Alon Cohen's Blog

AI, Are We There Yet?

2011-11-16T20:23:00.001-08:00

By: Alon Cohen

Wow how times fly. I remember a discussion I had about 28years ago as if it was yesterday. At the time, I was working on few computer programsthat seem to need human intelligence. One was an automated device testingprogram that could tell a technician which board to replace based on anomaliesin the way that device behaved. The second was a learning algorithm that had toplay Tic-Tac- Toe by figuring out the rules of the game by itself (yes after I sawthe movie war games in 1983))and it triggered in me the thinking about what would it take to make a computermore human.

I was talking to few of my friends discussing what would ittake to make a computer creative. My idea at that time was that scientists wouldprobably be able to take a human Neuron (or few of them) and place them in achip, and use that as an intuition co-processor.

Well it seems like the MIT scientists just made it happen. TheMIT people did not really took a brain tissue but found a way to emulate theway a Neuron behaves using analog circuits on a CMOS chip. I guess it took morethan few years to figure that one out. However, as it stands I can now envisiona reality just as the one depicted in Asimov’s books where business entities (likeUS robotics) will own an artificial brain that will surpass any human or supper(digital) computer in existence, which will help them invent and solve problemsnot solvable by humans like time travel or teleportation.

As it stands, the human brain has 100,000,000,000 Neurons andabout 100,000,000,000,000 Synapse connecting them. The cerebral cortex is the outermostpart of the brain. It plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptualawareness, thought, language, and consciousness. The number of neuronsin the cortex is estimated to be 11,000,000,000 so about 11,000,000,000,000Synapses. Synapses are those specialized junctions through which neurons signalto each other.

Surprisingly it only took 400 transistors to create that artificialSynapse at MIT. Imagine a quad core Itanium chip with 2,000,000,000 transistors,take that level of technology and you can create a brain with 5,000,000 Synapsesor an equivalent of 5,000 neurons give or take or hmm as smart as Pond Snail.

Since our brain has about 11,000,000,000,000 Synapse in our cortex,we need just about 2.2 Million more of those quad core chips to emulate thehuman cortex. Sounds scary large number but the truth is that it is not thatfar if you are an optimist.

If you apply Moore’s law to those numbers you get that in 30-40years (2^21 = 2M) give or take we will have the capacity to replicate a humancortex that can work thousands of times faster than a human can.

It is not that far I can tell you that, specifically when welive in internet speeds and each New Year end before you even noticed itstarted. Now, way before those 30 years, say 15 years from now we will be ableto compose an artificial brain equivalent in capacity to a dog cortex. I guessall we will need to do at that stage is hope that this technology will not biteus. If it will bite, it will help us realize the corrections we need to make,just in time, so that the first artificial human-level brains will do the rightthing.

Science Fiction? Conspiracy theory? – You Decide

2011-08-30T06:15:00.000-07:00

Science Fiction? Conspiracy theory? – You Decide

By: Alon Cohen

I will start and explain why I do not buy HP products for 10 years now. This is a story I have been telling every HP employee I have met at every trade show and every friend who asked me about HP that was willing to listen.

Maybe 10 years ago I bought an all in one HP printer. I really liked HP from my days working at an R&D lab during the eighties, where every really good measurement equipment was either Tektronics or HP. I specifically liked the HP200 serious of PC computers that were way ahead of their time and superior in all aspect (but the cost) to the flimsy PCs XT that came out from IBM and looked like crap back in 1986-1987. So naturally, when I came to staples around 2000 and saw the brand new HP printers I still carried with me that warm fuzzy feeling I had from the old HP days about those products.

Since I needed two printers, one for home and one the office, I thought to myself why not buy the same one? This way I will install the driver once on my laptop and be done with it. In theory a great idea, practically I discovered that HP is not HP anymore and that printer drivers, is not their forte to say the least. But you know what, this is not the point.

The point is that after a year, just a week or two after the warranty expired, both printers started to display a similar error message on the screen. Normally a person who buys one would not suspect a foul play, however when one printer did thousands of pages at the office and the other one did only few pages sitting idle at home, one starts to suspect. My suspicion was that HP allegedly inserted a time bomb in the printer software to make it looks like it is dead forcing consumers to buy new printers.

To be honest, I have no proof of that but I was unable to shake that feeling off over the years, specifically with all the other bad smell coming out of that company.

It did not end there, to add a sin to the crime, when I called HP's customer support they made me pay for the call and forced me to buy another cartridge saying the new spare one I had expired. Well clearly, it did not, but if you can squeeze few more bucks from a sucker why not.

At some point, the HP customer support agent felt he was on a roll, one sucker customer two bad printers, so he took it to the next step saying: “What if I will get you the newest fancy printer for only $200”. Well I was an idiot for buying the first time but hey I am not that bad. And so I said, “let me get back to you on that”.

The next day, I went to the store to compare prices and, lo and behold, it is cheaper at the store! This sealed the deal from my point of view. I have not touched HP ever again.

Was I correct about this alleged selling methodology? You will be the judge of that. However moving to now, I came across this WSJ article about how HP decided to commit suicide and how this whole move is so unclear to everyone in the industry and... bang, it all became clear to me.

I wouldn't be surprised if few years from now, it will come out, that competitors were able to prove what HP did use time bombs and gave HP’s board and management an ultimatum to stay out of the PC / Home Printers / Tablets space or face class action law suits with deep personal consequences. I am not sure how deep you are into conspiracy theories, but this explanation works for me, and personally, I would like to see them out of the game because of that incident.

Who knows, maybe Agilent who span off, back in the days, and took HP’s good measurement products, can re-take the HP name and revive it to glory once again.

Thanks

Alon

How to stop your Microwave clock from Blinking

2011-01-07T11:29:00.001-08:00

By: Alon Cohen

Whenever I hear about a new programming language I cringe. Essentially programming languages are all the same… a group of commands in an allegedly human readable language that tells your computer or device how to respond to inputs like keys keyboard, voice, numbers, mouse and so on.

So why do we have so many programming languages? Well every so often, a computer science professor decides that all that was done so far could be done in a simpler way; for those of you who believe that, I suggest trying to program in “Scheme”. Too often, a software company from the north-west decides that the best way to sell new development tools would be to create a new sharper language. Or a company in California, decides that in order to make it harder for developers to move code from other platforms it is better to come up with their own version of objective C.

Generally speaking, all those "new" languages, in my mind, just slows down development of good code (as programmers are always new to the language) and it prevents the industry from building on existing foundations. Yet it sure does help few companies to strive.

Contrary to the above, sometimes a good idea appears. This time, I would not call it a programming language but more like a programming interface. It is not an entirely new concept and it was even used for programming of Lego Devices and even homegrown interactive telephony systems.

However, this new concept from a Rutgers Professor makes me optimistic and also proud as my two boys, Gal Cohen who directly works on this project as a Junior at Rutgers, and Roy Cohen a Sophomore in High School who helps the team with ongoing advice about the Arduino and Xbee communications.

So why am I optimistic? Well for once, I can see this saving significant amount of my time trying to convince the kids to program the “smart” phones to do X & Y (for instance try activating conditional call forwarding on iPhone). It will also save me time helping less technically oriented friends, to deal with devices from answering machine (yes some people still use those) to wireless printers.

Plus, I can clearly see how the Phone.com user interface for call handling rules (which I use every day) could become a part of that Scratch world, helping customers define, in a simpler way than available today, the different actions that will take place when a call comes in.

Exercising my Bragging Rights

2010-10-20T01:58:00.000-07:00

I wanted to thank all my friends and the people I have never met for voting my invention/idea about a simple way of "Increasing Effective Capacity of Highways" to the the first place and helping me win.

I am now officially the #1 winner of the popular vote at the “Create the Future design contest for 2010” that was conducted by “Tech Briefs Media Group”.

I even received a symbolic prize, which is a 3D Mouse.

You can see the top 10 winners list here: http://contest.techbriefs.com/top-votes-2010

Tech Briefs Media Group is the home of few respectable industry magazines such as:

Thanks

Alon

My latest ISSUED Patent – Conferencing Bridge on steroids

2010-06-30T07:30:00.000-07:00

By: Alon Cohen

I was just informed (by a marketing company none-the-less selling plucks) that my US Patent 7742587 filed (November 25 2002) was issued (June 22, 2010), i.e. accepted as an official patent by the US Patent office (USPTO) it only took 8!!! years - wow.

In spite the fact that I have no idea who this patent is assigned to those days, as it was sold repeatedly between different companies, I still keep to myself the bragging rights for the idea.

The concept is about providing a more sophisticated set of capabilities to a conferencing bridge. What we all know is a bridge is a place where all participants hear each other unless the moderator decides to mute everyone.

In my invention every participants has full control over what he/she can hear and control over about who might hear each participant. Sounds a bit hard to manage? True! It is even harder to grasp when implementing. However, this is just the underlying technology at the base of it. Where in fact it enables nifty features, that when combined with a nice user interface (even on a mobile device) become very powerful.

Here are some examples:

Imagine you are a sales person about to call a prospect to close a big deal, you know you have good potential to sell but this customer is highly technical. You do not want to have an engineer talk to your prospect, as you master the art of selling in ways your engineer will never understand. So what do you do? How do you make that work?

You call your bridge and have the bridge call your prospect (yes you can do that), then you call the in the engineer in the group and enter team consultation mode. The Eng. can hear the prospect you hear both and the prospect only hears you the closing master. When the prospect comes up with a hard technical question about “MPLS convergence time”, your engineer gives you the answer and you look like the best sales person in the world. If you need a finance person to back you up on discount you can add that he/she to your group of consultants in the same way, where the group can talk among them without the prospect hearing a thing besides you. Deal closed you nailed another prospect.

Or say when you are in a board meeting conference call and you need your lawyer as personal consultant, so that the lawyer hears everyone but when he talks it is only to you. (Would you rather pay that lawyer to come sit with you or would you rather call him when you need him?)

Now imagine that any of the participants can invoke all those different modes any time, all at the same time, all using any phone or cell phone. The complexities of the technology dealing with managing privacy, managing echoes, suppressing DTMF tones, all implemented in software only, is just few steps above what is implemented today in the most complex bridges out there.

One of the uses I had envisioned at the time was an always-on scenario. A distributed team that collaborates on a time-critical project has the phone open day on and while they can still use the phone to receive and make new calls. The bridge keeps the private calls in private and can keep the conference at low volume in the back so that participants can jump in to the session when needed ask a quick question and progress fast in what they need to do to finish the task.

It is like bringing all the people into a war-room but enabling them to consult with one another on the side. Enabling participants to bring in new people to consult with. Get status calls from the field and decide if to share the callers with the team or not, step out and call home and perform any audio related communication task you can think of that they could have done had they been at the same room while in this case, they are in fact, located far from one another.

Think of it as windows operation system for audio. You can have windows at the back at low volume and main conversation at the front. The technology extends further to situations where the participants are using different audio Codecs, and still each enjoy the best quality and not the lowest common denominator due to the fact that each has in a sense its own mixing element in the bridge controlled by the participant to mix what that specific participant wants (even set individual volumes).

At the same time, each participant can control where his own audio will feed into, to enable privacy. All that controlled by high level features that manage and hide the complexity with a small set of commands delivered via DTMF, a web interface or even a mobile device.

Moreover, it can also do a normal conference call, and you will not know the difference.

It is tough concept to sell, but much fun to use. What made it all possible was a group of dedicated engineers product managers and other team players that actually made it work. What killed it were mostly the economy downturn of the first internet bubble and a one short sighted VC, who did not think a proposal from Nortel to include the technology in every office PBX, was worth the time to write a non-binding letter affirming their intentions to back the company up going on. In addition, the deal did not fit the VC hidden agenda to control bigger portions of the company (how can you take bigger portions if the company can hold its own?). Oh well. The nice thing is that the technology survived, moving on from one company to another, merged into the video conferencing space, and moved on with one dedicated very talented programmer Mr. Igor who was hired along with the patent and IP to make it work in new environments.

SMS on Steroids

2010-06-24T06:50:00.000-07:00

By: Alon Cohen

I am sure any one of us at some point or another tried coordinating a dinner or movie with few friends. Using e-mail it is relatively simple, you send a note to a group of people and hope that everyone will use “reply –all” and that the meeting time and place will converge.

However, in this day and age, kids want to do the same using SMS. Normally you can send messages to few people at once but the concept of “reply-all” has not made it yet to SMS specifically since SMS has a “from” field of only one caller ID.

The team at Phone.com decided that there is a way around it and concocted this unpublished unnamed tool that does just that and still is in alpha.

The tool enables you to create an SMS Conference (few to few) with a group where each participant can choose to see accept messages from all the others and can respond to all. The nice thing is that you do not need a special smart phone, it is wad made so cleverly that any SMS device will work. In addition, it is free.

Here is how to use it at your own risk:

To initiate a bridge you need to text to 1-973-577-6378 a list of numbers and corresponding names:

Number 1 Name1 Number2 Name2 …..(and so on)

Use this EXACT format for the phone numbers: 1xxxyyyzzzz

Use one name for each person (with no spaces in the name)

The bridge will respond on with different caller ID that will be your bridge number that you can name and keep in your address book.

Participants will have to accept a request to join before receiving any messages from the bridge.

Once on the bridge you can send “help”, to find out about few more options like how to add or remove people, how to mute people and some other fun features.

Please try it but know this: it is addictive, specifically for family members with teenagers, for students on vacation that want to keep contact and arrange parties or a movie time.

It is not that easy to start, and I know Phone.com may fix it if people will ask.

It is not twitter, as the messages are not public, it is more like a mobile chat room but different in the sense that any phone can use that without any application download.

Let me know what you think.

Our economy needs your help – here is how!

2010-06-15T12:30:00.000-07:00

By: Alon Cohen

Whenever someone has an idea, of any sort, which is any good, the most important thing is to socialize that idea with people that can help make that happen – well unless you can do it yourself. Some ideas obviously require capital, and the more socialized they are, the higher the chance that they will be funded and see the light of day. Sometimes and more often than we want, they will just see the light.

One way to socialize ideas is to enter them into an invention contest and even better win. I usually make a point to submit a provisional patent just in case someone wants this really bad, and in case nothing happens, at least I know I created some prior art so everybody will be able to use the idea for the good of others without paying anyone else royalties.

This time I am looking at an idea that I came up with many years ago, to reduce traffic jams. The US and world economy is, as we all know, impeded by the slowness of traffic during rush hours. Reducing the traffic jams problem, on existing roads, without building major new roads can have a dramatic improvement on many aspects of our lives. It can give us the time the economy needs to recuperate.

You can read all about that simple $10 per car concept, here on the competition page of the Tech Briefs site, and see other interesting ideas as well.

The idea is to try and convert regular highly "elastic" and slow line of traffic to a more rigid almost train like line of train cars without giving up control of the car (which is expensive) and by using only our basic normal driving psychology and this low cost idea of a device.

If you want to help me win, and I ask that you do, please register to the site and vote. Every vote counts.

See this video to get more understanding of what this concept is trying to solve, and understand that by dissolving the Phantom Jams as this video names them we can make a difference.

Thanks

Alon

Phone.com, two new products that I like

2010-06-10T14:04:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

Phone.com listens to customers and constantly improve the user experience by adding new convenient services. It is the truth regardless of the fact that I work there.

Today Phone.com introduce two new Mobile Phone Apps:

Phone.com - Mobile Office (fo Android) and Phone.com - Mobile VoIP (for iPhone)

Phone.com Mobile Office is my favorite, it is available for all Android phone users. It can be downloaded free of charge directly from the Android Market. Calls can then be placed from your cell phone but using your Phone.com phone number.

You do not need to dial differently or do anything different with the phone i.e. seamless integration.

It is easy to miss how important and how powerful that feature is for your personal productivity and lifestyle. You no longer have to tell people your cell phone number. This is huge, not because you keep your privacy and really keep the cell phone number for emergencies, but because you now get back control over your life. You can block unwanted calls forever, this is by itself something I learned to appreciate just lately as I have started blocking calls on my Home Phone which is also part of the same Phone.com Virtual Office system.

Another feature which I like in the Phone.com - Mobile Office, is that you can do the same trick spoken above with SMS. Yes, you can send SMS from your phone without showing your cell phone caller ID. And surprise surprise, you can even be text back on the same number which is again your office number.

Among all that Mobile Office also gives easy access to your transcribed voicemail messages, Faxes and SMS messages with the click of a button.

And your own conference bridge accessible with one click.

I am now completely torn. I do not like Apple that much (too arrogant of a company for me, reminding me of Microsoft when they were on the top), but, I have to admit I like the iPhone so far (almost perfect UI even compared to the new Android phones). On the other hand I like the Android approach and the openness. After all, making the same level of application as the Phone.com - Mobile office on the iPhone with seamless integration to all the phone operations (as in the android) is just impossible on the iPhone.

One thing to note is that the Mobile Office app is not a VoIP application it uses your mobile minutes as if you made a regular call but it can sure save you on international dialing. It does enjoy all the new power of Phone.com VoIP back-end.

The app supports all Phone.com services, Virtual Office, Virtual Number and even your Home Phone Plus service.

The second Mobile app that came out today is for iPhone it is called Phone.com - Mobile VoIP

Phone.com - Mobile VoIP allows you to place calls from the iPhone using your Phone.com phone number as your caller ID. Now available at no cost from the iPhone app store the Mobile VoIP app is available to any Phone.com Virtual Office customer. Simply add an iPhone Extension within your Phone.com account, and bypass the use of your mobile minutes (data minutes will apply when using a 3G connection).

This is good when you travel, imagine making international calls from your Wifi connection in your hotel in Panama. I have done it and I can not tell you how much I saved. How about 4Cent a minute for a call from Panama to the US instead of $1.5 per minute. Simply unimaginable savings.

The nice thing is that it also work in 3G so you can mask your cell caller ID wherever you are.

Since it is an extension of your Virtual Office you can use your Phone.com number to make calls where you want to hide your Cell phone number. You can even receive calls to your Phone.com number even if the app is not running since you can make the Virtual Office call your cell as well as your iPhone extension. So all in all a different but also a very powerful tool by itself and it even works on the iPad.

However the app can not stay running in the background even with the new iPhone OS since apple is still not a real multitasking OS. The future will show if Phone.com - Mobile VoIP applications and other like it will be able to have Apple change, but I doubt it will be the case.

Ohh, the app is free to download but will cost you a whooping one time fee of $3.88 :), for the creation of the iPhone extension on your virtual office account. True value in my book.

Thanks

Alon

Inside the Studio with TMC

2010-05-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

Alon Cohen, EVP and CTO of Phone.com speaks with Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC

Saving the Global Economy

2009-12-12T07:54:00.000-08:00

By: Alon Cohen

At the end of 2005, we started a journey with few partners and investors to create a nice web site to help people in the community, which are need of human advice, and financially reward those who are willing to provide the advice.

The concept was simple but challenging in many ways. We set a directory of advisors arranged by ranking. We provided a solution to facilitate payment while evading fraud. We included a mechanism by which the advisor can chat, talk over the phone or do a video session with the client, while we measure the duration of the call and at the end, charge one user, and pay the other.

It was all good until we hit a speed bump. We found that it was hard to explain to the advisors that placing a page on a site is only the start to creating a business. It was hard to explain that an on-line virtual business is not much different from a physical business. I use to tell advisors that if you hang up a shiny plate on your bedroom door stating, “I am a certified consultant”, you will not get much action going. As in any other business, you have to go out and find ways to bring clients. To solve the problem, we gathered some on-line resources and communicated those to the advisors so they can use those tools to bring clients.

Our ranking system was a topic by itself, and the company is still perfecting it. It takes into consideration the positive and negative comments an advisor receives, but also the amount of money that advisor made over time. We took the finical gains of the advisor as an indication that this advisor is providing a service valued by the community.

Moving few years forward and passing thought a rough patch in the global economy, we noticed that the people that kept on moving up the ranks are not the Lawyers, not the Registered Dietitians, not the Travel Advisors, not the Doctors or Computer Support people. What we saw is that the most productive people are those who provide online psychic reading. We also noticed that the bigger spenders are those who are not afraid, and that are most open to learn about the future.

Maybe Wall Street should learn from that, and use some of the advisors on the BitWine site to figure out where the things are going, and use that valuable insight to save the economy.

We did our part already and change the BitWine home page to point to our most productive people the Psychics.

Check this out you may discover something you already know.

Phone.com the Best Home & Office Phone Service I have Ever Used

2009-08-12T06:46:00.000-07:00

By: Alon Cohen

If this post smells to you like an ad it probably is. I work for Phone.com and proud about what we offer. But I am also very satisfied with how I use the services every day. People who know me as a technologist know that I do not jump every time a new service comes alive. I do however likely to try new technologies more than the average person, and jump only when I know I get the best bang for the buck, and when I know that I get functionality that help me do more with less in order to feed my basic laziness.

In the past year and half I have been using Phone.com, Vonage, Cablevision triple play, Skype, Jajah, 1Voice, Google Voice and more. I ended up canceling or not using all of them (besides Skype which gives me free Video). At that time frame, I have created a monster phone system for my home based solely on Phone.com Virtual Office. I did not have to install anything just click my way on the Phone.com web.

Why? Well I started small, moved my home phone number and fax numbers, than added menus to make sure my family members get their calls directly to their cell phones, instead of me answering the home phone with calls that are not for me. Then I added support for my wife when she fly overseas so I can save on roaming, then I added a Global Number in Israel so my parents can call me as if the call a local call, then I added a soft phone so my college kid can call anywhere from his dorm using his MAC and save the cell phone plan minutes, then I added IP Phone, so business calls become simpler and so on and on. All the above is done by carving what I needed for my day to day, out of the Phone.com ultra flexible Virtual Office service.

None of the above is doable with a any single service from one company, and Phone.com delivers the goods in a single easy to use service. It is that simple!

Phone.com is in my mind the most flexible, most innovative VoIP service with the best Customer Support - bar none. And if you want to challenge that statement, just call, they are there 24*7, and very responsive.

If I think something is not clear on the Phone.com web feature description, I call the support as any other customer would. I use them to figure out how to best use some of the features we have or give them advice on the same topic. When I learn something new, I make sure it is added to the company’s web site so others can enjoy that knowledge as well.

Since I have joined, the company had created three new services: Home Phone Plus, Virtual Number and Chat Calls, added tons of features as per customer’s requests, improved reliability and much more. At that same timeframe Cablevision for instance (my internet provider) created very nice new commercials, and raised the price twice. I am asking you, does a new commercial help me if I was a customer? No! With Phone.com I know that I keep moving forward and improve my utility and as a result, improve my lifestyle.

From what I am seeing, none of the VoiP / Triple-play companies have the same level of drive to improve and innovate that Phone.com poses.

I am 100% sold. If you want to become a customer just like me, click the banner just above this blog and start your journey to telephony wonderland. Do not even worry about it, the first month is always free.

Canceling a Vonage Account

2009-08-09T15:15:00.000-07:00

By: Alon Cohen

As someone who works for a somewhat competing phone company I would probably not think about publishing my own horror story of getting disconnected from Vonage on the company’s blog. However, since I do like Vonage I hope they take some hints from this blog post. After all Vonage have created a huge service from scratch and lead the fight to de-regulation of VoIP, sometimes they win and we all win and sometimes they loose and we all pay the price, consumers and VoIP phone companies as one.

Since I have encountered a somewhat similar story to mine about canceling a Vonage account on a respectable site I have decided to share some of it, by reference, on my personal blog and offer a potential solution for a tormented customer.

Just as an FYI, knowing about the cancelation situation, Phone.com (which I work for) was established on the principals of providing the best customer support possible, best service possible at the most affordable price, while providing customers a simple way to move in and out from the service. Apparently it pays off. People come to us just because they heard we provide the best customer support.

So if you are leaving Vonage to any carrier here is a small advice:

First go to the winning company’s site, register, and start the process of number porting.

(You will normally need to have the last bill from the loosing company sent over)

Once the number was ported and only after it was ported, call the loosing company to disconnect.

If you do not call, you may keep paying the loosing company even if the number was ported!

If you happen to like Phone.com and choose them (us), simply press the banner above to start the process. The banner will take you to the Phone.com Virtual Office page which is designed for small businesses, but you can move around the site and select Home Phone Plus which is a direct replacement to Vonage.

Check it out.

Looking for Programming Power

2009-08-01T08:55:00.000-07:00

By: Alon Cohen

From time to time I come up with an interesting idea that needs either a proof of concept to get funding or some developers who are willing to shell some free time to be part of a dream.

When Lior Haramaty & I started VocalTec 1989, the company who created the VoIP industry by launching the first Internet Phone in Feb 1995, it was nothing but a dream. We couldn’t have imagined how the future will unfold. We invested our free, and not so free, time at VocalTec in hope that we can make something out of it. And we did, with the help of a very dedicated team that joined over time we managed to go public by 1996.

Today’s internet is much faster, and results show up much quicker.

As I often do with new Ideas, I run them by my close friends to see if they hold water. Not every idea is a go. This time it seems to hit a soft spot. The idea has the potential to solve a big Internet security problem for each one of us.

If you are a web programmer / thinker / technologist / social network animal, that can take an idea and make it work by starting simple and thinking big, I have an idea that I am willing to make you part of. There are no rewards besides bragging rights until we actually make money.

Contact me if you think you are that person alonchook@gmail.com .

The Nanites are here

2009-07-25T07:04:00.000-07:00

By: Alon Cohen

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has organized the second “soccer under glass” event at the RoboCup games at the international competition in Graz, Austria, from June 29 to July 5, 2009.

NIST, the federal agency that advances U.S. innovation and competitiveness, partnered with industry, universities and other organizations to move the world closer to the future where robots smaller than the eye can see are put to work in a variety of ways.

In the Nanosoccer event, computer-driven “Nanites” the size of dust mites challenge one another on fields the size of a grain of rice. Everything is happening under a microscope, while the nanobots are operated by remote control and move in response to changing magnetic fields or electrical signals transmitted across the arena.

The mass of the “Nanites” is just a few nanograms. They are manufactured from materials such as aluminum, nickel, gold, silicon and chromium.

The future application range from cleaning water reservoirs in third world countries to medical application fixing defects in our bodies on the cellular level.

You may have seen the potential use and potential risks associated with using such technologies in the science fiction world:

“In 2366 Wesley Crusher experimented with Nanites aboard the USS Enterprise-D to see if he could enhance their capabilities, by letting them work together. When these Nanites escaped they entered the Enterprise computer core were they multiplied and interfered with almost all ship operations. When Doctor Paul Stubbs tried to kill them, the Nanites retaliated by taking over control of the Enterprise life support systems and even tried to kill him. At that point the escaped Nanites were considered "alive." The destruction of the Enterprise was prevented by Data who was able to talk to the Nanites and as their spokesman was able to come to an agreement with Captain Jean-Luc Picard. The enhanced Nanites were eventually transferred to the Kavis Alpha IV where they founded their own civilization. [http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Nanite]”

We are not there yet, but the good thing is that etiquette and protocols of handling such nano technology particles and devices, are also evolving along side the technology itself to ensure the safety and constructive interactions with the technology as it matures.

The Nanosoccer contests drives innovation in this new field and is designed to inspire young scientists and engineers to get involved.

The Future of Social Networking

2009-06-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

Contributed By: the Editors of Freeservers.com

Twitter is currently having its 15 minutes of fame, thanks in large part to Ashton Kutcher. Known in Internet circles as “aplusk,” Kutcher transformed the social networking website into an overnight sensation when he challenged CNN to see who could be the first to attract 1 Million followers.

Kutcher won the bet, and Twitter now joins Facebook and Wordpress as the media darlings of the social networking revolution, aka Web 2.0. These sites let you interact with friends, family and colleagues in ways previously unimaginable. Ten years ago, people flocked to the Internet for information. Nowadays, they use the web as a platform to broadcasting their opinions—and their very identity—to the world.

I Tweet, Therefore I Am

Those who’ve already hopped aboard the Twitter bandwagon know the drill: sign up for an account, and you’re given the opportunity to express what you’re doing at any given moment. The catch? You have to do so in 140 character or less. Celebrities like Kutcher use the site to keep in touch with fans. But the majority of Twitter users are regular Joes, using the service to update their family and friends about the humdrum routines of their daily life. And tech-savvy job hunters are using their posts to brand themselves in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

News organizations and journalists are also “tweeting” about breaking stories. And protesters in Iran are using it to update the world about their dissatisfaction over election results.

When a site like Twitter pushes past the tipping point to become a cultural phenomenon, it’s only natural to wonder what lies ahead on the horizon. Which trends will emerge in the next ten years, and will they put social networking to rest?

Web 3.0

Look to the next generation of web sites to enable enhanced video searching capabilities. Not only will you be able to watch your favorite shows and films online, but you’ll be able to search for key frames and audio cues within programs.

You can also expect live video and social media to merge in coming years. Glimmers of this phenomenon have already been seen, most notably during President Obama’s inauguration when news sites hosted live chats for visitors. Imagine being able to invite your Facebook friends to watch an event together online, all the while posting comments to each other throughout the experience.

Advertisers are also on the lookout for new ways to integrate their products into social networking and video sites. Many brands are already hip to Twitter and Facebook, using the services in unexpected and creative ways to communicate with customers. New technologies are being developed to insert brands beyond traditional ad banners and sponsorships.

Next-Gen Web Hosting

The future of web hosting is also likely to evolve. Game changers like Google are already pushing us towards “cloud computing,” a system in which an individual’s documents and software are hosted remotely and accessed via the Internet. With less need for storage, personal computers will become lighter and more streamlined—a significant advantage for business travelers.

Multi Tenant Portable Devices

2009-01-12T11:18:00.000-08:00

By: Alon Cohen

Here is something I did not see at CES 2009, well, I should say did not see yet. As I was watching Star Trek over the years it became clear to me that those programs can provide a glimpse to the future if not even forge the future by igniting creativity among other creative people.

We know that scientists are working on teleportation, (“beam me up Scotty”) they even made progress in the past years and managed to show that it is theoretically possible. But why go that far, we all use cell phones, they started big, morphed to mimic the shape of Captain Kirk’s communicator (the flip phone) and they are now becoming smaller and smaller almost like those of Star trek voyager comm badges.

All we have to do to find new ideas is look closer and permutate some of the visuals and gadgets used at those shows. And there are plenty of them.

What caught my attention was how Star Trek people were using their “iPhones” (well not really iPhones more like their “iPod touch”. The key difference between what we have today as iPod iPhone, Android or Palm Pre and what they have used on the show is the fact that theirs was not really owned by anyone specific. They were tossing them around as if they were yellow pads.

This is how I came to the conclusion that given the correct method as depicted later in this post one can build what I call a Multi Tenant Portable Device. I started working on the concept way back, and finally decide to file it as a patent on December 4^th 2008.

The Objective

The objective is to enable multiple users some temporary users to use any portable device nearby with full access to all personal data as if it was your own device, and without compromising your own privacy or the privacy of other users (I call tenants) on the device.

Imagine that you can get full access to all your personal data such as e-mail address book, phone numbers, calendar and messages using someone else’s phone or portable device when your own device is not nearby or not operational from some reason like luck of battery juice, reception or any other reason.

Imagine sitting in front of a TV and reading your e-mails, using your kid’s iPhone or even your smart universal TV remote.

As portable devices become pervasive they could be thrown in the house everywhere much like our old cordless phones. Today, as oppose, to my home cordless phone which is everywhere, when I hear my cell phone I need to find my own cell phone first in order to accept the call. With this invention you could be using any available cell phone around you to pick up your call.

Imagine a world or a corporate environment where people exchange PDA-like devices as if they were writing pads or a printed document, and then leave that device around for others to use, without losing any privacy of personal data.

Using this invention, all the above can become a reality. To say the truth it is not even complicated which in my mind makes it a perfect idea, simply simple and powerful.

Here is how

Today, cell phones have a SIM card that defines the phone personality, kind of a serial number that provides the network ID to which the network can assign your phone number and attach billing information. Today, it is not simple to replace the SIM card, and on iPhone almost impossible. The address book, email settings and other data objects are usually stored locally on the phone’s flash memory. As it stands the experience of using someone else’s phone or PDA is a not a pleasant thought and often feared by the phone owner from privacy reasons. It is sufficient to see my College kid objections to his teenage brother using his iPhone, to understand that privacy is a real issue on those portable devices.

Now what if we could make that SIM card or SIM card analogy well seamless? In much the same way that my mail is not on my PC but rather on a networked mail like g-mail, so can my address book be, my calendar be, my YouTube movies be, my browser preferences be and so on. All I need is to point the Phone (or the Device) to the correct well encrypted on-line setting storage, and the device is temporarily mine.

Some of the above settings’ data is already on-line or replicated for backup or as a synchronization point, but it is not made available on-line to any device I desire, it is for my own devices to use, my own Google account, own address book and so on.

In many cases local storage is not a dirty word, think of it as cash memory for personal data. The problem is that it is not segregated & encrypted per user. So a temporary user can easily get access to personal information stored on the device, while pretending to use that for something else.

Once I have my settings available on-line and from my segregated local storage I can see how iPhones or PDA or iPod Touch or Plam Pre or any iPhone-like smart devices would use a password, or a finger print reader, or even an RFID reader with a tag that a user would carry in his/her pocket to be able to re-define the phone current tenant and all of those tenants relevant settings.

To use such a device I would enter my ID, or place my finger on the device, or just touch it and retrieve all my settings (from the network or local storage on the device), and gain access to my address book, my preferences, My Music, My Movies, my phone calls and even my device desktop and wall paper. In fact as soon as I touch the phone or device I should not be able to distinguish between that phone or device and my own device or phone (operationally speaking, taken in consideration form factors and UI capabilities).

As soon as I “let go”, (if I am not on an active phone call), and the phone goes to sleep mode, the device, using some defined policy, revert back to its original “owner” (or default user) settings.

Different “let go” policies may be used like a tenant registering on another device, or a tenant proactively logging out from the device, or just not touching it, or simple timeout. When this happens the device can forget the tenant personal data, or store it encrypted in a local storage in case the same tenant needs it again quickly, all according to what the tenant defined in the tenant’s personal profile.

As a user of such device, I can now prepare a document on my way to work, assign it to the destination user, by say e-mailing it or potentially storing it locally encrypted for a specific user. As I come to work I just hand the device to the other user to read without risking unauthorized access to my personal data on the Device. All that the next user will see is his own data his own e-mails and nothing else. Could he use his own device to read it? Probably yes if I mailed it, but he just gave his own device to someone else. One can envision that there will be no more “owning” of devices, in much the same way that there is no owning of a document I just handed to you, it’s yours if you like it. Or owning will exist but sharing of and collaboration by using those multi tenant mobile devices will be more apparent.

For very sensitive data that should not hit the network, sharing specific data might be accomplished, as mentioned above, by storing the data locally with an access list for one or a plurality of users so that only the People named in the list can open the data when they have their identity entered to or identified by the phone. The data is stored locally encrypted to that trusted list of readers and does not have to leave the device.

My phone, my PDA device, even my universal remote control are now becoming a much more powerful collaboration devices, with much more diverse set of uses and applications almost like what we saw happening on Star Trek Voyager. It shortens the distance of the users not only from the device but also from their personal data and any other public digital content out there.

If you recall on the Star Trek series the com-badge was not part of the data infrastructure of the ship, it was very personal, like a personal SIM or ID card for a person. But on many occasions, you wished one person could use someone else’s com badge to get out of dire situations. If only they thought of applying the Multi Tenant methods to the communicators they could have probably save the jobs of few actors here and there.

As mentioned the device local storage can hold group access rights and personal settings for say an enterprise, so that local data on the device can not be used outside the list of trusted users without erasing all data that might be stored on the device. The local storage can also store an updated copy of all the local users’ settings for the occasions where the device is not connected to a network.

If the device shared is also a phone and the phone is now used by a temporary user, phone calls to the original device owner or other guests on the device might be accepted in one implementation as call waiting if the phone is used at that instance when another call is directed to the same phone, while the display can show the called person ID as well as the caller ID. When not on a call an incoming call can trigger a vocally “called person ID” so the correct person can know to pick up the phone to answer.

Looking at it from the network side, when a temporary user is logging into a shared device the calls for the temporary user or users will be directed to the shared device. If implemented efficiently this process can take place even when I hear my phone ring from a far and I want to instantly become a tenant on say my wife’s phone or any suitable device in my vicinity to pick that call.

The Personalization Process

Personalization methods are not limited to, but could use an apparatus such as a Finger Print reader, image recognition using a camera on the device, voice print identification, RFID tag or be as simple as a password on a phone that was setup to accept a specific guests, or as simple as a username and password the first time a new guest is introduced to the phone.

Basic Personalization and Personalization Persistence Process

The Personalization data has to be made to fit different devices. It means that the personalization data of a user or guest is stored in some tagged metadata format that can be interpreted and converted differently by every multi-tenant device to match that device’s specific setup and capabilities. If the device supports only e-mail and not phone calls than obviously the phone information and redirection process will not be used and the calls for the new guest tenant will not be directed to that phone. SMS or other push mode notifications for instance might be directed to that device via e-mail if the device supports push e-mail and not SMS and if the user chooses that type of behavior.

Persistence of one or more guests on a device must be handled as well. Persistence is a bit different than what is widely known as presence today. Presence is an indication that I am currently actively using a specific device or software and usually indicate a “non-present” status when the user has not touched the keyboard or has not responded to a call for action for some time. On a phone for instance, the user may not have used the phone functionality for a long period but he/she is still present to accept calls, SMS or/and voicemail indications even when he/she is not able to specifically answer a phone call at a given situation (like in a movie theater) or when he/she has not touched the keyboard for a long period. This means that the fact that a specific user is now guest or a tenant on a device must be persistent, even when normal presence may indicate otherwise.

As mentioned there may be few policies that could be implemented by the device owner or a guest regarding the persistence of a guest instance on a device. For instance a phone can be set to accept a guest phone call as long as the guest did not logout, or as long as the guest did not log in from another device. An automatic log-out can be implemented so the fact that the user is now a tenant on another phone can indicate to the network to automatically log that guest out from any previous devices the user was logged into as a guest.

For this system to work for example for normal calls and SMS, a forwarding action of SMS or calls must be accessible from any remote device even when the device is not on the same network and also from any internet connected device. In the existing cellular networks if you want to forward calls to another phone while traveling, you must remember to do that from your phone before you leave the country, or you will not be able to do that later. VoIP networks today enable that forwarding anytime from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection and a web browser.

A simple personalization process would look like this:

Note: this concept was filed as a patent, and the author is open to discuss licensing.

Long Term Happy Investments during Sad Economy

2008-12-02T05:56:00.000-08:00

By: Alon Cohen

When the economy suffers, there are few that can claim they made good investments that did not depreciate. There is however a currency which has not depreciated as did the rest of the market. This type of currency is not money; it is in fact, our own capabilities.

The question is, what are we, as individuals, choose to do with that currency? This question should be asked at any given moment in life, but even more importantly now in light of the current sadness of the economy.

Generally speaking, I agree that time is money, and an individual’s time should have a price and one should be compensated for time invested. In a startup situation it is my conviction that time invested by say the founders has to be compensated as if they are investors in the company using equity, debt or salary.

Sometimes however, as entrepreneurs at the concept stage, we find ourselves investing mostly free time (i.e. with low alternative cost) without an instant reward in something we believe in and passionate about. This type of investment, seems to me, to encapsulate a much smaller investment risk with a high upside potential, than investing your hard earned money in the stock market.

I often look at other entrepreneurs and programmers, who decide to invest time, in essence put their personal currency to work, in ideas they believe will create opportunities as the economy recovers or the project takes off. Sometimes the investment starts small as a free time project, then momentum is built and it becomes a part time job, then investors come in (or maybe you are lucky to not need them) and eventually this becomes your paid day job. Sometimes it doesn’t and you gain experience and knowledge for the next one, but even then there is almost always some sort of direct or indirect long term “tax free” gain.

Personally, I invest my time in making sure the company I work for, Phone.com, is doing its best while I try to use my free time to gel new ideas into convincing power point presentations. To make even better use of that time I often do this process with my kids, just in the same way my father has done with me since I was a kid (and still does today), where we drive a creative process of sifting through project ideas and problem solving, as a part of our quality time. I run my ideas with my kids who often contribute, and we work together to develop their own ideas, programs and presentations. I am sure that directly or indirectly those time investments may one day become assets. I see this process as my kids’ backup plan, kind of a boot camp preparation and a way of building arsenal for whatever life will throw at them or at me. Plus it’s a fun way to pass quality time.

So, here s one for you, if you are a creative software developer with entrepreneurial aspiration look at my blog post about doing business with linked-in written by Ronen Mizrahi and myself, as an example for such a project idea. The fact is that we composed and patented the concept in hope that we can shape our own future by creating a tool that helps entrepreneurs meet funding solutions and partners, faster than usual.

We believe that, once implemented, this linked-in project is poised to succeed. If you are a capable software developer who values your free time and wants to be part of a free time embryonic low key entrepreneurial process, here is what we look for: We need you to understand social networks, the open social API and how to apply that knowledge to develop a Linked-In application. If you are open to the idea of investing your free time, and fancy the project we want you to become part of the process and its potential success. Invest some of your free time to develop the application based on our patent and help all of us do better business, find investors, or just develop our own capabilities and experience to the next level.

Happy Holidays,

Alon Cohen

Innovation in the Network DVR space

2008-11-08T05:09:00.000-08:00

By: Alon Cohen

A good friend of mine CEO of Tversity mentioned to me the story about the networked DVR innovation planned by Cablevision and how they were sued based on their press release. For now it seems they won the first battle in this space.

They still promise Network DVR 'Early Next Year, though legal fight against entertainment industry may continue (Thursday Sep 11 2008 by Karl Bode)

“Despite the fact their recent court victory may head to the Supreme Court, Cablevision insists that their network DVR concept should show up sometime early next year. "We won a monumental case and all the things that we thought we could do, the court agreed with, so we're ready to go to market with that product," says Cablevision COO Tom Rutledge….”

Being involved, as a Prior Art witness, in some of the VoIP law suites out there and a consultant on those matters, I can smell the next phase of lawsuits moving to the IPTV/DVR space. Since I still own about 4 shares of VocalTec (NASDAQ: VOCL), from the time I founded the company, I have decided to air this story as potential opportunity for them to maybe monetize the VocalTec Patent I filed 12 years ago, while it still have merits. This is specifically true as the legal reality is that patents become wider and cover more as they grow old.

The patent was filed prior to the launch of the VocalTec iWave product in 1996, just about year after we launched the VocalTec iPhone in Feb 1995.

The patent which I filed is captioned. “System and Method for distributing multi-media presentations in a computer network” US5751968

It discusses system and methods to create an efficient distribution of multimedia content while providing time shifting capabilities as part of the process, both for recorded and live content.

Computer networks, in particular the internet, allowed users (at the time) to download files in order to play them. This was a slow process needless to say. The object of the invention was to provide an improved method for distribution of multimedia presentations of all sorts to users having a display connected to a network. Another objective was to provide the presentations in substantially real time, while enabling a user to selectively display portions of the presentations or re-display them using any desired delay.

In other words what we are now calling a network DVR.

The patent was also filed internationally at EP0850451, WO9712447, US5751968, NZ316616 JP11512893.

Obviously you are welcome to read about this patent or drop me a note and I will be happy to tell you how I envisioned the distribution process and why I thought at the time and still believe that one can build a very nice distribution network using conventional web servers rather than dedicated media servers. In fact the patent even describes the basics of a cashing CDN that drives the content to the edge of the network.

Well Cablevision, if you think I can help, I am here. I do pay you too much in my opinion as it is. Let me know if I can help you reduce my monthly bills in any way.

For the rest of you, if you are interested in this space, enjoy the reading.

Alon

2008-10-08T06:47:00.000-07:00

מונסטר ונצ'ר פרטנרס רוכשת את הסטארט-אפ הישראלי ביטווין

ביטווין, מתוך אתר החברה | צלם: יח"צ

ביטווין מקשרת בין גולשים המחפשים עצות ליועצים מקצועיים במגוון תחומים. אלעד בר-און, מנכ"ל החברה: "הטכנולוגיה שלנו טובה מזו של קסמבה"

05.10.08 | 13:05 גיא גרימלנד
Israeli Hi-Tech and Startups

חברת הסטארט-אפ האמריקאית ישראלית ביטווין (Bitwine) נמכרת לקרן ההון סיכון מונסטר ונצ'ר פרטנרס (Monster Venture Partners). על פי הבלוג הטכנולוגי טק קראנץ', הקרן תודיע על רכישת אחזקות בחברה מחר (יום ב'). בפוסט מציין מייקל ארינגטון כי במסגרת ההודעה על הרכישה צפוי אלעד בר-און, מנכ"ל החברה, להתמנות לנשיא ומנהל טכנולוגי ראשי, כשאת את תפקידו ימלא רוני גוריון (שאינו ישראלי). פרטי הרכישה לא פורסמו.

ביטווין מציעה לגולשים יעוץ בכל נושא שבעולם: עסקים, בריאות, תזונה ומה לא. התהליך הוא פשוט. היכנסו לאתר, מצאו את היועץ המועדף עליכם והתקשרו איתו. חלק מהיועצים הם בתשלום. הקשר בין הגולשים ליועצים מתבצע באמצעות טלפונים רגילים ותוכנות VoIP (כמו סקייפ). בקרן מונסטר מסבירים כי הטכנולוגיה של ביטווין תסייע למספר חברות בפורטפוליו של הקרן, כשבין היתר מדובר ב-,Questions.com ,Careers.org ,Patents.com Traveler.com ו-Slideshow.com.

בראיון ל-TheMarker אומר בר-און כי ביטווין פיתחה פלטפורמה טכנולוגית המאפשרת ליועצים מקצועיים, למשל מורים פרטיים או פסיכולוגיים, להציע שירותים לגולשים. "כך יכולים אנשים ממרחק של מאות קילומטרים לקבל ייעוץ. הפלטפורמה שפיתחנו תומכת גם בוידאו. אנחנו מאפשרים התקשרות באמצעות וידאו בתוכנת סקייפ. שותפים נוספים שלנו הם חברת ג'אג'ה שמאפשרת לנו להציע שיחות Call Back". עוד הוא מסביר, כי לחיצה על הכפתור באתר תפתח תיבת שיח של צ'אט אינטראקטיבי בסגנון IM (מסרים מיידיים), ובמקביל ישנה אפשרות להתקשר ליועץ בטלפון.

אם אני מבין נכון, המתחרה שלכם, חברת קסמבה הישראלית, מציעה אתר שמרכז מומחים ויועצים בעוד אתם מתמקדים בפלפטורמה שמקשרת בין השניים.

"קסמבה היא אתר מתחרה, אבל אנחנו סבורים שהטכנולוגיה שפיתחנו היא טובה יותר. המטרה שלנו היא להציע את הפלפטורמה הטכנולוגיה לשותפים שלנו, וזו בעצם מהות העסקה הנוכחית: להטמיע את הפלפטורמה אצל יותר שותפים, בתחילה בחברות הפורטפוליו של הקרן ולאחר מכן אצל שותפים נוספים. יש לנו כבר שותפות עם חברת IDG. הם מציעים יעוץ של מומחים בתחום ה-IT. הדגש שלנו הוא לאפשר לכל שותף לתקשר עם אנשים ברשת באמצעות הפלטפורמה הטכנולוגית שלנו. מעבר לכך, הפלטפורמה שלנו מאפשרת למצוא את היועץ המתאים לפי ציונים".

ביטווין היא חברת סטארט-אפ ישראלית בעלת משרדים בכפר שמריהו וניו-ג'רסי, ומונה בסך הכל שבעה עובדים. בר-און מגדיר אותה כ"חברה וירטואלית ללא משרדים", כיאה ללא מעט חברות אינטרנט אחרות. היקף הרכישה לא פורסם, אך בר-און אומר כי לא מדובר ברכישה מהסוג של ווייל על ידי מיקרוסופט (ברון היה המנכ"ל של ווייל שנמכרה למיקרוסופט עבור סכום העולה על כ-70 מיליון דולר). "מדובר ברכישה טכנולוגית", הוא מציין אך נמנע מלפרט. ההערכות הן שמדובר בסכום שנע בין מאות אלפי דולרים לכמה מיליוני דולרים בלבד, אך לכך, כאמור, אין אישור רשמי.

מייסד שותף נוסף בחברה הוא אלון כהן, אחד היזמים של ווקלטק. "הוא הגיע עם הרעיון הראשוני", מתגמל בר-און את שותפו בקרדיט. הרכישה הנוכחית היא חריגה במקצת שכן הרוכשת היא לא חברה טכנולוגית גדולה, אלא קרן הון סיכון. גם בר-און מודע לכך ומספר שהקשר נוצר די במקריות. "אלון כהן וחברים נוספים יצרו את הקשר. היזם של הקרן, רוב מונסטר, התלהב, וחשב שהטכנולוגיה שלנו מתאימה לחברות פורטפוליו שלו".

באמצע: אלעד בר-און
עדכון אחרון: 14:28, 05/10/2008

Source: http://it.themarker.com/tmit/article/4589

The Future for Skiing and Skating is here

2008-07-06T06:41:00.000-07:00

The Future for Skiing and Skating is here
By: Alon Cohen http://alonc.blogspot.com/

The RedSeaMobile Invented in Israel, is still somewhat ugly and still clunky, but it is doing a good a job as it first of a kind prototype. Imagine the pod racing in star wars without the antigravity nonsense and you got yourself a RedSeaMobile. The RedSeaMobile takes skiing, skating and in-line skating to the next level in terms of sports’ action, speed, terrain, distance season and accessibility. What so far were inaccessible places for skaters, like going up hill just to be sliding back down at speeds beyond comprehension or, sliding across flat sands in the desert using ski’s, or using larger wheal skates for miles long rides along the shore line, are now a reality (well as soon as this become widely available).

It seems like a good Skater can derive lots of fun and sporting action out of this device.

I had the privilege to contribute few small ideas myself to the inventors and building team composed of the two most creative people I have seen, Hagai Cohen and Mel Rosenberg while they were creating the prototype. The prototype was patented and then unveiled this year at the Kinernet geek convention in Israel alongside inventions from famous people and companies like Google, Jeff Pulver, and other Israeli inventors including Yossi Vardi the legendary father of ICQ who is also one the organizers of the event.

It seems like the RedSeaMobil team are in need of a younger and more experienced skater/test driver to really show the units capabilities, but I am sure there will be lots of volunteers who would like to make history.

The word is that the team is now working on a green version to meet California’s Environmental regulations.

In the video you can see Mel (in his fifties) using the RedSeaMobil in relative ease but in somewhat reserved manner which is acceptable to his age and skating experience. Enjoy the Video.

Social Network Backup Anyone?

2008-06-24T07:47:00.000-07:00

By: Alon Cohen - See me or call me

Backup is probably one of things that everyone wants to have but afraid to ask about (knock on wood). It is also probably the last thing anyone wants to hear about so I will keep that post brief.

I am sure all of you keep backups of your Pictures, Audio Files, Work files, yeah I know.. but what about your Facebook account or your MySpace friends list? For some people this is not critical, having about 5 friends is not something to write home about, but if you are someone like say Jeff Pulver with more than 5000 friends, or someone that rely on Facebook as part of your day to day operation or livelihood, like some event organizers, you need to take that backup into consideration.

So what could happen to your Facebook friends you ask? Well, how about some arbitrary guy at Facebook support decides that promoting your event is against the site regulations and all of what Facebook Term of Service stands for?

After all you state that “You understand that except for advertising programs offered by us on the Site (e.g., Facebook Flyers, Facebook Marketplace), the Service and the Site are available for your personal, non-commercial use only.”

Be aware that you may be receiving the following notice:

“You made one or more wall posts that violated our Terms of Use. Among other things, posts that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. We also take down posts that attack an individual or group, or advertise a product or service. Continued misuse of Facebook's features could result in your account being disabled.”

And if you insist and say that you have not even posted anything in the past year you get:

“We do not allow users to send messages promoting or advertising a product, service, or opportunity. It is a violation of Facebook's Terms of Use to repeatedly send the same message or to make the same post.

Facebook prides itself in protecting users from spam, and we take this standard very seriously. You have been abusing the features of the site in a way that is not permitted. I'm sorry, but you will no longer be able to use Facebook. We will not be able to reactivate this account for any reason. This decision is final.”

Unfortunately you don’t have any recourse or anyone to talk to and your social network in which you have invested countless hours for building and pruning is now gone forever.

If you know of any friends-backup application for Facebook, let me know.

I like Facebook, but beware nothing is perfect.

Making Linked-In the Best Business Oriented Social Network

2008-04-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

Or, Incentive based referral system and method for social networks.

By: Alon Cohen & Ronen Mizrahi

Linked-In is one of the earliest business social networks and as such inspired great hopes of simple access to people for the purpose of doing business. The hopes were for direct or friend-assisted access to individuals you want to do business with, which may be in your network up to a certain degree of separation.

Many of those who actually tried using the network as business tool report a complete failure. Here are some bloggers sharing their experience:

Seamus McCauley states in post at Virtual Economics: “Here’s the problem with LinkedIn - it doesn’t do anything. You sign up, you find some colleagues, you link to them and then…nothing.”

So have others Including Jeff Pulver, who completely gave up on Linked-In and moved to Facebook.

Our experience is that even using the paid version of linked-in for direct access does not help a bit. The only people you really gained access to, were the people you already knew beforehand, and all the rest of the millions on the network remained inaccessible.

One can only assume that Linked-in invested vast amounts of development time into the referral mechanisms just to discover that it doesn’t work in the real world. The network’s main value is apparently manifested as a repository of resumes and as an active update mechanism that generates notifications as friends find to new jobs.

The problem, as we identified it, was not the concept of the friendly referrals but rather the lack of incentive for people to propagate introduction requests, specifically in fear that they may not be up to par, and the lack of a method to evaluate the request and determine whether passing it on will undermine their reputation in the eyes of the receiving party or reinforce it. In other words am I doing the receiver a favor or am I wasting their time with junk. Plus what’s in it for me?

The idea is to create a clear incentive path and a tracking mechanism for deals that materialize due to referral actions taken by individuals, with the intention to make business introductions facilitated by a social network significantly more efficient when compared to pre-existing methods.

This is similar to the efficiencies social networks added to other forms of communications between friends such as selective sharing of news, photos and other personal data.

Business referrals among friends has been taking place in the world long before the Internet came along, yet it has not been made more efficient or monetized by social networks yet, like other social activities have.

The Internet and specifically social networks provide the underlying infrastructure to do just that with the potential to track the referral and its path in the network and to keep all parties updated with respect to the referral progress.

As an example if I knew that by referring a start-up to an NBC executive I will receive 1% or so of a multimillion dollar in case the deal is closed, I will probably do my best to forward the referral request, and even make an effort to find the correct next link to ensure higher success probability of the referral.

Think about helping an entrepreneur get to a VC for a few million dollar funding deal, or for that matter, any other deal that is easily quantifiable. I am sure you can think of some as you read those lines.

Obviously the network will monetize its database by taking its own 1% or so commission from those “few” multimillion dollar deals.

The provisional patent described here was filed and it is depicting a method and mechanics associated with incentivizing and monetizing the referral system in business social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, Xing, Plaxo or Pulse and can fit other social networks used for Dating and Matching, as such it is not limited to the business domain.

Third-parties currently working on social network projects and APIs (Google, Open Social and so on) may also implement it across several social networks such that the referral path may span and can be tracked across seemingly unconnected networks.

The inventors are happy to negotiate licensing terms with interesting parties that want to own the patent and its priority date.

In a year from now (April 7th 2009), this patent will officially lose its priority date and will be available, royalty free, to all social networks. Take that as our own contribution to the social networking world, and yes, we need this to work. We are already in discussions with few parties, so if you are the CEO of a social network straggling to differentiate and compete, or a Biz-Dev guy for that matter, with those companies, don’t let this slip between your fingers, be among the first to contact us.

For more information, please contact: Alon alonc@netvision.net.il, or Ronen ronenmiz@gmail.com

Making Money out of Patents

2008-03-03T06:38:00.000-08:00

By: Alon Cohen - See me or call me

In general I think patents are a waste of time, specifically for the inventors. A patent is merely the right to sue someone, not a cash register, in fact, until you can actually sue someone it is nothing but a drain on your resources.

Most “business” models around patents involve suing companies that infringe on the patent, or threatening them, or selling the patents to the companies that can sue the people that potentially infringe, or having some legal firm help take the legal cost of suing on some contingency base.

It is all about a long legal fight that an inventor / patent owner has to initiate in case he/she was lucky to invent something useful. It seems what is required from the inventor is to be a lawyer, or at least have some affinity for legal battles.

In my mind a complete waste of time for society, just the opposite of the original idea of patents that were design to compensate and encourage people to invent and share for the good of all mankind. It seems that since the only people enjoying that legal economy are the legal firms, maybe they should encourage people to file patents on their firm’s dime.

During the summer (as I was visiting Israel) I encountered an interesting initiative from Procter and Gamble. The company has Identified Israel as a source of innovation and decided to shorten the process from innovation to market or from innovation to inventor compensation. In fact they opened an office where they encourage people to come up with an innovation and a business model, what ever that might be, and if the concept is good and match the company’s goals, and makes sense business wise, they will pay, and potentially take it to market. This is great news for inventors and for Israeli entrepreneurs since most VCs in Israel do not touch tangible-consumer-goods startups.

I can happily attest to the P&G process. During summer 2007, I entered a P&G contest, where they were in a search of a technological solution for a specific improvement of a popular consumer product. I presented a solution and won the contest, and yes they even paid. In my case one-time fee, as was agreed as part of the contest rules. Few weeks ago, Feb 2008, they opened the model for others to come and bring them ideas. Check P&G’s Israel office, or ask me how.

In many cases, where an individual file for a patent during the course his/her job, the patent legal work is paid for by the company and the patent is assigned to the company and not to the individual. In many cases, companies that are not trigger happy will never sue others for infringement as it may be too distracting for their day to day operation, or simply bad PR.

On my record, I have at least one patent that might be “legally monetized” the patent has to do with network based time shifting of radio and television broadcasts in essence a “network based TIVO”. If you have the time on interest find it here.

As I am really fed up with the patent legal process (and find it boring), I am trying to think of new innovative ways to make money out of innovation which is interesting. In a sense I am looking for a quick way to flush the potential of a patent if such potential exists.

One such way which I am contemplating now, is submitting a provisional patent (very low cost say at LegalZoom), then publishing the patent / idea on a blog, potentially even stating a ball park price, and inviting potential companies by name, to come and read the concept.

Correct me if you think my logic is wrong here. If a company reads this blog and find some innovative idea interesting, they will want to be the first to engage and negotiate out of concern that their competitors will try and grab the patent for its priority date. Since they don’t know if others have approached me they might move even faster. Unless, say Google will cooperate with Microsoft, to NOT buy the patent, for a year, the process seems safe.

Obviously the idea has to hold some merits, if it doesn’t, nothing will happen and the patent will become public domain. The inventor invested not thousands, but rather just few hundreds of dollars; hence the value got flushed early on into the process for the innovator at very low cost. It is also good for the rest of humanity since after a year, if a real patent was not filed, the provisional patent is out there for anyone to use.

Let me know what you think, I am gearing up to try this concept myself on this blog so if the logic is wrong let me know.

As for new patent ideas, if you are Google / Microsoft, or LinkedIn / Xing, stay tuned, I have something coming up for you to fight over.

Solar Energy Innovation

2008-02-17T14:48:00.000-08:00

As energy cost rise, the luck of significant solar energy producing facilities becomes evident. The sun that reaches the Earth's surface every day delivers 10,000 times more energy than we consume.

There are discoveries in the Nano Technology space (2005) related to absorbing more energy from the sun, scientists have invented a plastic solar cell that can turn the sun's power into electrical energy, even on a cloudy day. Those "spray on" cells have the potential to be five times more efficient than current solar technology.

Another interesting solar generator is using a Stirling engine (powered by heat) which was invented in 1816!! A startup company is now developing those generators in a way that they could be manufactured by the suffering car industry manufacturing facilities.

Flying over the US and looking down, it is simple to see the fact that there are locations where you can cover enormous area with mirrors or photo-voltaic surfaces that can be exposed to sun light large portions of the year. Obviously transferring the energy is another place where efficiency can be improved, but we are transferring fuel over unimaginable terrains and distances for years which indicate that this is a surmountable problem.

I can envision "solar farms" consisting of the plastic material rolled across deserts generating enough clean energy to supply the entire US and even the planet's power needs. We need to make this happen regardless of any political affiliation. It is a question of quality of life, and independence above everything else.

The insufficient planning and deeds in this area is probably the biggest mistake made by the US economy leaders over the past 50 years. It is not too late to do the right thing if we accelerate the efforts now.

See where innovation can take us if we put our mind to it. A solar powered Rickshaw demonstrating the use of clean solar energy while relying on natures’ designs. With that invention at hand it seems like we will not need wheels.

Best Communication tools for Small and Medium Businesses

2008-01-16T06:51:00.000-08:00

Many people that I have been talking to recently, like me, work from home. They do travel, they do get out sometimes but their main business is from home.

Since a large portion of the US economy is based on very small to medium size businesses I though that it only makes sense to discuss some of the latest coolest tools that I have seen that can help you build and be your own small business from home or anywhere, while projecting a very large professional footprint.

The three most important communication elements in my mind for creating the large footprint are:

- Online Presence.
- Professional Flexible Sounding and Acting Phone system.
- Conference Call Service.

- Online Presence.

For the on-line presence specifically if you provide services, a must have tool is a page on BitWine the benefits are simple to understand. You get instant presence on a popular site which is being scanned by Google every day. You can later link the BitWine page to a more sophisticated web site, or a blog, but BitWine provides the basic tools for doing business on-line, including a way for people to reach you by phone or Skype, and a way to charge people for services rendered using PayPal or Credit card. Imagine that all that is free, and probably consumes 10 minutes to establish.

- Professional Flexible Sounding and Acting Phone system.

When you travel or at home you want people to always call you on your own 1-800 number, or ‘corporate” number, leave messages, get to your accounting department, send faxes, search the corporate directory, in other words provide everything that a large corporate would provide.
The difference is that you want most calls to eventually land on your cell phone, or home phone. When you do hire an accountant you want the flexibility to change the destination of the accounting extension with few clicks.

You also want to be able to receive all your faxes to your mobile e-mail and get SMS or e-mail notifications and even the voice mails themselves onto your blackberry or outlook. You want the transition from home to mobile to be seamless. Phone.com do all that automatically and much more.

The fact is that the Phone.com service can even save you money. For instance you never have to give out your cell phone number, which means that you never have to pay number porting fees if you change the phone company in order to get a better plan from the other guys.

If all that sounds scary, let me tell you, you are correct it use to be that way and it use to involve words like IVR, Key Systems, PBX, DID and so on. Luckily it is not the case any more. Phone.com is now providing all those features and more with only few clicks and plain English.

If you wonder about the cost, how does “less than $10 per month” sounds?

Mind you, it does not end there. Phone.com has the best customer support ever, so a simple call can do the job. If you read this, then there are three months free waiting for you. Start here or call 1-800-998-7087 and accept their 3 months free offer.

Listen to Phone.com's CEO Ari Raban in an interviewed by Dave Mason Part1 part2

- Conference Call Service.

The last thing related to communication is Conference Calls. Specifically for someone who works from home, you are often required to put few people on the line for a work session. You can do that with your cell phone, if you pay the wireless companies and if you are using a GSM phone. I would argue that “wait let me connect the other person” statement, does not sound professional it is good for an ad-hoc session but not for a planned meeting. Plus, the obvious question is: why pay for a service if you can get it for free?

You can get a conference call service for FREE at confreecall simply register, get your bridge code and you are done.

If your business involves mostly on-line participants than potentially you can try a new paid service called HighSpeed conferencing where participants actually talk using Skype (or phone). The difference is that the sound quality for the skype participants is like listening to FM radio vs. a standard low quality phone call. HighSpeed conferencing is not free, but they do offer a 10 days of free trial.

All the above services are free or almost free, for the proper disclosure I can say that the CEOs of all those companies are friends of mine and I help them whenever I can. When you do call or register don’t hesitate to say that I sent you, who knows, I might gain few friendship points if they hear about it. And hey, for a paid advice on all those services try my on-line presence here.

Improving Your Internet Application Success

2007-12-13T15:13:00.000-08:00

Many VCs and Entrepreneurs struggle with the problem of predicting when to invest money and time into a new idea and when to pass. Some just guess, others invest in people and passion. I decided to try and see if we can analyze and find some success predictors.

A method often used by investors include a mental simulation that assumes the investor is the target audience (even if it is a product for kids) which will usually end up with one conclusion “I would not use it, why would anyone else”. When in doubt, they will say let’s wait and see if it gets some traction. This is a good test but if the product gets traction without marketing budget, you may not need the investment, or the valuation would be different.

Entrepreneurs often get excited an in love with an idea and forget the basics such as the business model. As a frequent visitor to the NY Tech Meetup forum I can tell you that the forum organizer banned the Business Model question simply because, many entrepreneurs had no idea what it is.

To make that process a bit simpler I have decided to do a summary of my non-scientific observations of some internet product features that can be used as predictors for success.
As a reference I chose to look generally on some successes such as ICQ, Skype, MySpace / Facebook, Google, Twitter, Wikipedia and try to ask the question “what traits do they all have in common?”

I came up with the following list of “success” factors (traits or features) that seem to repeat themselves on the more popular applications and websites. I have also added some of my own experience to the mixture.

Let's start with those:

Viral or Social Characteristics
Simple & Reliable
No installation
User Participation (UGC)
“Usefulness
Business Model
Marketing and Budget
Investment Requirement

Viral or Social Characteristics

If a product is more useful to you when your friends have it, it means that it poses the viral trait. For instance what can you do with ICQ or Skype by yourself? Maybe talk to strangers. Yet, when your friends have it, you are really thriving.

If we look at my MySpace, the need to show people your new psychedelic page background drives you to ask others to join in.

If you have designed your product with a viral approach, good, if not, try to ride on top of an existing Social Network that has strong communication tools, so that it would very simple for a user to tell a friend, see what I found.

LinkedIn for instance has Poor communication tools, they adopted the “Don’t e-mail me, I will call you” approach whereas Facebook did the opposite with features such as Poke, Status, and Simple internal mail.

The use of OpenSocial API (led by Google) will enable new application to get closer to the Holy Grail of interoperability and Viral Distribution with the mantra of “write once run many” (on many Social Networks that is).

Simple & Reliable

Not much to say here, the product should Simply Work (Like Skype) vs. for instance MSN Messenger or other SIP phones that at least initially suffered from all kind of NAT (networking and fire wall) issues. I would say that new products should be designed with security in mind and work behind corporate firewalls. It seems that people now work from home, and “shop” from the office.

The GUI must be as simple as possible, like twitter; it should work on every OS, and on any browser. I know it is not always simple to do, yet it is a good design consideration, that can be achieved over time.

No installation

Every installation that a user is required to do is a friction point, even Skype in my opinion may have been more popular if it did not require setup for the first second.

My recommendation is to use Flash when possible (if a web page browser based technology is not sufficient). There are new similar or Flash like next-generation environment but it is better to stick to those already deployed with end users. The most popular applications such as G-mail, Facebook, MySpace, don’t require installation.

Sometimes the audience you need for Business Development is different than the one really using your product. Skype Developer Program manager said in a developer session in NY “Make sure your application can run on a Mac” so more people in skype will know about you.

User Participation (UGC)

It makes sense, that applications, which let users share private or public information, get more attention. First the users who placed the information keep getting back to update, or share more. Second it provides for an incentive to tell others about it.

In a way it feeds our basic curiosity to see what other people expose and our need to be exposed. In other words the basic human Voyeurism and Exhibitionism. Good examples for that are Q&A sites, Facebook and MySpace.

It turns out that UGC it is also good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which dramatically contributes to the economics of the site.

SEO In general is something that needs to start from day one, from the point when you register the domain name, or buy one that has traffic, and on, on every page that comes up on the website.

Usefulness

Usefulness or Utility is hard to predict, what useful for me may not be useful for others and vise versa. I would never think that emoticons will be useful in any way, yet almost two Million users of Zlango think otherwise. When Skype came out people might say why I need another Messenger/Yahoo/AIM/ICQ/… well apparently me2 is not always useless and if it always works with better audio quality, it is useful.

A product is also useful if fills a personal social need like, promoting global knowledge, by writing articles in Wikipedia or a need for personal promotion by writing a personally related factual page in Wikipedia.

Fun is another form of utility if people can derive fun of a product it is useful for that purpose.

So how do you predict if a product or a webpage is useful, I guess by asking as many people as you can, or finding a specific need that the product covers. One way to try and predict is by using the Kawasaki map of Uniqueness vs. Value.

Business Model

There are many business models that one can come up with, yet the most successful are Ad Revenue which is based on traffic or Eyeballs, Recurring Subscription fees as done with Linked-In, and WOW (World of Warcraft) and so on. The last is selling non tangible replicable products such as Music, Videos and things like Software Download. A type product that makes you money while you sleep.

Commission based models that are driven by paid clicks (and not by organic traffic) are getting hard to support with the climbing prices of popular keywords. In some popularlucrative domains (sex for instance) a click can cost more than $10, imagine how much money has to be made per transaction to get the net revenue balance the cost of the click divided by the conversion rate. The party receiving the gross revenue is the one that need to support the ad, not the party receiving the commission, and this is a hard situation to create.

Marketing

Never leave marketing to pure luck. The more successful companies (leaving out those that got lucky or had other traits working for them) started with nice marketing budget. They started with their SEO activities, such as creating content, creating back links, grass root buzz creating activities, Ads, Videos, TV commercials, radio commercials, free “minutes”, and more.
A good young marketing person is an asset worth having on board. Pure luck is simply to hard to manufacture.

Having said that a startup need to make sure it allocates sufficient funding for marketing purpose.

Investment Requirements

A product or a web site is not built in one day, it takes time and time needs funding. As an entrepreneur I would recommend that the first Angel or VC round will take in account R&D and Marketing. From an entrepreneur point of view if you finish the product and you can not market it to create traction; you will not be able to raise the next round. Investor place no value on Internet technology those days, as sophisticated as it might be.

An investor on the other hand would argue that it is better to raise money for marketing after the product is proven, or has gone few improvement phases. This obviously seems to minimize the risk, and drives the company to make improvements trying to make the product get traction without marketing.

I say, raise the money up-front. Spend on marketing only after you have done some improvement phases. Don’t get caught with a product everyone says is good, but has no traction to prove them right.

I will conclude by stating that not every application or website encompasses all the ingredients from day one, the more it has from the get go the better its chances are to succeed.
You must keep adding the ingredients and funding in order to move from the initial success to the ultimate exit opportunity. If you are stuck without one or the other, start writing Blogs :).

Alon Cohen

VoIP and Wide Band Audio

2007-12-11T08:09:00.000-08:00

As one of my friends indicated to me "I am still making news" (see article bellow). When VoIP was launched in February 1995 with the first iPhone (Internet Phone by VocalTec) the idea was to displace telephony. Later while working on VoIP standards such as H.323 and SIP protocols people started to ask about the benefits of VoIP my answer was "imagine your phone negotiating CD quality call with the phone on the other side, establishing the call and taking less resources than a PSTN call".

As some of the industry veterans indicated this is not happening yet, at least not at CD quality, but some companies such as Skype and VAPPS with their HD conferencing do support Wide Band audio typically 8KHZ of audio bandwidth (almost FM Radio Quality) which is a big improvement. I would compare that to flying first-class, at a lower price than coach.

If you are wondering about why the change to HD Audio was a slow process, read the enlightening article from a friend of mine Dan Berninger (now CEO of FWD) who recently wrote in Giga OM the following:

Here Comes Trouble: Infocom Voice

via GigaOM » Voice by Daniel Berninger on 12/10/07

During the spring of 1995, I participated in a series of meetings at AT&T Bell Laboratories, at which management lamented the impending doom of the telephone business model. The looming threat, however, was neither MCI (which had instigated the breakup of AT&T) nor the Bell companies (which did eventually undermine and absorb AT&T). No, the once-dominant telco feared a $50 software product released by two 20-year-olds at a startup in Israel: Vocaltec Internet Phone, which made voice communication an application of the Internet.

The death of the telecom business remains a standard prediction, but telephone bills continue to arrive 12 years after Vocaltec introduced VoIP to the masses. ITXC (now a part of VSNL) used VoIP to help cut international calling rates to an average of 10 cents a minute currently from 99 cents a minute in 1995. Vonage gets credit as the first to offer flat-rate, unlimited usage plans, erasing the distinction between local and long-distance calling. But aside from price, the telecom business remains largely unchanged by VoIP.

Consider the improvement of infotech platforms since 1995. Intel et al remained true to Moore's Law by expanding processor performance 100-fold, while the price performance improvements of storage, memory and many other components exceeded this pace. But although improved performance and falling costs usually combine to produce new applications, this does not seem to be the case for VoIP and the voice business.

Reducing the price of a telephone call does not erase all the frustrations associated with communication. Humans can detect sounds of up to 20kHz, yet the frequency response of the traditional telephone call has remained stuck at 3.3kHz since the 1930s. The audio quality of a telephone call compares unfavorably even to the 5.6kHz frequency response of AM radio; we still revert to military radio protocols ( "A" as in alpha and "T" as in tango) when spelling a word.

Miscommunication remains a significant source of daily frustration. CallerID seems to be the best telecom has to offer. (Imagine paying extra for the privilege of knowing who sent you an email.)

The differences in the pace of innovation between telecom and infotech can be traced to differences in their respective business models. Telecom companies chase profit growth through margin expansion, which requires controlling costs and resisting the potential for competition to reduce price (e.g. controlling supply).

Conversely, competition forces infotech companies to chase profit growth through revenue growth. This requires investment in the innovations necessary to create demand. The pace of innovation in communication promises to accelerate as the search for revenue growth leads infotech companies to pursue communication business more aggressively.

Developments in communication shape human history. The Renaissance followed the printing press because less expensive books produced educated citizens that demanded more representative government. The telephone offered more than simply a better telegraph. If the infocom sector can move beyond cheap telephone calls, it might finally represent the threat to the status quo imagined by my AT&T colleagues.

Art of Innovation - Guy Kawasaki (NY)

2007-12-07T08:35:00.000-08:00

Innovation and what you need to succeed at that, was the topic discussed by Mr. Guy Kawasaki in a lecture I was lucky to attend.

Here is the short version.

- Make Meaning – your desire and major goal should be to leave a mark on the world and not to make money.

- Mantra - define your goals with a four words mantra.

- “Jump to the next curve” - make a ten fold improvement over the prior art. Jump to the next Generation.

- The product must have Depth, Intelligence, and elegance. It must evoke emotions and be complete.

- Don’t worry, be crappy - If you have done all the above, and your product is complete but not perfect, it will be accepted.

- Polarize people - Do not be afraid to aim your product to an exclusive group of people, and invest in making your target consumers very happy.

- Let it grow - If your product turns to fit a different market segment than planned, don’t hesitate to sell it to anyone who wants it.

- Reduce churn - Improve the product to the users who bought it. Don’t listen to those who didn’t. Those who didn’t will always find a valid reason why not to buy.

- Make sure your product is unique and valuable (see diagram).

- Be prepare to pitch - follow Guy’s 10/20/30 rule.
10 Slides – must be sufficient
20 Minutes presentation – leave time for questions
30 Points font – VCs are older than you or use the following font size formula (VC_age / 2)

- Don’t give up when people that look smart tell you it will not work. Even Guy gave up 2B dollars when he refused to be the CEO of Yahoo on the grounds that it is not interesting and too long of a commute.

The session was very entertaining, if you get a chance go and listen to Guy first hand.

Alon Cohen

More Realistic GUIs (Graphical user Interfaces)

2007-12-03T12:40:00.000-08:00

When thinking about futuristic realistic GUIs (Graphical user Interfaces) for our computers there are few things that come to mind. The first is obviously 3D GUI such as Second Life.

The more futuristic version of that format is the Virtual reality 3D GUI where the user wares motion gloves and 3D goggles that enable manipulation of virtual objects in a 3D virtual reality environment. All those are nice but will take time to get to our day to day life.

It seems that multi-touch user interfaces are now getting more popular since the release of the iPhone, and obviously they did not start there as many Mac People may think, they are nicely visualized in the movie Minority Report (Tom Cruise).

Recently we saw the Microsoft version of that multi-touch display in the form of the Surface computer, that not only gives you ability to manipulate objects on the screen in a more realistic graphics fashion but also added a nice component which is the ability to interact with real world physical objects such as your Cell phone, Zoon or digital camera. The surface computing will probably take time to mature just because of the expensive hardware it requires.

The latest GUI I saw, which drew my attention, was potentially the simplest solution so far to creating realistic GUI for organizing your desktop. I am sure some of you remember that from your own childhood, but I was asking my mother not to move anything on your desk as I remember at which layer every notebook is. Well it took few years but now it is becoming a reality with the Bump Top GUI. The Bump Top I predict at some form will become popular as it really has the ability to be implemented on any existing computer, activated with a simple mouse or a pen and tablet computer. Check out the Bump Top 3D Desktop Prototype www.bumptop.com.

Bump Top is a fresh and engaging new way to interact with your computer desktop. You can pile and toss documents like on a real desk. Break free from the rigid and mechanical style of standard point-and-click desktops. Interact by pushing, pulling and piling documents with elegant, self revealing gestures. Bump Top’s stunning interface makes clever use of 3D presentation and smooth physics-based animations for an engaging, vivid user experience.

A video of the Bump Top interface was or maybe still is the most watched video of software on YouTube, ever.

Watch a demo of the Bump Top GUI. Enjoy

Multimedia E-commerce MME

2007-11-17T00:01:00.000-08:00

Ever since VocalTec (VOCL) came out with it’s with its free calls internet Phone in February 1995 named iPhone, everyone involved with the Internet and VoIP asked the same question, how can we monetize the Internet if it is all free.

The concept of a platform for delivering services came to me back then, but was hard to implement from many reasons: luck of Broadband connectivity, low VoIP Audio quality on those early days, luck of payment systems and luck of e-commerce consumer behavior.

All that, I assumed, was about to grow and I started to build a business case for what is now BitWine Inc, or as I named the space back then Multimedia E-Commerce or MME.

The first thing I did was to map the world of e-commerce trying to predict the market direction in a hope to get there first.

In my quest I met Charlie Federman who introduced me to my brilliant partner Elad Baron and together the there of us set sail to build BitWine. We recruited a group of excellent Angel investors and an extremely talented group of developers, which worked hard to bring BitWine http://www.BitWine.com to life.

I recently looked back on my MME e-commerce map to try and see how far off I was in 2003-2004. I think I was on the money, but I will let you be the judge of that.

I did not predict Amazon grid computing and storage services per-se but they certainly have a place on the map.

The diagram show that e-commerce applications spread from tangible goods to non-tangible goods, and from Auction to Buy Now and to pay-as-you-go.

If the trend continues, it seems that the market will experience growth in the next few years to keep an open window of opportunity to companies such as BitWine and fast investors who can ignore trendy investments and are able to focus on growth potential and tangible business models.

After all, 50% of US GDP or about $7T is derived from services, so there is plenty of room for the space to grow.

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2007-11-13T12:05:00.000-08:00

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