According to Douglas Adams, there was once an alien race cursed by telepathy. Cursed? Yes, because being aware of every last fleeting, irrelevant thought of their fellow beings was completely unbearable.
The only way that they could block out the noise was by talking loudly and constantly about nothing at all (or by playing host to a Disaster Area concert).
Watch Twittervision for a few minutes and you will understand how they felt.
Guy Kawasaki calls Spinvox "utterly indispensable." Fred Wilson calls Simulscribe "life-changing." David Pogue says that about both of them. So why have so few people heard of them?
I've been using Spinvox for two months. Spinvox replaces my carrier's voicemail system. For callers there is no change, but Spinvox converts their voice messages from speech to text and sends the transcript to me via email and SMS. It is so good that I haven't listened to a voicemail since and with any luck I never will again. Now it takes seconds to check my voicemail, I can do so during a meeting, I know which messages are important, and if the caller leaves a number I can just click on it instead of scrambling for pen and paper and then typing it in. If voicemail is a big part of your life, then Spinvox is indeed life-changing.
So much for the iPhone's 'visual voicemail', the feature that allows you to see who has left voicemail messages and to listen to them separately. Steve Jobs claimed that this required tight integration with a network operator, justifying Apple's exclusive relationship with Cingular. Spinvox is far better than random access to your regular voicemail and far more deserving of the name visual voicemail. And like every other great idea online, it works just fine at the edge of the network.
Spinvox was founded in 2003, won several awards in 2005, and won a major innovation award at 3GSM last year. But they did not announce their first carrier customer - Vodafone - until 3GSM this year. Why aren't they bigger than Elvis?
The problem is that carriers charge us for voicemail by the minute. Lots of companies waste our time. It usually costs them money. Only mobile carriers charge us for wasting our time. In the US we spend almost 100 billion minutes each year leaving or listening to voicemail.
The European market is more complicated. Charges for voicemail vary from one carrier and country to the next. On average mobile phone calls are much more expensive. Only the calling party pays: incoming phone calls are free. Since it costs nothing to receive a call, but it costs money to return a voicemail, a lot of people would rather miss a call - betting that the caller will try again if it's important - than activate their voicemail and be expected to return messages. Hence fewer than 50% of subscribers activate voicemail.
It never seems to occur to zero-sum minute-pinching carriers that if voicemail were more efficient, we might make more phone calls. Since I started using Spinvox I return voicemail messages more often because I get to check them before they're stale. If everyone else had Spinvox, I would be more inclined to leave voicemail messages, confident that they were going to be returned. (Today when I reach voicemail I usually hang up and write an email instead. You pay to listen to the date and time that I called, a click, nothing, and then the sound of me hanging up.)
Maybe carriers won't make back from increased call and text message volume what they give up in voicemail minutes. Here's another idea: they should adopt Spinvox just to make their customers happy.
Sadly, that is not how the telecom industry works. Mobile carriers have no idea how to retain subscribers: they grew so fast that they didn't need to worry about it. If a new service doesn't pay for itself, it doesn't get launched. Don't expect your carrier to launch Spinvox or Simulscribe anytime soon. But you can sign up for either at the companies' web sites. Spinvox is offering a free trial in the US; Simulscribe charges $9.95 per month for 40 messages and $0.25 per message after that.
Your carrier will happily charge you for forwarding your calls.
Carry Two Phones Into The Shower? Not me.
One of the more interesting mobile startups in the Valley, Talkplus, went live today. (They had a private beta before this.) Talkplus makes phone numbers virtual, breaking the link between a phone number and a specific handset. Instead a phone number becomes more like an email address or IM account; just another online identity that I choose to adopt for communicating with certain people.
Let me stop speaking in Powerpoint and give some specific examples. Many people carry two phones, one for personal use, one for business. (In countries where extended families are very important, some people carry multiple phones for talking to different family members.) The main reason we do this is to separate our professional and personal lives, the same reason that most of us have at least two email addresses. But you don't need two computers to answer your email, so why do you need two phones to answer all of your calls?
The Chinese company whose booth I photographed at 3GSM in Barcelona is one of many that offers dual-SIM phones to solve this problem. But that's a crude approach, akin to having one modem in your PC for each email account. It makes the phone fatter and more expensive too.
Talkplus can assign multiple phone numbers to one mobile phone. You can have one number for work and one for your friends; a few disposable numbers for companies or people that you are not sure about; one number that your company reimburses you for, and another that is your responsibility; one number for life, and one for the weekend.
Soon Talkplus promises to let you spoof Caller ID from your mobile phone for other numbers that you control. A doctor, say, or a lawyer will be able to place a call to her client from her mobile phone and make it appear that the call is coming from her office. The goal is not to mislead; the goal is to keep the mobile phone number private and confidential while still communicating the identity of the caller.
See what I mean about phone numbers being separated from physical devices - both handsets and SIMs? Calls can be made to or from multiple numbers on multiple handsets. Talkplus goes further, promising a lot of the functionality that we take for granted online but that we never get on our phones. Right now they let me can screen calls automatically, blocking calls from some numbers, and sending others to voicemail.
And yet ... when I tried Talkplus tonight my experience was very disappointing. Setting up an account and choosing my first number was easy, but here's what I had to do to make a call from that number on my Sony Ericsson K800i:
Talkplus has great potential, but I hope that they are planning to offer a J2ME application for my handset soon. Right now I'd have to be desperate to conceal my phone number in order to use it.
In a previous post I mentioned how the IPO market has almost dried up in the US, mainly due to Sarbanes-Oxley.
The "Interim Report of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulations" recommends changes to Sarbox among several other reforms, but according to the New York Times nobody is happy. Elliott Spitzer calls it "wayward and wrong-headed", the National Venture Capital Association thinks that the recommendations don't go far enough.
Meanwhile the (original) Times reports on the peformance of US companies that have chosen to list on London's AIM (Alternative Investment Market), where the regulatory burden is much lower.
This is what they call adverse selection.
Photo uploaded by tychay
Are there ever any advantages to starting a technology company in New York versus Silicon Valley?
Summer and I have spent the last nine months traveling; all of our things are in storage; we could live anywhere. I want to start another technology company. We're trying to decide where to go.
Let me simplify things. Obviously my wife's career is important too, but I am not going to discuss her career here. And obviously we have friends in New York and strong feelings about the place, strong enough perhaps to keep us here no matter what. But we'll weigh all these things ourselves. The fact is we have no children, jobs, or apartment, and it is very easy for us to move. What I want to focus on here is the business advantages, if any, of starting a technology company in New York.
Fred Wilson thinks that "entrepreneurs should start businesses where they want to work and then organize the company according to what works best for them. The whole company, particularly development, does not need to be in one location anymore." I agree, but as in all things just because you can doesn't mean you should.
It is true that you can start a company almost anywhere. The founder of RightNow moved to Bozeman, Montana after selling his previous company, got bored, and started another - in Bozeman.
But certain places have undeniable advantages: high concentrations of talent, capital, infrastructure, service providers, and more. In tech, nowhere beats Silicon Valley. (Paul Graham has written two essays on the subject, comparing the Valley to the rest of America and America to the rest of the world, and without repeating his arguments let me say that I agree with most of them.)
Build your business in Bozeman and on top of all the usual risks of starting a new business - market acceptance, competition, execution, e. coli. - you add the risk that it will take six months longer to find staff, investors, office space, and lawyers with expertise writing contracts in your market. You should only do it if the risk is worth it to you in order to live in Bozeman (or New York). Otherwise you will find yourself moving, like the companies in this recent article in the Wall Street Journal (registration required). There are also the intangibles.
There are of course other considerations. Where are your likely customers? Suppliers? Other business partners? If you were opening a bodega and planning to live above it, you would be crazy to choose the location based on which street you wanted to live on. You would put your store wherever the customers were (and far away from the competition). Jeff Bezos left new York to found Amazon.com, but he didn't go to the Valley. He moved to Seattle, home of Ingram - the largest wholesaler of books in the country. Not surprisingly, technology companies that focus on finance or advertising are often based in New York, and ones that focus on music or film in L.A.
Note that these are arguments for putting sales, business development, and marketing in New York, not necessarily engineering. Fred points out that many of his NYC portfolio companies have engineers scattered around the country or even the globe.
Which brings me to his second point: "The whole company, particularly development, does not need to be in one location anymore."
Again, it is true that you do not need to be based in one location. But there are real advantages. Successful startups need to be highly flexible, responsive, able to change direction. At the same time they need to have a strong team culture, a sense of unity and purpose: "We may all be changing direction, but we understand why and we're doing it together." This is much harder to accomplish when the team is widely distributed.
Don't tell me that IM and wikis solve the problem. They help, a lot, but if you believe that they are a complete substitute for daily human contact then you need therapy. Again, you can take the risk, but the risk is not zero.
Which brings me back to my original question. Leave aside personal considerations, lifestyle. Let's agree that you can start a tech business in New York, just as you can start one in Bozeman or Topeka. And let's also agree that depending on your customers, New York may be the best place to locate sales and marketing and business development. Let's even forget the disadvantages of New York, chiefly the high cost of living and consequently high salaries.
My question is are there ever any advantages to starting a technology company in New York versus Silicon Valley?
To outsiders there is something very entertaining about the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. The cities are about the same size and the same age. When Australia federated, Canberra was built and made capital to avoid choosing between the two.
People from Melbourne claim that their city is more sophisticated, intellectual; you know, classy. While we were there a newspaper was outraged to learn how few Melbourne designers had been invited to show at Sydney's Fashion Week, which of course undermined the integrity of the entire event.
Tellingly, people in Sydney seem more concerned about what the rest of the world thinks of them than anything Melbourne might say: Sydney papers speculated that their Fashion Week may now be the "fifth most important in the world, if not the fourth." But it was a woman from Sydney who made the most condescending remark that we heard: "There was a time when we would never even have considered buying a Melbourne wine."
Me, I like Sydney. It's partly that Melbourne doth protest too much. ("Sydney hosted the Olympics, but we've hosted the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games!" "What are the Commonwealth Games?" asked my American wife.) It's partly that Melbourne is more European in outlook, and Sydney is more American. But mostly it's Sydney Harbour, because it is probably the most beautiful harbour - or harbor - in the world.
Harbors occupy some place in the imagination half way between the natural and the artificial. Most are not places of great natural beauty in themselves. A harbor is a tool: a found tool, like a stone with a sharp edge or a long straight stick. Add a little fishing community and a few sailboats and even those of us who can´t tell a spinnaker from a starboard poopsail get all sentimental. Sydney Harbour has all this and is naturally beautiful and seems to go on forever and is topped off with one of the most remarkable buildings in the world.
We walked around Manly Cove, we caught a ferry, and I walked from the Botanic Gardens to the Opera House. But there is no better way to see Sydney Harbour than by climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Click on the image to see a group of people climbing.
There are very few places in the world where someone with no training or experience can climb a structure like this, which was never designed with tourists in mind. When Paul Cave, the founder of BridgeClimb, first proposed the idea to the Roads and Traffic Authority, they wrote back with a list of sixty-two objections. It took him ten years to work his way through that list, but he and his team have been rewarded with more than a million customers since the climb finally opened in 1998.
It takes about an hour to get breathalyzed, walk through the metal detector, suit up, get familiar with the safety lines and other equipment, and practise on a rig that resembles the scariest part of the climb. Once you get out there, it seems almost too easy.
If you want to try this without flying to the other side of the planet, a bridge climb is about to open in the U.S. on the Purple People Bridge at Newport on the Levee, in Newport, Kentucky. From the top of the bridge the promoters promise a spectacular view of the greater Cincinnati area.
Or you could go to Sydney.
For a long, long time we've been waiting for carriers to launch automatic location-detection for phones. In 1996, the government mandated that carriers roll out this technology for 911 calls. The commercial possibilities were fascinating; entrepreneurs and investors and analysts talked up the potential for a whole new category called 'location-based services', and Vindigo was one of dozens of companies founded in the last 10 years in anticipation of LBS.
The technology is ready. In most parts of the country, emergency services can locate a wireless 911 caller. And if they can't, it's probably because the local authorities haven't got the funds to link their systems to the carriers. But we're still waiting for commercial services ... 1997. 2001. 2005.
To cut a 10-year-long story short, with the exception of Nextel, the carriers just haven't gotten around to LBS. There's always been something more important to do: WAP, or Java, or ringtones, or push-to-talk, or 3G. And unfortunately, because the wireless Internet in its current form is closed and proprietary, the rest of us have to sit tight and wait for the carriers to decide when this application is important enough to bring to market.
Which makes Navizon very interesting. Navizon offers a small app for wireless (Wi-Fi or cellular) Pocket PCs. Download their app and in many places in the US they can provide you with a good estimate of your location, based on the co-ordinates of the Wi-Fi nodes or cell towers that you are within range of. But how do they know those co-ordinates? That's the interesting part. A small number of their users are GPS enthusiasts; people who have a GPS attachment for their Pocket PC. Navizon's app runs in the background on their machines and as they walk around it records the latitude and longitude of all the nodes and towers they pass. Given enough users in the right places, Navizon can collect and maintain this information for the whole planet - for free. In Web 2.0 speak this is called peer-produced content; folksonomic location-finding.
It's fun to think of the other data that could be collected this way. Volunteers with the right attachment for their phone could build up global maps of air pollution, air temperature, noise levels, or traffic, just by walking around. They could monitor biohazards or radioactivity. They could collect prices in stores (from their RFID labels), or sample music played in public. Or maybe they could just cheat at hipster bingo.
I don't know whether Navizon will be a successful business, but it's a great example of what will be possible once consumers are carrying true smartphones: devices with open operating systems and an IP stack. Most importantly, we won't have to wait for the carriers to decide which applications to prioritize, and which ones we have to wait 10 years for.
Out for a run in the East Village tonight I saw one of these for the first time in the wild - an e-bike hybrid electric bicycle. Two conventional lead-acid batteries power a 400-watt motor on the hub of the rear wheel, activated by a throttle that's next to the brake handle. Like that green dream machine the Toyota Prius, this is a hybrid. When the going is easy, you pedal;
when the hill is too steep or your personal battery is just flat, the sophisticated onboard bio-computer turns on the motor.
Now your first reaction might be 'oh no, don't fat-ass Americans need all the exercise they can get?' Or perhaps 'isn't this the anti-Prius? Adding a (mildly) polluting technology to the most environmentally friendly vehicle we have?' Well, maybe. But very few people who cycle regularly today are going to switch to this. The e-bike is aimed at the many people who would like to use a bike instead of their car at least for short trips, but just aren't young, fit, or well enough, if only in their own minds. If this persuades them to do so, then it will be a net positive for both their health and the environment.
The chances of adoption are much better than for the Segway: a fraction of the price, an easy-to-understand concept, no regulatory issues, and no ridicule. The e-bike is to the Segway as the Prius is to experimental cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
One last intriguing fact: the fouder of e-bike is Lee Iacocca. Lee I Am Chairman Of Chrysler Corporation Always. You're never too old for a startup.
It's been a staple food in science fiction for years, but here at last is the first peer-reviewed research into culturing meat on an industrial scale.
The engineer in me is fascinated by some of the practical challenges. Sure, you can grow muscle cells in a petri dish, but how can it ever acquire the taste and texture of meat if there's no animal to exercise those muscles? Perhaps you could culture it on a giant taffy-puller? A perfunctory twist for that familiar cage-bound factory taste, or turn it up to maximum for Kobe NuBeef. I have no idea how to replicate foie gras though. Presumably any freshman bio-ag student will be able to grow you a liver, but how do you force-feed a test tube?
It's the ethical and economic implications that really stretch the mind. No more cattle farms, no more slaughterhouses, no more Meatrix. But that hurts people who work on farms (including organic farms) and who process meat, it doesn't hurt Big Food. McDonald's will no longer be associated with the deforestation of Argentina, but instead they might be able to develop their own proprietary strain of beef, guaranteeing the company a global supply at a fixed cost, and at the same time guaranteeing their customers that every patty in the world will taste the same - and different from every patty at Burger King and Wendy's.
No more BSE or foot-and-mouth, but what new diseases might we accidentally introduce into the genotype? If every customer at KFC is eating the same chicken, over and over again, won't the lack of biodiversity increase that risk?
A lot of farmers in developing countries are shut out of our markets today because of protectionist trade policies. Will they have to compete in their domestic markets with low-cost, patented, cultured beef?
They have founded a non-profit organization to pursue their research, and chosen to call it New Harvest. Oh dear. Sounds like a bad Margaret Atwood novel. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
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