putting to them as garlic to a vampire. That’s a shame.”

I couldn’t agree more. And I believe this applies not only to returning-to-the-workforce moms but to everyone as a whole. Especially in this day and age when employees may not be as married to their employment as employers would like. I know many folks that have taken time off to go climb a mountain, explore a foreign country, sail the oceans, be with their family, or generally enjoy life for a period of time. Maybe this is just my experience living in Boulder, anyhow.

The common practice by HR and Recruiters that involves filtering out resumes with temporal gaps in their employment history is ridiculous. Should I take some time of for whatever reason, that doesn’t mean I’ve all of a sudden forgotten everything I’ve learned. In fact I’d argue that in many instances (Ahem, Aerospace for example) many employees sometimes go months or years at a time working on tasks that do not involve their core competencies. I know many colleagues that have spent six, maybe twelve months writing countless amounts of useless technical documentation, not touching a single line of code during that time. Perhaps you HR folk, and especially you employment Recruiters should start doing your job and find a better way to deal with this overwhelming resume burden that you are faced with each day. Filtering on simple typos and resume gaps well, give me a goddamn break.

A friend of mine introduced me to Hamachi a few days ago. Since then I’ve finally gotten around to installing it and playing with it, and I’m really impressed. Hamachi bills itself as a zero-configuration Virtual Private Networking (VPN) application. I personally like to think of it as a zero-configuration Virtual Private LAN application as that is basically what it allows you to create - virtual LANs over the Internet.

What this means is that using Hamachi, you can finally eliminate your traditional VPN endpoint and use Hamachi to securely transport traffic destined for your LAN over the Internet (WAN) For example, take typical Windows / Samba file sharing. Without Hamachi, you would have to connect to a VPN on your home network to access any file shares in your LAN. With Hamachi installed and configured on the server(s) in your LAN, you can access them over the Internet via the Hamachi service without the need to have a VPN connection established to your home network.

Hamachi comes in a free and paid service, is a very simple, straightforward installation, and is compatible with Windows, OS X, and Linux. I have performed the install on all three of these operating systems and it is very straightforward (even the console installation for Linux and OS X is quick and relatively painless). I have successfully used Hamachi from a foreign network and it works just fine.

Hamachi supports NAT to NAT traversal and is able to establish peer-to-peer communications between nodes in 95% of all cases. Hamachi uses industry-standard security algorithms and protocols, and uses an open security architecture allowing verifiability of all security implementations by third parties. When connecting two nodes, Hamachi makes every attempt to connect the nodes directly, but has the capability to use a relay server when direct connections are not possible. Hamachi can also be used to connect LAN segments through some creative routing. With this option you can install Hamachi on a single computer in your LAN and have it act as a gateway to all the machines on your LAN. Pretty sweet and very useful.

If you often connect to file shares at your home network, but haven’t found a good solution for accessing these shares when you’re away, you should consider taking a look at Hamachi. Hamachi is also good for remote desktop sessions, iTunes streaming, gaming, and securing your email, if your email servers lack TLS capabilities.

I was just going through some email today and came across a Transmeta alert from Yahoo finance talking about the new OQO model 02. Not having followed Transmeta or OQO for some time now, I was excited to hear about this news (guess they released it back in January). I just now checked out the specs and prices for the Model 02. Pretty sweet.

I like the redesign. Now uses a 1.5GHz VIA processor (no more Transmeta), 60GB hard drive, and runs Vista. Wireless WAN, Wifi, and Bluetooth are standard. Has a nice docking station, HDMI port to connect to external monitor which it can drive at resolutions up to 1920×1200. Prices range from $1499 to $1899, offering a better range of prices than was available with the model 01. A review and OQO’s website for those interested. And hey, OQO, if you’re reading this, why don’t you send me one so I can do a long-term review on it!

Cool term for something that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about and working on for several years now. Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention, but I just came across the term for this market of products a month or two ago when listening to the CTEK Angels Live podcast of the MoodSeer product. I must say I am slightly amazed that we aren’t further along in this category yet (oh yeah, we were also supposed to have interplanetary space travel at the turn of the millennium), but according to the MoodSeer presentation at the LivePitch event, this market is expected to grow by 70B between now and 2011. I also believe this market will be experiencing a large deal of growth as I think the technology is available to create products at costs that are reasonable.

My personal interest in this area has rendered itself in the form of a a PBX serving the voice (telephone) needs of my home and home office, digital music available throughout the home via a centralized music collection and the Squeezeboxes, a whole house audio distribution system via the Zon whole house audio system. Various servers for sharing my photos and video collection with family and friends, along with serving several domains, web, and email.
One idea I was thinking about around a year ago and started tinkering with was the simple idea of having something like all the clocks in your house connected to your home network (wired or wireless). The idea involves throwing a small Linux buildroot onto some cheap embedded hardware and have it display accurate time (synchronized to the atomic clock of your choice courtesy of ntp). The software would be simple, and the hardware not too complex. I even attempted to implement this using the Gumstix platform hooked up to an LCD.

The idea is that Linux+ntp would keep your clock synchronized at all times, especially when the power comes back on from a power failure, or daylight savings time goes into effect. I figured you could hook this up to the Ethernet network in your home, or probably would be a good candidate for wireless, perhaps Zigbee would be the physical layer of choice here, as 802.11 might be overkill and also expensive to implement.

Currently, my collection of Squeezeboxes serve as my rudimentary implementation of network-sycnhrnoized clocks throughout the home. I also use them to display the incoming caller ID (name and phone number) for any calls coming into the house, courtesy of a simple Asterisk AGI script I cobbled together.

Ambient Devices

I ran across Ambient Devices a month or two ago when I was playing around with the Google Calendar. They seem to be doing exactly what I described in the last couple paragraphs. Currently they have a few products, including the Weather Wizard that displays the current weather for five cities directly from accuweather.com. They also have a number of cool looking orbs that communicate information (from the Internet) through subtle changes in the color of an orb-looking device sitting on your desktop (or attached to the handle of the umbrella they sell) Pretty cool concept, and is true to their “Ambient” company name. They also sell their chipset and seems that their chipset is embedded in a LG “Weather Plus” refrigerator.

Ambient Clock

Anyhow, the Ambient Clock is what got my full attention. Not yet in physical product form, but currently a Google plugin, this concept clock connects to your Google Calendar, and not only shows you the current time synchronized to the network, but also has a unique way of displaying the time and duration of upcoming appointments for the day. The mechanical chassis design is really slick looking as well.

I only imagine that additional products that could fit the market that Ambient is targeting include things like:

1. A digital rolodex that sits next to your phone (heck maybe it’s embedded in the phone) and lookup addresses and phone numbers for your contacts in a LDAP or online database of sorts
2. A digital recipe manager that sits in your kitchen and is connected to your favorite online cooking site (cooking light, food network, etc…). It lets you lookup and conveniently display your favorite recipes as you prepare your meals.
3. Further the clock idea by offering a network-connected alarm clock - never worry about the time resetting to power outage. Alarm wakes you up to an Internet radio station or MP3. I guess the Squeezebox does this to an extent already.
4. A device that monitors and alerts you to a powder day for the skiers out there, Great surf conditions for the surfers, or open tee times at the local club for the golfers.

Ok, well a somewhat lame list of other uses, I had some more examples a while back but can’t seem to recall some of them at the moment. Plus I need to get back to studying for midterms this week.

I attended the LivePitch event at the CU Law School this morning presented by FundingUniverse and TechStars, and figured I may as well share some of my notes on the companies pitching.

The angels panel consisted of David Cohen, David Brown, Jared Wandry, Bob Smartt, and Bill Treadwell

The presenters and their presentations along with some of my thoughts (none involving any actual due diligence other than today’s pitch and any prior knowledge I may have about the company) :

Livengood Engineering

• Problem: patient mobility in hospitals
• Solution: Wheeled cart that supports a patient’s medical monitoring devices, IV stand, and medical supplies that they can push around the hospital.
• Takes up same footprint as a typical IV stand
• Final version exists, is sleeker and modular
• Only product in category and concept promises many future products and markets such as military
• IP and patents exist - product isn’t just a cart on four wheels - must be made safe for patients to use.

My thoughts: Very useful device and well designed (footprint of IV stand is important and the modularity of the final product is a good idea) solves a problem that I personally have never thought much about, but now I realize has some major potential. I gave these guys the bulk of my monopoly money, even though medical field is not really my bailiwick. It just made sense and seemed like the best business model and opportunity.

Magic Home Entertainment

• Problem: Large music collections and physical music distribution issues in home make it difficult to be a music aficionado these days.
• Solution: MoodSeer is a whole house audio music distribution system targeted at high-end audio enthusiasts. Supports multiple zones and a main theater zone to give whole house distribution.
• Is wireless so no physical damage or modification of a residence required.
• Targets Connected home electronics market: 15B now, projected to be 85B by 2011
• Targeting high end audio enthusiast that already has typically 30-40K sunk into their audio components alone
• Competitors are Sonos (sold 50K units in first year and a half), Harmony (bought out by Logitech)

My thoughts: I was pretty excited to hear the MoodLogic pitch as I only found out about them a little bit ago through their pitch at CTEK Angels Live. Being really interested in the digital home / whole house audio, I wanted to see if this technology was something I should consider for personal use in my home. After talking to the founders, I realized this product 1. Can’t stream from auxiliary devices such as a TV or XM radio as it is specifically used for streaming digital music i.e. MP3, FLAC. 2. Does not support synchronized music throughout the home. This seems to be due to the lack of determinism of their wireless physical layer. It’s also something I tried to accomplish with the Slim Devices squeezeboxes, but worked only marginally at best.

For $10,000 per installation, and having the first two problems, I really wonder what I’d be getting for all this money. The Zon system in my house ran $4000 for four zones, and add a few SqueezeBoxen to stream the music and maybe you’re at $5000 tops. Yes, I ran a bunch of cat 5 to support the whole house audio / Ethernet network, but synchronized zones is in my opinion the main point of whole house audio, especially when your house isn’t all that big to start with! I’ll still continue to watch this company as I’m sure as development proceeds they’ll work out some of these deficiencies. Going the wireless route to stream synchronized music might require some implementation of determinism at the protocol level. I doubt 802.11n has that yet. And then you have to worry about scaling and interference, and probably a million other things. Yikes. Makes me want to go rip up my drywall and install some more Cat5.

Kerpoof

• Problem: Providing active entertainment for children
• Solution: Kerpoof, an Internet destination for kids.
• Provides an interactive and dynamic creative environment for kids to design artwork and scenes
• Allows you to create an outline rendered version that you can print out and let the kids color themselves (cool)
• Kerpoof sees the need as companies struggling to get their message out to kids.
• They make money through advertising, branded scenes, charge per use and per traffic/time spent on the scene.
• Parnership exists with Kidz magazine, have 5 paying customers and about 3 other similar competitors

My thoughts: Initially I was perturbed by the advertising supported business model on a concept that is targeting children. I’m not a fan of the current state of advertising everywhere, and I really don’t think kids need to be subject to it either. I spoke with Krista Marks, CEO and in addition to giving me a better feeling for the advertising aspect stressed Kerpoof as a means for active entertainment versus flash-based sites that are more passive, television-style. Their site, design, and implementation of the service is pretty slick, especially with the dynamic nature of the clip art collections and their effect on the scene renderings. Being able to create the instant coloring books pages is really nice as well.

Torii Medical

• Problem: Catheter securement targeting IV therapy
• Solution: Hydrogel based catheter securement device
• Saves in IV catheter restart costs (70% of IV theraputic cases require a restart)
• Saves in costs associated with infections due to catheters that come loose and breach the vessel wall, costs that run around $25,000 per incident, not withstanding emotional and physical trauma
• The device is easily applied, and is basically a hydrogel, which is normally used in burn patients, but with a reformulated stronger adhesive that can last up to four days per application.

My thoughts: Interesting concept and product and a pretty large market. The presenter mentioned on a number of occasions that they are rendering their competitor’s product obsolete, however I imagine their competitors will be quick to come up with a version of their own, so I wonder if they can sustain their advantage.

Chaperon

• Problem: Protecting your source code (software) from theft and piracy.
• Solution: Lock it down with the Chaperon system,
• Chaperon server is composed of open source software
• Server uses public key security technology to prevent copying the software repository, disables copy and print functions of development environment (IDE)
• Currently getting a lot of traction in the offshore software development outsourcing markets.
• Chaperon uses a pay-per-use subscription model - recurring revenue.
• Currently works with Eclipse IDE and netbeans

My thoughts: Kudos to Chaperon, leveraging open source to tackle this problem. I’m an open source advocate and believe there’s a lot of untapped potential in that space. As a software engineer by trade, I would more than likely refuse to work for a company that imposed a system like Chaperon on my development. 1. I believe it imposes additional constraints on the developer. 2. I can’t PRINT my source code every now and then for code reviews and debugging? Give me a break! Don’t make me look at the crappy (single) display most companies procure for their developers longer than I have to. 2.5 Currently limited to Eclipse IDE and netbeans. I’m a SlickEdit / TextPad / Emacs / vi fan, so I guess I have to throw those development environments away

3. I’m not really a fan of big configuration management and version control systems (Synergy, Clearcase - although Clearcase’s MVFS was really nice). Chaperon sounds similar to these. My experience is that it is very cumbersome to develop under these systems, and often requires a steep learning curve. Give me Subversion and TRAC, any day. 4. I question the operating policy and motives of companies that don’t trust their own developers. 5. How is Chaperon immune to a simple screen capture program, digital or video capture devices, simple pen and paper or things of that nature? I guess if a developer wants the code bad enough, There may be other non-technical ways to subvert the system (disclaimer: I haven’t done my due diligence in this department yet)

I will say that this system may be useful in protecting source code IP as companies leverage offshore / outsourced talent. But I guess as far as outsourcing to Bangalore goes, you get what you pay for, and Chaperon only increases the overhead costs (even if only to a minor extent) of those outsourcing activities.

The Winner Is

So those were the five companies that pitched at this event. Prizes were awarded to the audience and panel favorites. Prize award to each winner was a $500 cash contribution and $500 of in-kind legal services from Holme, Roberts & Owen, LLP. The audience picked Chaperon as their favorite (received $770 in total monopoly money), and the Panel chose Livengood Engineering’s “patient mobility cart.” All in all, it was a good event and a great selection of presenting companies.