TechCrunch wrote today that they’re hearing Google might add Google Voice to their Google Apps suite of enterprise apps (link). I’m excited to hear this! (and I twittered this as a feature request just a week or two ago).
At both Snapstream and Piping (my father’s manufacturing company that I spend some time helping out at), we use Google Apps. Since I’ve been spending some time helping out at Piping, their phone system is something we’ve struggled with. The most immediate problem has been voicemail:
– their PBX has no ability up route them over email and no ability to transcribe them
– Traditional VM is a huge time sink – disrupts your workflow, requires you to pick up your phone and interact with voice prompts using buttons on your phone
– limited ability to forward or otherwise share received messages.
Their particular phone system (a Toshiba office PBX) has a module that we considered purchasing for $10k that would route voicemails over email. I was never excited about spending that money to buy something that was written 10-15 years ago, and has only a fraction of the features available in packages like Asterisk (open source PBX that we use at SnapStream).
But in the last month, the IT guys at Piping have started doing something interesting. They’ve figured out how the existing phone system can forward to a 3rd party service after x rings. So they’ve bought a bunch of Google Voice accounts (off of ebay – like $2 an invite) and are using it for voicemail! The user feedback on this has been hugely positive.
“No more stopping everything I do to check voicemails!”
“Now I get my voicemails on email as the day goes on.”
“Even though the transcription isn’t perfect it’s usually good enough to figure out what was said.”
They’ve setup 20 users with this (<10% of the users there), picking off the heaviest voicemail users first.
When they add Google Voice to Google Apps, we'll certainly jump on it at Piping and SnapStream -- at least for the VM use case described above. Replacing the entire PBX with Google Voice? As much ad I'd like out my office PBX into the cloud, call reliability and quality will have to be perfect. I've had this conversation with my brother in law (who is a telecom guy) many times and he's right. Will a local small business -- say a pizza joint -- risk switching from their "it just works" copper phone line to an unmanaged over-the-top Internet-based phone service? Not until "it just works" too.
I haven’t been posting much here… my blogging to do list:
Review of my TED5000 (an energy measurement device that integrated with Google’s Powermeter and has changed the energy consumption habits at our house)
What I learned switching from incandescent bulbs to CFLs. I recently switched almost every bulb in my house from incandescent bulbs (the things that get really hot that make light by passing electricity through a filament) to CFLs (the curly bulbs).
My new primary laptop — the Acer Timeline 1810TZ (I’d link to their site, but it has a really annoying soundtrack that they don’t give you the option to turn off!).
Voicemail transcription: Callwave vs. Youmail vs. Google Voice. I’ve recently tested all three and have deployed them at work and at home.
I hope I get to doing some of these write-ups in the next week or two!
I tried out the Motorola Droid for 2 weeks, including a business trip to Los Angeles last week and here are my quick notes:
Google Navigation is nice! I like the user interface — for example, it’s nice how the next step in your driving directions are rendered in white text on a dark green background (just like the road signs on U.S. freeways!). It only made one small mistake that I can remember: rather than directing me to go right onto a jughandle that put me onto the freeway going in the correction direction, it directed me to take a left turn instead (near LAX, getting onto 405 S). We dubbed the female voice Vivian. How long before there are custom voices available? One of the writers at Current TV who had the same Motoroloa Droid as well said, “I’d LOVE to have my directions read to me by Mr. T!”.
There were lots random stalls and lock-ups in the user interface. Consistent with Stewart Alsop’s review, I’d be doing something and suddenly everything would cease working for 30-60 seconds. It happened 2-3 times a day, but that was enough to significantly lower my confidence and trust in the device’s reliability.
Google Voice is really great. The biggest GV feature for me is being able to click an international number in my phone book and trust that I’m not going to get reamed on the international calling charges. As I noted on twitter 10 days ago, Google Voice charges me $0.07 / minute for calls to India while AT&T (iPhone) charges me $2.49 / minute for the same call — more than a 35x differential! Sure, there are other ways I can get a low rate to India on my AT&T cell phone (and I do — I use Reliance CallIndia), but none as convenient as just tapping on a phone number in my phone book.
I never use the keyboard. Maybe I’ve been conditioned by using an iPhone for the past 2.5 years, but I never use the keyboard on the Motorola Droid. I’d much rather take the size/weight reduction that removing the keyboard would bring. Apart from being conditioned by using the iPhone, I guess I just use my cell phone with one hand (while I’m walking, while I’m driving, in a meeting in my lap) a lot more than with two hands (required for using the keyboard). And the context switch from portrait to landscape + sliding out the keyboard is something that slows me down.
The apps were fine. They were for me anyways. I know the iPhone app store has more variety and selection, but I was able to get the key apps that I use the most. On my trip, my colleague had entered everything into TripIt and TripIt has a native Android client, so I was happy there. There wasn’t a native Yelp app for Android, which I would have liked.
Some UI quirks and lack of polish. I bought the G1 the day it came out and played around with it for a couple of weeks before giving up on Android 1.0. The version on the Motorola Droid is a lot better — soft keyboard in both portrait and landscape mode. Settings menu is less confusing. But as an example of a settings things that’s still confusing: Droid comes with a charming-for-a-few-hours consistent-with-their-branding robotic sound scheme — when you receive a new email the phone cries out in a deep robotic baritone: “DROID.” But you quickly realize that this sound scheme is useless beyond starting a conversation with people around you about Android’s latest phone. In the “Settings” app, you can turn all notifications on or off, but you have to go into the mail app to toggle email notifications on or off and change the sound that’s use as the notification. Kind of confusing and for a basic service of the phone, something that should be included in the phone’s native settings menu, IMO.
Battery life wasn’t that great. Especially when using the phone for navigation! On one particular day, I think the phone lasted us for 3 or 4 routes and that’s all. We weren’t even using it for phone calls or anything other than navigation! I should note that I didn’t have the official Motorola Droid car mount because every Verizon Store I visited/called was out of them (maybe this include a power charger?) and that I think there were times when the navigation was still running after we got to our destination (it took me a while to figure out how to turn off the navigation after we had reached our destination!).
So that’s my quick rundown. If I was on Verizon already and didn’t have an iPhone, I’d consider the Droid. But the iPhone is still much better device IMO. I think I even like the Palm Pre more than the Motorola Droid. But Android is getting better and better and the Droid hardware isn’t bad. Given how thorny it is to unlock the iPhone and use it overseas with a local service provider (I tried on a recent trip to Barcelona and could never get data or GPS to work for me), I could see myself getting an unlocked Android phone to use when I travel internationally.
(On a side note, I ran into a friend at the grocery store yesterday using an HTC Hero on Sprint and that looks like a great device — no keyboard, decent screen, pretty thin, none of that chin that the G1 or the HTC Magic had. Where can I get an unlocked GSM version of the HTC Hero?)
UPDATE (12/7/2009, 3:35pm): It turns out that Yelp for Android was just released today and it also turns out that Google’s added a “What’s Nearby” feature to Google Maps for Android, something I would definitely have used last week!
I’ve been traveling a fair bit as of late and I’ve learned a pretty useful trick to buying mileage tickets (and this can also apply to cash tickets as well). Others might find this a useful way to save themselves or their companies money. Make-up some of those extra $$$ airlines charges these days for checked baggage, food, ticket changes, etc.!!!
A little bit about the kind of traveling I do:
Most of my travel is business travel
I usually don’t stay weekends — which means no Saturday night stay. Which means much higher cost tickets, especially if they are booked at the last minute.
I frequently travel to the same cities — for SnapStream, we have customers all over the US and Canada, but there are concentrations of customers in particular cities like New York City, Washington DC, and Los Angeles.
I like flying direct, non-stop flights — I save time, which means more time for meetings and I end up less tired (which ultimately represents better meetings)
So let’s say I want to travel to Washington DC next week from Houston, leaving on Monday and returning on Thursday. This ticket might cost $1,200 on Continental Airlines. The mileage ticket would cost 50,000 miles (all round-trip mileage tickets on Continental that don’t include a Saturday night stay are necessarily 50,000 miles). Now, spending 50,000 miles on a $1,200 mileage ticket is a reasonable use of miles.
But what if I could get two round-trip tickets to Washington DC and spend the same amount of miles? That would be really awesome!
It turns out this is possible if you can plan two trips to the same city at one time. Here’s how it works:
1. Decide your two travel dates to your destination city — for our example, let’s say I’m going to Washington DC June 22 through June 25. We’ll call this trip1. And I might plan another trip to Washington DC August 3rd through August 5th. We’ll call this trip2.
If I bought two mileage tickets for these two trips, it would be 50,000 miles for the June trip (trip1) and 50,000 miles for the August trip (trip2):
trip1: Houston –> DC, June 22 (Mon) – June 25 (Thurs) (50,000 miles) trip2: Houston –> DC, August 3 (Mon) – August 5 (Wed) (50,000 miles)
2. Instead, I purchase two round-trip mileage tickets — the first one (ticket1), departing Houston June 22nd (trip1) and returning to Houston on August 5th (trip2). This ticket has a price of 25,000 miles because it involves a Saturday night stay (technically, it includes a bunch of Saturday night stays! :-))
3. And then I purchase a second round-trip mileage ticket (ticket2) — departing Washington DC on June 25th (trip1) and returning to Washington DC on August 3rd (trip2). Also 25,000 miles.
A summary: ticket1: Houston –> DC, June 22 – August 5 (25,000 miles) ticket2: DC –> Houston, June 25 – August 3 (25,000 miles)
Because each ticket includes a Saturday night stay, each ticket costs me 25,000 for a grand total of 50,000 miles.
I just did this for a trip I’m taking next week and it worked out beautifully! Two airline tickets for the price of one.
And even if I somehow don’t travel on the latter ticket, I didn’t spend more miles than I would have otherwise. Also, changing mileage tickets is a lot more flexible than changing paid tickets. So I could even change the August trip (trip2) in the example above with some, relatively speaking, reasonable change fees.
Gus over at Swamplot wrote it up as a story, after some back and forth on e-mail with me. And then Swamplot’s write-up got picked up on slashdot.org.
First of all, the photograph was NOT photoshop’ed. It went straight from my iPhone to Natuba (what I use to post photographs to twitter) with no editing in between. If anyone is at Hobby Airport and wants to see this thing, it was in the men’s restroom near gate 51 last week Wednesday.
More importantly, though, what’s the story here? Is DHS actually monitoring airport restrooms using cameras installed at the urinal? I exchanged emails with Marlene McClinton at the Houston Airport System (as a side note, HAS uses SnapStream to monitor mentions of themselves on TV) over the weekend and she wrote:
…I talked to all of our security folks and they talked to DHS and said no way, there is no such program or video or cam in stalls or urinals.
So it sounds like this was a simple prank… I’ll update this post if I hear anything else from DHS or from the Houston Airport System (HAS was going to check out the particular location I mentioned seeing the stickers at).
“I’m sure this is a prank. Since this is generating bad publicity for the DHS, they will probably catch the person who put these stickers on the urinals after reviewing the video from the real, covert hidden cameras they have covering the urinals.”
Earlier this year, I embarked on a project to convert an old Dell laptop of mine into a digital photo frame. This particular laptop was one that had been used by my youngest sister in college. A Dell Latitude CPI, it:
had a slow 300 MHz Pentium II processor,
it was incredibly heavy and, as an added bonus,
at some point my sister had managed (by mistake) to burn a hole in plastic shell with a candle.
But the 13″ TFT backlit LCD worked just fine, so I was excited about turning this otherwise crappy laptop (aka a craptop!) into a photo frame.
So I turned one of these:
…into one of these:
Here’s how I did it…
First, the supplies I used (all the prices are approximate):
“Shadow box” photo frame (2″ deep to hold the LCD + laptop) — $20
Foamcore board (1/4″ thickness, this was used to mount the LCD inside the frame) — $10
Matte (sized to the frame on the outside and sized to the LCD on the inside) — $10
Duct tape (quack quack!) — $5
Styrofoam blocks (used as spacers inside the frame) — $5
And there were some tools involved, mostly standard stuff:
Misc screwdrivers – to, you know, remove and replace screws?
Chisel – some of my wooden frame had to be chiseled out to make room
X-acto Knife – used this to cut the foamcore LCD mount to the right size
Ruler – to measure stuff
Scissors – to cut stuff
Here were the steps involved:
1) Prep work
First, I experimented a bunch with:
taking the laptop apart (Dell publishes their service manuals publicly so this was straightforward)
the software stack on the laptop — more on this later, but I was trying to find just the right configuration
This laptop was old enough that it didn’t have any wi-fi. And all the old PCMCIA wi-fi cards I could find were old enough that they didn’t support the latest Wi-Fi standards (namely, WPA2 for Wi-Fi security). So I bought a cheap Linksys PCMCIA WiFi card on eBay to get WiFi.
The IDE hard drive that came with the system was loud (sounded like coffee grinder!) so I bought a CF to IDE adapter (also on eBay!) and as cheap a CF card as I could find. Here’s a photograph of the totally silent “hard drive” I’m using:
I also researched other people’s digital photo frame projects. This popular science article was helpful. And Brent Evans’ blog posting on his Geektonic blog and his flickr photostream (complete with annotations explaining steps he had gone through) were incredibly helpful. Two other sites I found amongst my notes:
Most importantly, I removed the bezel, plastic back, and other hardware from the LCD. But this also included removing the keyboard/touchpad and some other miscellaneous parts.
I decided to leave the keyboard/touchpad off the unit. Sitting upright in a frame, they aren’t things you’ll want to use and keeping them would have made for thicker frame innards. The laptop parts that didn’t make the cut:
Including the laptop cover with the candle-burned hole in it! 🙂
3) Cut the foamcore to fit the frame and LCD
Cutting the outside of the foamcore to fit the frame was easy — I just measured the frame opening and cut the foamcore to a rectangle of the same size. Cutting it to fit the LCD involved tracing an outline of the LCD and it’s associated and then going at that outline with an x-acto knife. All the while, I made sure that everything was going to line up with the matte inside the frame.
4) Mount the LCD inside the foamcore
Dropped the LCD, face down on a table, into the foamcore so the LCD was flush with the surface of the foamcore and then put duct tape around the back, on the interface of the foamcore and the LCD. Here’s the LCD mounted inside the foamcore:
5) Cut styrofoam blocks to use as spacers
The laptop needed to be an inch or two above the bottom of the frame box so I cut a styrofoam block. In hindsight, something other than styrofoam would have worked better. The styrofoam I used leaves behind a white “dust” that I was constantly having to clean off the glass and the matte of the frame (reminds me of an article I read many years ago on Philip Greenspun’s site about a Boston framing shop that bought a surplus clean room from National Semiconductors to do all of their framing inside of… they would have hated killed themselves over this styrofoam!)
You can see the foam block in this photograph:
6) Modified the frame for power cord, laptop WiFi, venting
I needed an opening for the power cord to come out from (used scissors to cut myself one). And I needed a bit of extra space in the shadow box to fit the Wi-Fi card on one side and the power connector on the other side (used a chisel to cut the necessary sections out of the wooden frame).
And then I felt like some venting was called for so I punched some very crude holes around the heat sink/vent area of the laptop motherboard.
The frame was chiseled out for the power supply connector and the WiFi card:
———————
And as far as the hardware goes, that was pretty much everything I did! I was reasonably happy with the hardware in the end. Some improvements that I’d like to make eventually:
The power on/off button is inside the frame… I’d like to cut a hole in the back large enough to stick my finger inside and push the power button. When I have to reboot the thing with that, opening the back up and then closing it up again is a pain.
It’d be cool to install a small webcam in the matte of the frame. That way when I’m out of town, I could easily video chat with my daughter. Installing a webcam probably wouldn’t be too hard. An idea I heard from Zack (at SnapStream) was having a “mirror mode” for the frame so people would see themselves in the frame when they looked at it. Also something cool that I could do with a webcam.
If you look at the WiFi card above, you’ll notice that I removed unmounted the built-in speakers from the frame of the laptop… Would have been nice if I could have mounted them flush with the sides of the frame. Then again, I’ve never used music with my digital photo frames. This would be more useful for some of the non-photo frame things, like the video chat described above, that I might do with this thing.
Now onto the software side. I reinstalled Windows XP on this particular laptop from scratch. Here’s a photograph of the thing booting into Windows:
A list of things that I did once I had Windows XP running to make it more “photo frame friendly”:
Installed LogMeIn — allows me to operate my frame remotely over the network (means I don’t need a keyboard/mouse directly attached to the frame)
Install Google Photo Screensaver (I ended up NOT using this… more on this below)
Install Windows XP PowerToy – TweakUI (I turned on autologon so the frame would go straight to the user desktop and start doing its thing)
Change power settings so the screen doesn’t turn off and the hard drive doesn’t turn off.
Turn off simple file sharing in Windows XP and share out, password protected, the hard drive (so without having to use LogMeIn I can access the frame’s hard drive)
Expand pagefile size — I only have 64 MB of physical RAM so I expanded the pagefile size for more virtual memory
Change Windows settings from “double click” for launching things to a “single click”
Turn off visual effects (under System -> Advanced -> Performance)
Disable and stop certain services (PC Tools)
The main software, the “screensaver” that would show photographs… I initially hoped I’d be able to use the Google Photo Screensaver. I publish almost all of my personal photographs to Picasa Web as “unlisted” albums (meaning they aren’t publicly accessible unless I send someone the link). The cool idea behind using Google’s Photo Screensaver is that it can automatically downloads photographs from a Picasa Web account… including “unlisted” albums. You give it your Picasa Web username and password and it does the rest.
The problems with Google’s Photo Screensaver:
1) It seems to NOT download new photographs while the screensaver is running: Since my “computer” (aka digital photo frame) is going to be in screensaver mode all the time, it needs to download new photographs WHILE the slideshow is running. Not in between runs of the screensaver.
2) And then even if you get your PC out of “screensaver” mode every so often, it’s not clear WHEN Google Photo Screensaver goes and downloads new stuff. Or what stuff it will download. You can’t configure what it downloads or when it downloads that stuff.
3) When I figured out that the Picasaweb automatic download thing wouldn’t work, I thought maybe I’ll write my own Picasa Web downloader and then just use Google Photo Screensaver’s ability to show photographs in a particular directory. Well, it turns out that GPS doesn’t recurse subdirectories with its “play photographs directory _____” feature.
So the solution I ended up going with was Windows XP’s built-in “My Pictures Slideshow” — a pretty barebones thing that was included in the original version of Windows XP in 2001. It cycles through the photographs in your My Pictures directory, including the photographs in subdirectories. It’s not as good as it could be… if you add new photographs, you have to take your PC out of screensaver mode before it’ll refresh its list of photographs. So updating it involves:
1. Copying new photographs to the My Pictures folder over the wireless network
2. Using LogMeIn to “press any key” to turn off the screensaver… this causes the screensaver to refresh.
Kind of a pain, but all-in-all, I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. Maybe I’ll do another post on the potential that I think this thing has to be a new and useful type of device inside the home. Meanwhile, here are the rest of the photographs of my laptop converted to a digital photo frame:
Matt Cutts asked earlier today what other people were seeing for Chrome browser share in March 2009. I pulled www.snapstream.com’s traffic stats from the last two weeks (March 20th through yesterday) and I show Chrome at 3.25%… about half of the 7% that Matt reported for Chrome on his blog. Another interesting note: Matt’s blog and SnapStream’s website are flip flopped on visitors using Internet Explorer and Firefox.
(I cut the # of visits column out of the table below, I will say that the total number of visits in the past two weeks was >100,000)
One of my weekend projects a few months ago was making it so I could open the garage door on my house with my iPhone. Here’s how I got it working.
First, a quick demo of the final product. Once I got everything working, using this thing is pretty simply. I launch X10 Commander on my iPhone:
Then I tap the “ON” button with my finger and after a small lag (1 second?), my garage door…
…springs open! (or closes).
“Who cares?” you ask… well, having my iPhone to control my garage means:
I can be in a car that doesn’t have my garage code programmed into it and open/close my garage (e.g. a friend’s car)
I can go out for a walk or a run, close the garage door behind me and open it again when I get back home
Generally speaking, it’s one less box to worry about when I go out
I can open and close my garage door from my iPhone… just for the sheer pleasure of the act
And of course, I have a cool thing to show friends when they come over. 🙂
So how does this all work? Pay attention because it’s a somewhat long-winded chain of events that makes X10 Commander control my garage door (almost a Rube Goldberg machine!):
1. I have the X10 Commander iPhone App installed on my iPhone (link, $9.99):
2. It talks, over my home wi-fi network (a pair of D-Link DIR-655s setup as access points), to the X10 Commander “Server” software I have running on an always-on Windows XP PC upstairs in my home office:
3. The X10 Commander Server software talks to an USB to RF X10 interface (the X10 CM19A)dongle on the same Windows XP PC:
4. That dongle on my computer talks to an RF to X10 interface device (the X10 TM751) plugged into a nearby power outlet:
5. Now we move downstairs to the garage where I have an X10 controller for low-voltage devices (an X10 PUM01) plugged into another home power outlet:
6. And the terminals on the X10 low-voltage control device are spliced into the control wires for the garage door opener:
7. And the control wires are, obviously, connected to the garage door opener which opens my garage:
And that’s it!
It’s all run pretty reliably for a couple of months now and never fails to impress. Surprisingly the most fragile piece has NOT been the Windows XP PC (would have been my first guess), but the TM751 (step 4 above). Because it’s connected to a childproofed power outlet and it’s at the entrance to my home office, if it’s ever brushed by a passing child, a the cuff of my pant, or a projectile toy, it easily loses contact. But even this hasn’t been a big deal — I can only remember one occasion where the whole thing hasn’t worked since I set it up.
Another tip: A lot of the X10 stuff can be found on eBay and elsewhere online at pretty low prices. The $$$ savings are nice and I personally make an effort to avoid buying anything from X10.com thanks to their <BLINK>WOW!! DO WE HAVE A DEAL FOR YOU!!</BLINK> style of website design and ecommerce tactics (not to mention that almost every page on their site starts a video with audio and then there are the bikini-clad women being spied on and… sigh, I should just stop. Please tell me you won’t spend any of your money at X10.com?).
We lost track of time on our bike ride and got their late, but luckily tofu13 got a nice video. A friend of mine that lives in the building behind the Compass Bank Building (the video has shots of some people on their balconies in the same building) said the implosion shook his building and woke him up.
I happened to be on Post Oak (near the Galleria) earlier this morning and I had my camera with me so I took some photographs of the Compass Bank that’s Houstonist reported is going to be demolished tomorrow, Sunday March 15.
If you’re wondering where the building is located, it’s across the street from the Sports Authority and near Maggiano’s Little Italy on Post Oak, just up from Westheimer and Post Oak. Here’s a Google Maps Street View of the building.
While Houstonist reported the building will be demolished at 7:45am, the foreman I talked to said it would be more like 7am to 7:30am. People who want to watch will be able to from the Hilton, about a block away, a little bit north of Post Oak. According to the guy I talked to, past there, all traffic (pedestrian, car, bicycle) will be blocked.
If the timing works out I’ll be there on bike with my camera!
