Microvision on the BBC
My good friend David is one of the engineers on this project.
‘Laser vision’ offers new insights. A system that projects light beams directly onto the eye’s retina could change the way we view the world.
Archive for April 27th, 2004
Another ENUM service goes live
The basic assets required to build a complete voice network outside of the PSTN are coming on line, one by one. ENUM is a mapping service, akin to DNS, that associates call destinations with IP addresses, or E.164 (POTS) telephone numbers. E164.ORG is a service targeted at asterisk PBX users.
VoIP and firewalls
This article had some good questions — Some questions about VoIP. In particular, this question…
7) Why is SIP and NAT-Firewall configuration so hard for VoIP? The great thing about Skype is that it *just works*. Every other VoIP client I’ve tried has either been a PITA to configure, or simply didn’t work, or depended on a central proxy/relay that is never going to scale.
It’s darned hard, that’s for sure. I have intermittent success with Asterisk and a Mitel 5055 handset through my SMC Barricade firewall. I have near constant success with Packet8 — it only rarely dies on me. Skype always works. And FWD with Xten requires some nasty port forwarding, but it can be made to work also.
The beauty of Skype is that it just works.
Designing for the edge redux
It’s always fun to debate with a couple of really smart guys. So, yesterday I horned in on Robert Scoble and Michael Gartenberg’s debate about designing for the edge case. This is something I passionately believe in, by the way. My house is a living edge case, wired with 100 Mbit ethernet, and VoIP phones and all kinds of goodies all over the place.
Gartenberg’s reply was basically designing for the edge is great, when it works. Totally right! 90% of those edge designs are abject failures, another 9% convey marginal value (think USB handsets for VoIP, for instance), and the remaining 1% change the world. That’s what entrepreneurship is about. Roll them bones, and see if you can make your point! Visionaries imagine a future vastly different from the reality Michael’s sample has told him about. A world where storage is cheap enough that we can put 40 gigs into a $99 music player… and then they try to imagine if people will care.
Scoble points out that some products are marketed as being edge products. They aren’t edge products, though. They’re products that have made it past the initial edge, and are now being marketed as status symbols. Think Seattleites wearing Raichle mountaineering boots, and driving SUVs from their funky Belltown condos to work on the Eastside.
The edge is a long term bet incorporating technology, behaviour, societal trends, tastes, fashion, demographics, and so on. For example, in 1995, I saw my first 4 megapixel digital camera. It was on an open circuit board the size of an old fashioned plate camera, mounted on a tripod, and had been used to take stunning, 35 millimeter quality images of a pair of… mountaineering boots. Go figure!
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