Siri, pour me a beer!

The history of nerds and automating their potables goes back a long way, even before claims about who invented the Internet. The latest chapter has been written with the geeks from RedPepper. They have invented Beeri, the first Siri interface for pouring a beer. Or, as its creators say, “the thought leader of beer pouring.” This is just the latest dream job for Siri, it seems.

The Rube Goldbergish process goes something like this. Siri is used to text the words “pour me a beer” to Beeri’s Twitter account. Meanwhile, the onboard Arduino Uno processor (which we have written about here at RWW) is polling this account, and when it sees the command pop up in the Beeri Twitter feed, it sends the remote controlled vehicle crashing into the wall in RedPepper’s lab and the beer can is opened and beer collected in the glass. Of course, Beeri 2.0 will figure out a way to do this with a refrigerated can, or to be able to refill the contraption.

Beeri is just the latest in a long line of Internet-connected devices that quench thirsty nerds. Of course, back in the day we didn’t know from Twitter or used any wimpy Wifi, but had RS-232 serial cables and standard Ethernet over coax. Back in the 1970s, the grad computer science students at Carnegie Mellon connected their department’s Coke machine to the Internet so they could “finger” (in the protocol sense, for those of you thinking nasty thoughts) the machine and determine the location of the coldest soda cans. And then there were the grad students at the University of Cambridge UK that connected their coffee pot to the Internet .

Workforce.com: Worker Policies Must Consider Ever-Changing Web Landscape

As employees become more avid users of social media both personally and professionally, companies need to create clear policies on what is and isn’t acceptable and be prepared to revise the guidelines as the world of cyberspace connections continues to evolve.

You can read my article, published this month in Workforce magazine, here. Worker Policies Must Consider Ever-Changing Web Landscape

The Importance of Being Your Own gTLD

Back in the 90s, it was a good thing to have your own dot com domain. But that isn’t good enough for some companies, and over the summer ICANN made it possible for you to purchase your own global top level domain (gTLD) for the mere sum of at least $185,000. Now we have dotFamilyName getting into the action and promising your own gTLD for “as little as $500,000″ for your family, to provide the ultimate cachet for the ultra-wealthy. Yes, you read that right. Half a million, for a set of domains that cost at best $30 a year.

When I got the press release today, I first thought it was a joke. But no, this company really thinks it has a business model here. “Only” 1000 gTLDs will be created, and only after filing a 200-page application.

Is this the “apex of the Internet” or the most exclusive or unique luxury digital item you can think of? Perhaps not, but it certainly the most ridiculous. The company promises “a state of the art security system for your personal reputation.” Harumph. We’ll see how long it takes before one of their gTLD domains gets hit by a denial of service attack.

But if any of you want to sponsor a .strom gTLD, you know where to find me in the rest of cyberspace that the common folk hang out in. (And no, I am not talking about AOL.)

Why can’t filing a patent be as easy as buying a book?

I am not a lawyer, and I don’t wish to ever become one (on TV or in real life), much to the disappointment of my mother who once wished that would become my chosen profession. I was reminded of this recently when I reviewed an article that Scott Fulton wrote last month for ReadWriteEnterprise here about the recent changes in our patent law system. It seems we are headed down the wrong path, making it harder for entrepreneurs to obtain and contest patents.

My intersections with our legal system haven’t been pretty: my divorce, registering a trademark, and an appearance in court to evict my deadbeat renter. Yes, I did serve on a couple of juries. No arrests, thankfully.

What these events have in common is that none of them were things that I initially wanted to do. Including the trademark registration. You see, I was using the name Web Informant for sending these email newsletters out, and doing so since 1995. A year or so later, a publishing firm who had (blank) Informant as their titles wanted to come out with a print version using Web Informant. I heard about their intentions and filed a trademark registration, fortunately a few weeks before their own attempt.

Now, on my application, I put the correct date of first use with the first issue of the newsletter, which was in September 1995. The other guys put their date as sometime in 1990, if memory serves me correctly, which was just false but there wasn’t much I could do about, short of spending thousands on legal bills to contest the action. The fact that the Web as we all know it didn’t really exist outside of a few places didn’t really enter into the discussion. As they say on lots of TV legal shows, let’s not confuse the issue with any facts.

Thankfully, things have a way of working out: the print publication went the way of the dodo, and this email newsletter and associated website have endured the test of time. But the whole thing left a bad taste with me for the trademark (and the associated patent) process.

Now we are changing things, so that the first to file will be given consideration for patents. This means if you are an entrepreneur, almost the moment of idea conception is when you need to engage a lawyer and get your application in. It almost seems as if the process is:

1. Think up a cool idea.
2. Find out if the dot com is taken and register it.
3. Find a patent lawyer and send in your application.
4. Start working on your product or service and build your business.

This seems wacko to me.

I realize that most of the world uses first to file as the criterion for patents, and in many parts of the world patents aren’t respected at all. But still, this is a step backwards. Yes, there are places like Legalzoom that will help you through this process online, but still it isn’t easy. Filing a patent should be like buying a book on Amazon.

Now, perhaps that is somewhat unfair: when you buy a book, you don’t have to have this dialogue with someone to lay out all your alternatives and to walk you through the purchase process and the various options for different forms that you need to fill out. But why can’t the Patent Office have some simplified process that has the forms online? It is probably impossible, but still.

How to outsource your helpdesk

Next Thursday I will be doing a webinar for MSPtv on how to outsource your helpdesk. You can register here. 

As long as there are IT users, there will be a need for helpdesk support, and that is not about to change any time soon, no matter how reliable and user-friendly the technology gets. For solution providers, the service is a must to deliver value to their clients, but it’s expensive and can be a drain on staff resources. Fortunately for them, there is a low-cost alternative: outsource your helpdesk to a trusted vendor partner. The trick, of course, is finding the right partner.

Here are my slides for the webcast.

The Way We Were, c.1995

Lots of memories of my computing past flooding through me this morning, and no, this won’t be another Jobs tribute. But a post yesterday on RWW talking about whether you were using the Internet back in 1995 brought me back to that era, and I thought it would be a good time to show how much progress we have made in the 16-some years and what businesses were doing with the Internet back then.

Actually, I first started communicating on the Internet back in the late 1980s, and when I started Network Computing magazine in the summer of 1990 I was determined for all of our writers to have Internet email addresses. Back then there weren’t any dot coms other than the research organizations that built the Internet and some universities. We were fortunate to work with a computing team at UCLA (which is where one of the first Internet nodes was established, BTW) and they had an email gateway so each of our editors could get Internet emails, along with Compuserve and MCIMail too. Those gateways were extremely buggy: someone sent an attachment that was 350 kB or so, and that clogged things up on the gateway until we could delete the message. Good times.

The most popular email product was something called cc:Mail, which was eventually bought and killed by Lotus and now largely forgotten.

Anyway, in 1995 we had the second version of graphical Web browsers, and this is where the Web began to really take off. Several print publications that I worked for at the time were setting up their first websites. I wrote reviews of “groupware” (what we called the first primitive social networking products, such as Lotus Notes and Novell’s GroupWise) and Web server software. Prodigy and Compuserve still had more people connected to their proprietary networks than the regular Internet. At the time, the Web was still more curiosity than mission-critical. One of my sources, a corporate IT manager, said that the web is “plagued with the teenage sex syndrome, ‘Everyone is interested in it, but they don’t know what to do’.” Others at the time said that “you don’t use a Web page to sell sofas.” Now my interior designer wife routinely buys and sells furniture for her clients online.

Back in 1995, there weren’t any broadband connections. The best you could do, short of paying hundreds of dollars a month for a dedicated digital phone line, was ISDN, which offered at most 100 kbps and wasn’t easy to setup. Business phone lines had to pay per minute for each call to your Internet service provider, which meant you were careful how much time you used on your connection, unless you purchased your own T-1. And unlike today’s modern OS’s that came with IP protocol stacks, we had to cobble things together with third-party add-on software that was idiosyncratic at best. Products from companies such as NetManage Chameleon and Frontier Technologies.

In the fall of 1995 I started my weekly email newsletter: a project that I continue to contribute to this very day. Email newsletters have come and gone but they still are the bread and butter of many businesses today. (This article will be cross-posted to that list later today.) Back then I used a Unix server and some complex command strings and FTP to post each issue to my mailing list.

At the same time, I built my first website, running on Windows NT with IIS v4 and Cold Fusion. Back then this was the best way to serve up dynamic content and to combine databases and the Web. We didn’t have WordPress, we didn’t have Java, we didn’t know from CSS. It was straight HTML and that was pretty much it. Even then Netscape (the ancestor to Mozilla) was trying to wrest control of the browser from Microsoft, and had introduced their proprietary extensions to HTML. Some things never change.

Who were the big companies back in the 1995 era Internet? Sun, Cisco and Novell come to mind. Sun is now part of Oracle, Novell is a shadow of its former self, and Cisco has acquired 75 companies since then, or so it seems.

The wireless data industry was also a very different place back then. RIM was just getting started, and their devices hadn’t yet caught on – clunky text-based things barely evolved from pagers. Cellular modems were available for PCs but expensive affairs and the connections were unreliable. UPS, the package delivery company, had just outfitted all of its trucks with them so they could track deliveries. Some improvement there.

So when you plug in your Wifi-enabled laptop down at the local coffee shop and fire up your Chrome browser at blazing speeds to update your WordPress site, think of where we have come from back then.