false precision

I want the new iRobot Pooba

One of the cool booths I walked through at CES this year was the iRobot booth. I have been meaning to get a Roomba for a while and after watching them in action I think the new iRobot Roomba Pet Series may be just what our hardwood floors need to keep clean.

Often the best products come from an intense need. If the iRobot guys really want to make something that im super incented to buy how about the iRobot Pooba. A little robot that drives around the yard using proprietary poop sensing technologies. When it locates its target it incinerates dog poop with a tiny torch turning it to dust.

When the iRobot Pooba comes out, I'll divert money from some kids braces the buy it!

Darby, Driving?

Ok, I certainly have had my run-ins with the government. We don't always see eye-to-eye.

But, today I have to take exception. It seems that the state of Colorado, the same state that took my license away when I was, oh 19, decided that it was prudent to give Darby a drivers license. That's just seems nuts. She's a little girl, look…

Maybe I'm just too close to this.

Congratulations Darby – I told you I was going to embarrass you J

Open Letter to Gebhardt Automotive Sales

To: Director of Sales, Gebhardt Automotive – Porsche

Sir,

My advice to you is to transfer to another Gebhardt Automotive Group Company. I am a two Porsche car family, one of which we bought in Boulder, the other at a Denver dealership. On multiple occasions I have tried to use the service department at your dealership, and multiple times I have had the service department do things that range from unfair all the way to unethical. Yesterday is a perfect example of unfair.

A week ago I changed the battery in my Cayman with a battery I bought at your service department. As a result the airbag system registered a fault (which happens when the battery runs down). I called and was told to come down to have the fault cleared. When I got there the service department said it would $115 dollars for 1 minute of work. Pissed, I left and called Stevenson Imports. They said no problem, happens all the time, next time you're in town, stop by and we'll clear the fault.

Guess what, I will when I come down there to have brakes serviced in a week or so.

As I said this is just the latest issue I have had with the Porsche Group. I owned a BMW for years and had great service at Gebhardt BMW in Boulder. My advice to you is transfer over there.

I know you're the Director of Sales, but I thought I would let you know as there is no chance in hell I will ever buy a car from your dealership for the foreseeable future.

 

Todd Vernon

 

 

Trying out the BodyBugg

Yesterday was my 45^th birthday. This is not a cause for celebration.

I feel pretty healthy, but I would like to loose about 6 pounds. In support of this effort, I got a cool gift from my family, the BodyBugg. It's an armband thingy that you wear and it records all the calories you burn during the day. It uploads to a website where you enter your nutrition items and it draws pretty graphs that tell you if you are eating more then you are burning. My hope is that if I do all this I will end up looking like this dude.

It doesn't track heart rate but rather motion, temperature, moisture, etc. The web site claims it's 94% accurate. Based on my three days of testing so far I would guess it's pretty correct.

The screen shot below shows my progress for today. I got up at 5:45 and did 30 minutes of cardio on the stair mill at the rec center from 6:15 and ending at 6:30. I walked on the track for 15 minutes and then did an hour of weights with my trainer from 7am to 8am. This was a Tuesday so the weight training was more strength then endurance. Thursdays I do the same gig but the training hour is also cardio to the point where I almost puke.

Below you can see that so far today I have a 686 calorie deficit (I need to keep this to 500 in order to lose weight at the rate I want – 1 pound a week). So far I have burned 1048 calories and if I sit on my ass the rest of the day I will fall short of my 3000 calorie target burn.

I've been comparing the gym equipment 'calories burned' with that of the BodyBugg telemetry. I have the watch attachment so you can see it all in real-time as you exercise. On Sunday I did 45 minutes on the Stair Mill. The Stair Mill computer said I burned 633 calories. The BodyBugg said it was more like 300 calories. Interestingly, if you include the time my metabolism was juiced up from the cardio in the following hour the two are nearly identical. My suspicion is the BodyBugg is dead on. Lura thinks, and I agree, that the equipment at the gym is including these 'future' calories in the display they show you to juice the numbers and make you feel better about climbing 10,000 stairs on a Sunday.

The web site takes in all kinds of data and comes up with a plan for you. Mine wants me to burn 3000 calories a day which I usually fall a little short of. So far since I got the BodyBugg I have successfully met my 500 calorie deficit every day except the first.

When you enter your consumed calories the web application attempts to help by suggesting things you have entered in the past. I found it funny that of the items suggested, 3 of the 4 were booze (the fourth being Doritos) for my afternoon snack. Maybe the BodyBugg needs to mind its own business a little more.

I have it set up so if I follow the plan I should lose 6 pounds in 6 weeks. It's fun enough that I think I have good chance of staying with it. Lura got one also and that creates a fun dynamic. The other night she had burned about 100 calories more than me by 9pm. The competitive dynamic kicked in so I ran in place for 30 minutes while watched TV. I think she still won but it was close.

I'll let you know how it goes.

CES and PogoPlug

Last week I went to CES and checked out the new stuff.. Lots of innovation on the TV side on the backlit (actually side lit) LED front and of course the much anticipated OLED. These technologies have made major strides and are kicking ass on plasma (RIP 2009). I'll post more about this later.

What I want to talk about is the more scrappy innovation side of the CES. Back in the 2006 I remember walking through the Sands looking at the more cutting edge and interesting boot strap companies. I personally awarded SlingMedia as the most effective use of booth space back then. They had a 15x15 booth and literally had 200 hundred people surrounding it listening to a Sling vignette about how the product worked. It was epic and as predicted they went on to much success.

This time I was lucky enough to have Brad Feld as my "cool stuff concierge" for a few hours. We visited a few booths which I'm still considering, but the standout for me was PogoPlug by CloudEngines.

PogoPlug looks like a brick power supply plug that plugs into the wall, but it also connects to a USB drive and your network. What you end up with is a drive that is accessible on your home network but also anywhere in the world via the PogoPlug website/drive share. Yes, cloud based storageis already available, but this is different because the disk lives in your house. Pretty cool.

But, that's not why I like it. Back in 2005 one of the first posts I wrote in this blog was that I wanted a SOAHG. A SOAHG is something I surmised would be a home gateway that would allow me, at an application level, to access digital assets in my house, control devices, and monitor what was going on from anywhere in the world. It's a cool idea but a little hard to grasp in the generic sense.

As I stood there and heard the PogoPlug pitch it dawned on me, PogoPlug is exactly the base functionality required to make this happen with an entry use-case that gets it into my home network. I love this product but not entirely for what it is – but rather what it could be given an open API (which I think they are working on). Hint, read my rants about storage and backup.

Can't wait till they ship in March..

Update on Pirates vs Global Warming

If you know the Vernon family you also know we are Pastafarians. Our religion doesn't meet at any prescribed time, we donate next to no money to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, to my knowledge no specific political candidate seems to pander to us, and if I think about it we don't "do anything" different then we would normally. Still ours is a strong belief and we all agree we have been touched by his noodly appendage, I guess you could say we worship in our own way.

Even with all the good parts of our religion, still a guy has – doubt – from time to time. But just as I was wondering, is there really a flying spaghetti monster? The deity himself has sent me a sign that Pastafarianism is alive and well.

I was reading today about the conclusion to the Pirate "occupation" of the Saudi oil tanker. I know some say they "high jacked it", but really can you feel sorry that the Saudi's lost an oil tanker?

It seems that justice has returned to the high seas and the pirates got away with nothing and in fact most lost their lives. What really caught my eye was the quote and warning from the managing director of the Dryad Maritime Intelligence Service, "The loss or potential loss of the ransom means the pirates will be all the more keen to get the next ransom in," he said. "There are people lining up to be pirates."

Rocked my world! Wow, this could be good news for Global Warming; quickly I did a few Google searches and found an article out of Seattle entitled "Global Cooling is here". It seems 2008 was the coolest year since 1997, arctic sea ice expanded 13%, and most glaciers had a positive mass growth.

Faith is not something you can question. You either have it or not.

Filtrbox, fix my real-time information crisis!

Over on the Lijit blog I wrote about the day that Google broke Google Alerts. It seems that Google changed the way they crawl blogs a while back. It used to be that they would leave the static sidebar content alone and just crawl the active content area of publications. Now it seems that they crawl everything and as a result my real-time information on Lijit is completely broken.

Lijit is a widget or piece of code that gets installed on publisher sites. Typically it's installed in the sidebar or static area of the site. It's named "Lijit" so Google crawlers now regularly run across it and Alert me to its presence.

A lot of times a blogger will write a post after installing Lijit on their blog telling people about it. I like to read those posts to keep a pulse on what people are saying. This used to work great as I would see 10 or so a day with no false alarms. Now that Google crawls everything I get tons of false Alerts for Lijit a day, sometimes hundreds of Alerts a day, but the majority are like these below. Neither of these blog posts are about Lijit, but rather Google is seeing our widget sitting on the site.

This has created a mess for me. I suspect it's no worse than the mess others have using the service however. I have always been lucky in that I have an alert on a fairly unique string of text. People never use the spelling "Lijit" unless they are talking about us, until now.

I have been a long time advocate of Filtrbox as a great idea. I use the service but the lack of real-time alerts has kept me from adopting it as my primary 'alerter' about Lijit references. Getting a once a day update may as well be once a month for our business. If I were Filtrbox, I would drop all other development and rush in to fill this market gap. Real-time Alerts are the killer feature for businesses. Without a viable way to capture them, filter them, and distribute them there is a huge need out there remaining unfulfilled.

Going to CES 2009 – What should I go look at?

I'm heading off to CES here in the next hour. I've been so busy with normal stuff I'm not sure what to checkout at the show tomorrow.

If you know about some cool new gadget that someone is announcing, leave a comment and I will try to stop by and check it out. I haven't been since 2006 so there should be a good delta from the hot stuff last time.

Why is buying connectivity always hard?

When we started Lijit we bought a DSL circuit from Qwest. It's a 7Mbit downstream / 900K upstream circuit. This is referred to as ASDL meaning Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line.

Local loop access refers to the copper that connects your house or business to the larger circuits out in the street in the front of your house. Local loop is almost always the limiting factor in delivering bandwidth anywhere. DSL is the latest way to cram more information down the jinky wires that connect your location to the world.

Now, because two copper wires stretched over a defined distance and shielded from one another have a theoretical bandwidth limitation (how fast a signal can change, or how much data can move across it in a finite period of time) ADSL was invented to give more of that maximum bandwidth to downstream traffic. Recognizing that a lot of internet surfing is data coming back to you in the form of web pages, images and video, it was designed to favor this direction. This works pretty well until you start to get a lot of people using the connection. Why? Because although most data does in fact come downstream, it's basically ALL interlocked with the data going upstream by the TCP/IP connectivity stack on your computer.

Example: Browser asks for giant image, web site sends a little bit, computer says send a little more, a little more is sent, repeat rinse, wait.

So fast forward to today. …

Lijit has about 27 employees all sharing this circuit and it totally sucks.. The reason (I'm fairly sure) is we are suffering the latency on the uplink. While the data going upstream is small relatively to the data coming downstream, the contention around the 900Kbit/second is limiting our ability to received data downstream. DirectWay internet service used to have a similar problem because your uplink went through a modem on a phone line and data came back to you via satellite.

So a month or so ago we started researching "what to buy to make it better". It seems the only option is a fractional DS3 (a DS3 circuit is a symmetric 45Mbit circuit).

Of thank god, lets light that up! What? It's $2,000 a month? Ahh, we pay like $80 a month now for 7Mbit downstream?

So this leads me to the question. Why doesn't someone offer the ability to buy two ADSL circuits together, oppositely configured so one is delivering 7Mbit down, the other 7Mbit up? Just plug them into a router and BAM 14Mbit of total bandwidth for like $160 a month? Ok, I'll even pay $500 a month how about that.

It would use two pair of wire but most houses have 4 pair by default let alone business that have even more ability.

Another idea, how about a router that just lets me plug-in 3 standard ADSL circuits through a smart NAT that just fans out employee's automatically between the circuits. For $2000 can buy a lot of ADSL circuits…

 

 

Emotions of a CEO…

I have been a little remiss with the Blog posts. I know.

Vacations make me a little cerebral and I like that. Except for a brief barrage of suggestions from my lead investor, it was a time of quiet, withdraw, and reflection. (Note: if your lead investor is Jewish, Christmas is a work day)

I have talked before that when I was in the CTO role at Raindance I would get all over Paul's (the CEO) case about taking off on vacation for two weeks and totally unplugging. At the time I thought that to be – irresponsible - in some way. Its different being the CEO, I was wrong. I really need the time away from the all consuming business. I know, reading this doesn't get you there, but believe me it's different.

A good friend of mine had his company downsize recently and not realize the ultimate dream he had for it. As a result he moved on to another great opportunity. This time he is the CFO. During the process of moving on he asked me, what do you think of moving from CEO to CFO? My response? If it's like being the CTO, then it's 50% of work for 80% of the money. I don't know if that assessment will hold the test of time with me, but it 'feels' correct at this point.

I started Lijit a little under three years ago and while it feels like a full three years, it's not the marathon that Raindance was. It feels more like a long sprint. Raindance was a test of will, like being locked in a cell for 8 years with finger puppets to entertain you. (Ok, maybe not that bad but it made me laugh).

Another friend of mine told me, quite a while ago, find other CEO's to talk and learn from. I think that was sage advice. The old saying is that it's lonely at the top. It's not in my character to think of myself at the top, but it's without a doubt 'different' at the top.

I'm looking forward to 2009. It's what I have been waiting for.