Voice over IP, is what it stands for.
In short, simplifying the systems that enable you to talk to someone else, with out having to use the old fashioned PBX system of dialing in a 10 digit number on a device that is bound and controlled by a larger carrier.

All you need, is some sort of indexing service so you can easily “click” on a name to establish a connection.

Historically, thats what the phone company did. They set it up so that (once you paid your bill), you could plug a device in to a hole in your wall, and it “just worked”. Dial tone… push some buttons, and you’re talking to mom.

In the world since the advent of major VOIP carriers like Vonage, Skype, and even Voice over IM systems, like having video chat/audio chat with AOL IM, Gtalk, etc… You either had to use a separate system of addresses, like someones buddy name, skype name… etc. *OR* carriers like Vonage, or Skype tied in to the old fashioned PBX based system to dial out to a conventional phone number.

And that all worked, well enough..
Savvy people were probably going to try Vonage or Skype anyway, and could deal with the extra setup of having to pay something and then login to a website, and then use your computer to be a voice recording/broadcasting device to talk to someone on a phone.

Today, Apple just announced how their video chat system is going to work… and they’re claiming “zero setup”…

Scratching my head, I had to think about it for a second, until I realized that … apple is going to figure out how to tell if the names in your phone book, are behind an iphone4… and use that to usurp the use of the phone carrier to work over wifi->broadband->internet as a hole ->broadband->wifi between your iphone, and your friends iphone.

Apple made it so you don’t have to use AT&T to make a phone call.
Next step, they start matching your “phone number” against a “serial number” on the phone, and you’ll never have to use a carrier for iphone communications at all. (assuming your on a network)

They stepped in and did what Vongage / Skype couldn’t do, give you a very well designed device to use.
Skype and Vonage had a buddy list type thing, or at least Skype did, I never bothered with Vonage… so you could talk to other skype people, or you could dial a regular phone number. But that still relied on you transferring data out of another device in to skype.

Now for $299 on June 25th, I can buy a device, that once I sync it, will have all of my numbers, so it can act like a boring old AT&T powered phone (ick)… but somehow, if by apple-magic, it will require zero set up to do video chat over wifi.

If you are a major carrier.
Apple just one upped you, by using the network, and smarts to beat you to the punch.

To me its an exciting advent of the chance that carriers stop being monolithic entities, and free market forces have a better say of how things work. I’ll gladly pay a monthly fee just for BANDWIDTH, if it does everything I want. No need to have a separate bill for TV/Phone/Data… when they’re already just 1’s and 0’s flying over a network to begin with.

Change is good, glad to see it being driven forward.

Written by Jeff Ello
September 8, 2009

Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks

September 8, 2009 (Computerworld) I can sum up every article, book and column written by notable management experts about managing IT in two sentences: “Geeks are smart and creative, but they are also egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business-challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring. To overcome these intractable behavioral deficits you must do X, Y and Z.”

X, Y and Z are variable and usually contradictory between one expert and the next, but the patronizing stereotypes remain constant. I’m not entirely sure that is helpful. So, using the familiar brush, allow me to paint a different picture of those IT pros buried somewhere in your organization.

My career has been stippled with a good bit of disaster recovery consulting, which has led me to deal with dozens of organizations on their worst day, when opinions were pretty raw. I’ve heard all of the above-mentioned stereotypes and far worse, as well as good bit of rage. The worse shape an organization is in, the more you hear the stereotypes thrown around. But my personal experiences working within IT groups have always been quite good, working with IT pros for whom the negative stereotypes just don’t seem to apply. I tended to chalk up IT group failures to some bad luck in hiring and the delicate balance of those geek stereotypes.

Recently, though, I have come to realize that perfectly healthy groups with solid, well-adjusted IT pros can and will devolve, slowly and quietly, into the behaviors that give rise to the stereotypes, given the right set of conditions. It turns out that it is the conditions that are stereotypical, and the IT pros tend to react to those conditions in logical ways. To say it a different way, organizations actively elicit these stereotypical negative behaviors.

Understanding why IT pros appear to act the way they do makes working with, among and as one of them the easiest job in the world.

It’s all about respect

The author goes on to discuss the nature of respect from the perspective of an IT professional and the various character traits that come out of that mind set. How the stereotypes of the nerdy anti social and rude IT person actually are reflections of legitimate frustration among IT workers in an environment that doesn’t support their LOGIC FIRST attitude about getting things done, and being productive.

If you’ve ever even been the guy who helped fix your granmoms computer… let alone work in a “serious” IT environment. This is a great read.

I read it twice in fact when I was linked to it via Twitter, in fact…

I just need to figure out a way of tactfully making my bosses read it… all 3 of them *headache*.

Read on… Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks

Google Waves goodbye to Email…

You can read the official release here…

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

My take on it…
I think, –at least in the world of people who already live and die via google– that we’re about to see a major shift in the way people collaborate and work online in groups.

I already exist in a number of online “communities”, some are more real time then others (chat, vs forum posts), but all of them are obviously “version 1″ of what is possible with the web, and the internet as a whole.

I think with Google Wave we’re going to see a pretty large change in the concepts that people use when describing communication online.

We’re all used to email.
Some of us even use more advanced email systems such as GMail, Zimbra, Chandler and other email systems that try to strech the boundries of what Email is.

I’d venture that most of us also have some sort of Chat Program as well, AOL IM, GTalk, Yahoo, MSN… etc.

No matter how you cut it, they’re seperate things. Only GMail and GTalk have a degree of uniity in how they relate to each other.

Now merge your email, IM communication, and your other online community tools, such as message boards and blogging, RSS feeds (google reader interaction comes to mind), and you can start to form true online communities on the web that are truely real-time collaborative.

I’m really interested in seeing how the interaction of documents and files between different parties can work with this system as well.

Its a lot to wrap your head around, and I know I’m just starting to spend some time seriously thinking about it. Go read the links I put at the top, and enjoy!

Technology as a feature in our lives.
What are the lines between us, and them, and what do we do when a object asks for help?

Some of us spend a lot of time working with computers, and when something goes wrong, we fix it. Not because we should, but because we need it to work.
But what happens when an object, or in this case a mobile robot, who has a purpose that has nothing to do with you, asks for help?

This is a really interesting project, coming out of the ITP program from the Tisch school of the arts at NYU.

In New York City, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

Given their extreme vulnerability, the vastness of city space, the dangers posed by traffic, suspicion of terrorism, and the possibility that no one would be interested in helping a lost little robot, I initially conceived the Tweenbots as disposable creatures which were more likely to struggle and die in the city than to reach their destination. Because I built them with minimal technology, I had no way of tracking the Tweenbot’s progress, and so I set out on the first test with a video camera hidden in my purse. I placed the Tweenbot down on the sidewalk, and walked far enough away that I would not be observed as the Tweenbot––a smiling 10-inch tall cardboard missionary––bumped along towards his inevitable fate.

The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

The Tweenbot’s unexpected presence in the city created an unfolding narrative that spoke not simply to the vastness of city space and to the journey of a human-assisted robot, but also to the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me, was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people’s willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining it’s destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.

I just found this story, and its one of those scientific advances that while not really revolutionary, still is a big step forward in its particular area…

Intuition + Money: An Aha Moment – The New York Times.

In short…

“We have seen a 100 to 500 times increase in sensitivity to light compared to conventional silicon detectors,” said James Carey, a co-founder of SiOnyx who worked on the original experiments as a Harvard graduate student.

This research has resulted in Solar Film technology thats 100 to 500 times more sensitive to light than normal solar film. Thats a big deal…

Hit the jump to read more …

October 12, 2008
Slipstream
Intuition + Money: An Aha Moment
By JOHN MARKOFF

IT started with a Harvard physicist acting on a hunch. It ended up producing a new material, called black silicon, that could have a broad impact on technologies ranging from ultrasensitive sensors to photovoltaic cells.

On Monday, Harvard plans to announce that it has licensed patents for black silicon to SiOnyx, a company in Beverly, Mass., that has raised $11 million in venture financing.

This would never have happened if the physicist, Eric Mazur, and his graduate students had stuck to the original purpose of their research. He says their experience offers a lesson in government financing of science and technology, which is becoming so narrow and applied as to make discoveries like theirs much less likely.

A more narrow focus does have its advantages: for one, it can be more likely to produce an immediate payoff.

But in the current research environment, “you are less likely to be open to serendipity,” said Judith L. Estrin, an electrical engineer and author of “Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy” (McGraw-Hill, 2008).

Black silicon was discovered because Dr. Mazur started thinking outside the boundaries of the research he was doing in the late 1990s. His research group had been financed by the Army Research Organization to explore catalytic reactions on metallic surfaces.

“I got tired of metals and was worrying that my Army funding would dry up,” he said. “I wrote the new direction into a research proposal without thinking much about it — I just wrote it in; I don’t know why.” And even though there wasn’t an immediate practical application, he received the financing.

It was several years before he directed a graduate student to pursue his idea, which involved shining an exceptionally powerful laser light — briefly matching the energy produced by the sun falling on the surface of the entire earth — on a silicon wafer. On a hunch, the researcher also applied sulfur hexafluoride, a gas used by the semiconductor industry to make etchings for circuits.

The silicon wafer looked black to the naked eye. But when Dr. Mazur and his researchers examined the material with an electron microscope, they discovered that the surface was covered with a forest of ultra-tiny spikes.

At first, the researchers had no idea what they had stumbled onto, and that is typical of the way many scientific discoveries emerge. Cellophane, Teflon, Scotchgard and aspartame are among the many inventions that have emerged through some form of fortunate accident or intuition.

“In science, the most exciting expression isn’t ‘Eureka!’ It’s ‘Huh?’” said Michael Hawley, a computer scientist based in Cambridge, Mass., and a board member and investor in SiOnyx.

Black silicon has since been found to have extreme sensitivity to light. It is now on the verge of commercialization, most likely first in night vision systems.

“We have seen a 100 to 500 times increase in sensitivity to light compared to conventional silicon detectors,” said James Carey, a co-founder of SiOnyx who worked on the original experiments as a Harvard graduate student.

Dr. Mazur is an investor in SiOnyx and chairman of its scientific advisory board. As a result of his research, a number of academic and corporate research groups are still exploring the material, which absorbs about twice as much visible light as normal silicon and has the ability to detect infrared light that is invisible to the current generation of silicon detectors.

SiOnyx is already commercializing sensor-based chips as a technology development platform for other companies and for use in next-generation infrared imaging systems.

The new technology has a tremendous cost advantage in that it is compatible with current semiconductor manufacturing plants, according to Stephen Saylor, SiOnyx’s chief executive. It is certain to attract broad attention from a range of industries, including scientific and medical imaging markets.

In the future, the low cost and higher sensitivity of black silicon may also make it a contender in the multibillion-dollar digital camera and video markets, an area currently dominated by silicon and charge-coupled-device sensors.

SiOnyx is continuing to experiment with the photovoltaic properties of black silicon, but Mr. Saylor said the company had no plans to jump into the market to become a solar cell manufacturer. “Our engagement is going to be as a technology provider, not as a producer,” he said.

Instead, he is eager to get a new generation of a supersensitive light detectors into the hands of entrepreneurs and experimenters who will be able to take the technology in unpredictable directions.

AND that is how this technology got to where it is today. To Dr. Mazur, that should be a lesson to technology funding agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency of the Pentagon.

“This is a very strong case in point for funding science for the advancement of science,” he said.

This evening I’m headed up to NYC to visit my brother for a few days. I decided to take Bolt Bus. They say it has wifi, and the price is very good.
So what the hell. It can’t be worse then the China Town bus, can it?

Right now, as I type this, I’m sitting about midway back on the bus, plugged in and on the internet at 75mph headed north on I95. The fall evening has turned dark, and I’m listening to friskyradio typing in to the glow of my monitor as the highway blurs by me in the windows. I’m in a sort of future pause right now, as I see what tomorrow will bring us, and how its already here if you’re looking in the right spot.

In 83 Gibson wrote about a ubiquitous data network. At the time it was raw fantasy with the “internet” as we know it only a sketch on a drawing board, and barely connecting only the most major Universities in the world. His vision was of a matrix of computers, connecting everyone together, making communication and the exchange of data effortless and integrated fully with our daily lives. We’re not quite there yet with the level of Virtual Reality he predicted, but its almost impossible to not find somewhere where I can get on line… and the power to share, collaborate, and integrate that it brings us is amazing.

Case in point.
Obama Iphone App.

The Obama campaign continues to blow the lid off of what you can do with the internet in coordinating grassroots campaign movements. Wired has a great article on how it is connecting people all over the country in a way that has never been done before, for the purpose of grassroots organizing.

And now the Obama campaign has an iPhone app thats leveraging the digital device we have in our pockets to track and manage that same campaign at the level of what you, as a single person can

The ability to share information quickly and effortlessly is the biggest problem with running any organization. Your team can not execute the plan if they don’t have the knowledge to do what you want them to do. The advent of the internet as a way of distributing that information easily was the first step. The devices that most of us carry in our pockets are just waiting for the connectivity to take the next step.

The iPhone, I’ve always said, is the first generation of a new paradigm in connected devices. its easier to use, slicker, better interface, and developed in mind for applications as a small computer, not as a phone. Its screaming for applications that leverage our own personal data, such as your phone book, and GPS sharing, with a larger organizaation that needs you to participate in the mission at hand. Leverage this for any grassroots or low capital oganization that needs to maintain connectivity and organization and you no longer have to have offices, phone trees, or even email if the system communicates the data you need to share exactly how it needs to be consumed at the other end. If that data integrates with you personal knowledge, such as the phone book, or GPS system, you then have the ability of coordinating that data with real action in real time. The Campaign software tracks calls made, and your position when you make the call (its not tracking who, just that a call was made from its interface). This data can be shared with the head quarters, and you’ve instantly got a knowledge network based on not only abstract contact info, but also geospecial relationships. You know know exactly where the holes are in your coverage, and can see whos near by to fill it.

I think its brilliant, and for the purpose of a volunteer force organizing to elect a man president its perfect for their needs.

this *IS* what we’ll see in 4 years, and in 8 years, and I cna’t even imagine in 12 years….

The military has been working on the smart warrior technology that does this for the use of soldiers on the ground for decades, I think a simple iPhone app made it look old, and useless all of a sudden.

I don’t want a day when you can’t unplug.
But the day when everything I need to do my job, and connect with who and what I want to connect with is right around the corner, and I can taste it. The future is in beta, and we’re all testing it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to give up my SuperHawk… But when you just want to roll out, 10 blocks or so. its not as convenient.

I stopped riding 3-4 years ago, after a brutal 3 months of being bounced off the hood of taxi cabs and squished between parked cars and septa buses that don’t seem to notice anything around them. I think I got a flat tire, (which really isn’t that uncommon) and just never got it fixed. Then I bought a motorcycle…

This summer though it seems like everyones got a bike, or buying a bike, or I’m now hanging out with a crowd that has bikes, and they’re always wondering where my bike is… and … soo… now I’m geeking out and trying not to buy a Cannondale Capo, or a Bianchi Pista… and yeah, someone help me.

I mean, how fucking awesome does this look –> http://www.cannondale.com/bikes/08/cusa/model-8PR1.html

I guess I’m looking for a single speed, or maybe a 3 speed, bike… with at least one brake…
I’ll probably end up building it from parts… but yeah… I need to put the money down and just do it so I have something this end of the summer and fall to enjoy.