19 Jul 09 A baby, a house and a full time job

For those of you who know personally, you probably already know that last month I became a father. I guess the transition is something that I was more or less ready for, at least on the technical terms of the transition. However, the thing that completely surprised me was the mental transition – which isn’t even related to the somewhat lack of sleep here and there.

So, here I am, about a month and half away into the final touches to our new home, spending the weekend deploying over 100 meters of CAT-5 cabling in the house – yes the house is network rigged to the teeth. I’m sitting in my daughters room, clamping away the wall sockets for the network, thinking to myself: “hmmmm…. will Nitzan need a single network connection? or should I put at least two for future usage? … hmmmm…. well, I guess time would tell”. In any case, so there I was, spending most of my weekend being my own geeky self, thinking about wiring, networking, wireless exposures, access points, etc. I then go back home, and suddenly, all that disappears the minute I put Nitzan on my shoulder to burp her. It’s really funny, but with her on my shoulder, I guess everything goes away for a few minutes. My brother-in-law informed the house that he caught me burping Nitzan, while sitting at my computer answering emails with the other hand – Ok, so I can’t stop being a geek all together.

In any case, here I am juggling the various aspects of being a father to a new born baby, attending to the various tasks required to final touches of the house (painters, cleaners, air cons, dry walls, etc) and of course, attending to my customers – some of which are completely ambivalent to the fact that I’m under a constant lack of sleep in the past month. Well, I guess in a couple of months Nitzan will start sleeping better, and would make life easier for both me and my wife; in the mean while, we take comfort with the sleep periods my wife gets during the day, so that I can work and cater to my customers, while she caters to Nitzan during the nights – and I have to be honest about this, when it comes to the baby, my wife is the closest thing to a Jedi Knight, her ability to stay focused and clam even when the Nitzan is screaming is amazing – I can’t always do it.

Ok, enough about the house and Nitzan, let’s go back to been geeks for a bit. As you can see on the right hand side of the blog, I’ll be speaking at the up-coming Astricon. I’ll be giving a talk about how to build “IP-Centrex” like installations, utilizing Asterisk and tools like VMWARE, XEN and OpenVZ. However, while my talk may be interesting to you (I hope), my pre-conference tutorial will be much more interesting. I’ll be giving a full day tutorial, teaching people how to install Asterisk in a clouded environment (cloud computing), mainly the Amazon EC2 cloud computing infrastructure. For those of you reading this blog, you may have noticed that I’ve developed a distinct interest in the Amazon EC2 cloud, which I’ve written about several times and also lectured about at Amoocon. While my Amoocon presentation was mainly informational, at Astricon I’ll be primarily teaching you how to do what I did. Well, I won’t be teaching you the inner workings of the GreenfieldTech IVR API framework, although, if you’re gonna ask questions I will answer (especially if you ask the question 3 times, I can’t stand it when people ask the same question 3 times – I just have to answer it – nudge nudge).

Ok, back to fatherhood and Nitzan stuff. The mental transition that I was referring to before is something that I felt last night in its most force. My wife and I decided to go to one of the malls, not far away from our house. So, we entrusted Nitzan with my in-laws and drove to the mall. The mall I’m referring to is called “The seven stars mall” and we like it. It’s not a big mall, but its got this shop called DOMO, that carries these high class cooking ware (my wife and I really like to cook – my chilli con-carne is well known). So, here we were walking the mall, after I ordered a pair of shoes that I needed. So, my wife comments: “You know something, let’s see if there is some sale at Super-Pharm.” – and then we ended up purchasing baby formula, pacifiers and baby wipes. I then asked my wife if she maybe wants to walk into DOMO, but we both didn’t really think about it – suddenly, something that was like a default prior to Nitzan is no longer a default – interesting isn’t it?

In any case, this is how my life looks like at this point in time – and I have to admit that I kind’a like it. Sure, I don’t get as much sleep as I got before, but hey, I’m happy with it – so I just keep on smiling and go on forward.

Tags: Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Application programming interface, Cloud computing, File sharing, Google, Microsoft, Pirate Bay

05 Nov 08 Creative ideas for start-ups… maybe…

Michael Eisenberg is a well known VC partner (Benchmark Capital) and an avid blogger. In one of his recent posts, Michael refers to 8 different approaches to raising a start-up company, in the midst of an economic crisis. The full blog entry can be found at his blog, however, after reading it myself, I would like to comment on it. The below section will also be commented to Michael’s blog for reference:

“Everyone in the company is a salesman – Your R&D team should be selling too”

This is an interesting approach, however, R&D people are R&D people because usually they don’t do sales well. Actually, most of the R&D people I know are the worst sales people I’ve ever met. To be honest, in my previous position, our R&D Manager basically screwed a 500,000$ deal that we worked on for 6 months, because I said something in the form of: “It’s possible to do, however, I can’t really say what would be required to do so.” – R&D people can easily sell products that are closed, not products that are under development. As start-ups are constantly in the development phase – this is a BAD idea.

“Hire sales people on commission only”

YES! This is a great idea, although, it means that you’ll need a hell of a lot more sales people to manage. When a sales person works on commissions only, it means that while he’s selling your stuff, he’s selling other stuff too. It requires a certain degree of finesse and agility to be able to manage such a team, but the general idea is good, actually it’s GREAT!

“Virtual company”

Michael’s idea of a virtual company isn’t new, dozens of companies around the world utilize this methodology. However, this methodology sometimes requires quite some resources. For example, according to Michael, the utilization of sites like oDesk and rent-a-coder may assist in your quest to lower general spending. That is true, however, it automatically poses a problem. Let us imagine that I develop a service that is made of 3 distinct areas of expertise. I hire all coders from oDesk, now, I need to remotely co-ordinate them all, so that the code I’ll get is manageable and well documented. If not, the end result will a running service that becomes stagnant, as no one can go into the code and continue its development (seen it happen to 2 of my customers, both start-ups).

“Choose Self-PR over paid search”

Hmmm… I can’t really comment on that, as I practice it – and can honestly say, it’s very hard.

“Focus on product”

Killer applications in the web are a must, if it’s not a killer – your service is dead in the water. Killer services like PokeTalk have a great potential to become the next big thing, but they highly rely on the company’s ability to market the product correctly within the available channels.

“New distribution channels”

Michael talks about the creation of affiliate programs – that’s not as simple as it sounds. Many companies made a shitload of money out of building distribution channels and affiliate program management systems – affiliates are a wonderful idea as long as you are capable of managing these in a proper manner (See my comment about commission only sales people).

All in all, Michael surely has some valid points, however, these require delicate work and proper management in order to work right – if executed improperly, will not only end in failure, may also send you down debt country.

Tags: Business, economy, Eisenberg, Google, internet, Michael, Startups

05 Nov 08 Poking around for Free Telephony

Ever since the introduction of JaJah to the world, the world of free telephony services had been booming with various solutions and services. While each service concentrated on a different market niche, none of the services really is free of charge (at least not in full). For example, JaJah requires you to register and purchase additional air-time, RebTel operates under a similar approach, so does TruPhone and others alike.

Over the past 10 months, I’ve been working closely with a company called Parrot-Media, who operate the PokeTalk.com website.

PokeTalk is a free international calls service, allowing users to make international calls FREE of charge. The service allows a user to make up to 50 free calls per month, of up to 10 calls per calls (that’s 500 of FREE minutes per month). Judging from normal ACD traffic around the world, a normal call duration is around 5-6 minutes, thus, the service is a great solution for making phone calls for FREE.

According to the PokeTalk economic model, the calls are being funded by the advertisement on the website. So, while you watch the ads on the website, the advertisers are paying for your call – it’s as simple as that.

As you may have guessed, the service utilizes the Asterisk Open Source PBX (after all, this is what I do). In addition, it utilizes a highly advanced, high-speed, highly-reliable Asterisk based dialer framework – enabling the system to initialize up to 140 calls per second, and sustain a total of 1200 concurrent phones calls across the entire platform. All in all, a fairly big and robust platform for a new service.

To enjoy the service, simple point your browser to http://www.poketalk.com, regsiter, and start making calls to your loved ones.

Tags: Advertisement, Adwords, Free Calls, Google, JaJah, Parrot-Media, PokeTalk, RebTel, TruPhone

19 Oct 08 Do No Evil!

When Google started off, one of their core mottos was: “Do no evil!”. Of course back then, in the year 1998, their main concern of evil doing was Microsoft and proprietary software. Google has been known to support and promote various open source project, over the course of time, but the “Do no evil!” methodology had mostly stuck to most of the things Google is doing. 

It is my belief that while Google, and its likes, are surely practicing its “Do no evil!” motto, I’m not entirely sure about its users and customers. We are all aware of various SEO schemes, capable of bypassing the various mechanisms Google had put in place, fooling the Page Rank mechanism to do something else. What I’m worried about is Google’s latest news about “Context Based Video Search”. 

While the evolution of “Context Based Video Search” is still brewing slowly, its immediate outcomes can easily be exploited for doing wrong, sometimes, the results may be down right criminal (if not even capable of inducing terror). 

In order to explain, I will introduce a doom’s day scenario, one that is so out there, one that you would end up reading saying: “Impossible!”, but yet, somewhere in the back of your mind – you would know – someone will do eventually. 

Our scenario starts with the US Presidential elections of 2008, Barack Obama is leading in the polls, while John McCane is slowly lingering back. People from all over the US are tuned in to the race, TV, papers, online – the information is all around us, just waiting to be read, watched, listened – you name it, it’s there. A short visit to http://video.google.com/ will yield multiple results when seeking video footage of your favorite candidate. 

Let us imagine that “Context Based Video Search”, for now “CBVS”, is capable of searching a video and “knowing” that Barack Obama or another Democratic figure appears in the video, and would immediately associate that video with the search for the term “Barack Obama” or the term “Democratic Presidential Rally” – or any other combination related to the elections. John McCane’s advisors team are willing to do almost anything to get him elected, but of course, they will not resort to unlawful acts. However, John McCanes supporters and voters are totally a different story.

Let us imagine that now a supporter/voter would upload a video to the Google videos website, in which there is a video promoting Barack Obama. However, while the foreground video shows images of Barack Obama, an underlined subliminal context exists in the video, quietly promoting John McCane. While the actual success ratio of planting subliminal messages in such a video are questionable, this type of subliminal message may actually be targeting the “floating votes”, slowly bringing them to the Republican party, while at the same process, basically disrupting the democratic process. 

In the above scenario, the video was induced by a follower or a non-profit oriented individual – which means that the above scenario is highly un-likely. However, as we all know that Coca-Cola and other companies had planted subliminal messages in movie theaters during the 50’s, imagine what would happen if a company producing Web Videos would start selling: “Subliminal Video Ad Space” – the sheer magnitude of the Internet and the viral expansion of such services are surely to affect us on a global scale. Imagine getting that funny video in the email, watching it and then running to the nearest Fry’s to purchase a new iPod and you have no idea why you did that… – Time will tell, who will win? the quest for the quick buck, or the desire to “Do No Evil!”.

Is the below truly a glitch, or are we back in the 50’s?

Or how about the following example, which I just found on YouTube:

The following website videos a panel of 5 different approaches to Context Based Video Search. While each company went a different way, it is clear that they are all trying to reach a similar goal – understand what people are looking to look at and provide it to them. Each one of these mechanisms is most probably prune to the same logic attacks as the one I’ve described above and are sure candidates for exploitation by the companies that are closed to evil than others.

Tags: Context, Google, Search, Video

01 Jul 08 Web Robots are funny creatures …

I guess web robots are funny creatures, especially when you write the weirdest stuff on your blog. For example, one of the my previous posts was about a movie I’ve seen lately, “You Don’t Mess With The Zohan”. Now, imagine my surprise to get into my inbox about 6 messages, from various web robots that had come across my post and tagged it along the Internet.

Now, this raises a very interesting question in my head: “Is it possible to create a logic bomb, that would render the entire web robots network into a frenzy?” – for example, let’s say I would like to sabotage the opening night of a movie I dislike. Technically, it would require me to open multiple websites that talk about this movie, then, make sure that the web robots find these pages – meaning, make the pages robot friendly, this will end up in a form of storm of robots on these pages, and most probably, a storm of robots on each other – interesting, isn’t it?

Here’s another question, let’s say I create 1000 web domains, all having the same web front page. All front pages simply include a list of links to a single website, listing all the available links on that website. If a robot encounters that page, will it start traversing the links to that website? and if there 1000 of these, will these automatically bring the Google page rank up? I’m no SEO expert, but my logic says yes.

Well, I guess it’s time to do some experimenting I guess…

Tags: attack, DDOS, Google, robots, SEO