Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Janice, our friend Sharon, and myself headed out to the Hullo launch party last night at Capital Music Hall in Ottawa’s Byward Market.  The big draw for the night was rapper Kardinal Offishal, with backup bands the HILOTRONS and Donkey Punch. 

We walked through the door at about 9:30 pm, scooped up some free shooter tickets, and caught the tail-end of Donkey Punch, playing hard-driving, bluesy rock and roll.  They looked great.  The HILOTRONS were a throw-back to the 1980’s. Think DEVO.  Fun to watch, made you want to dance.  The lead singers dance moves were… unusual.  Awesome drummer, though.

Kardinal Offishal, despite being the big draw, didn’t do it for me.  I think I’m showing my age, because he was really popular with the folks on the floor.

Here’s a shot of Kardinal Offishal, and the crowd, from way back, plus Bob Mimeault and Rick Clemmens, taken with my Nokia 6682 cellular phone. 

  

 

The Hullo crew knows how to party!  About the only thing that could have made the party better was if they had given themselves a little more lead time between coming out of stealth (at the beginning of this week!) and their launch.  Despite just 4 days of promotion there were probably close to 250 people at the event.

Yesterday, Canadian telecom consultant Mark Goldberg filed an application with the CRTC to have a specific American web site blocked for Canadian viewers.  The reason for the application was that the site was promoting genocide against Canadian jews, and the murder of one specific human rights lawyer living here in Ottawa.  The site has since been removed by Google (the hoster), however it raises some interesting questions.

These cases are often hard for folks to figure out.  Censorship is distasteful, and may prematurely curtail important discussions that can occur in a public forum.  For that reason, while not condoning their message, I’m generally in favour of allowing these groups to have their say.  My hope is that exposing them to public scrutiny will show them for what they are.  I’m reminded, in particular, of a Jerry Springer episode in the 1990’s where he interviewed members of the KKK, including their kids. It would be difficult for me to imagine anyone being influenced by that show in any fashion except to conclude that the KKK membership is mostly poor, white, uneducated bigots that any normal person wouldn’t want to associate with.  I am sure that they viewed the opportunity to be on national TV as a platform for spreading their message.  It didn’t work out well for them at all.

I’m also sympathetic, although usually not in agreement with, “slippery slope” arguments.  Most of the time there isn’t any substance to these arguments.  They are simply being set up as a straw man to curtail debate. 

Having said all that, I support Mark’s effort.  The spirit of our Charter of Rights is being violated.  Moreover, our own laws against the promotion of hatred are also being violated.  In Canada, it’s illegal to promote genocide, or violence against minorities, or to encourage others to hate minorities.  The man being targeted is fearful that among the readers of this web site there may be Canadians with similar views living near by.  Nobody should have to live with that fear.

One commenter on Mark’s blog asks why the owner of the site is simply not being charged.  The reason was that this site is hosted on Google’s Blogger, in the US, and written by an American. There is no concept of a hate crime in US law, however, and courts have generally given strong support to free speech. That is why groups like the KKK can continue to exist south of the border.  It’s clear that the only way for us to uphold our own laws is to attempt to ensure that this content can’t be viewed here. 

I disagree with my friend Jon Arnold’s view that this might be a side effect of net neutrality.  Net neutrality would not give anyone the right to engage in illegal acts using the internet. In a net neutral world, it would still be illegal, for instance, to produce and view child pornography.  We should think about this case in the same way.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing with the beta of a promising new free service called hullo. Now you can try it too.

hullo bills itself as a personal call manager.  The promise is that it will help you stay in touch better than ever before.  It incorporates a buddy-list style softphone with some very slick advanced telephony features.  For instance:

• You can quickly and easily have a conversation with as many people as you want. Just select the people you want to talk with and bring them into the conference.  It will scale pretty much infinitely, because it’s not peer-to-peer based, relying on Versatel Networks EdgeIQ series hardware on the backend to handle the traffic.  In fact, hullo has a “cafe” which is an open party line that anyone can jump into and start talking — the voice equivalent of a text chat room.
• It has the ability to create sophisticated find-me rules.  These can be assigned on an individual basis too, so you can have different rules for different people.  Want your buddies to be able to track you down on your cell phone, but not your boss?  Not a problem. 
• Don’t like talking on a headset?  Use your ordinary phone instead.  When you click on your buddy’s name in the hullo contact list, it will ring your choice of handset, and your buddy at the same time.   You can make and receive calls on any handset you choose. This will be a killer feature if they migrate it to a cellular handset.
• hullo also does mid-call transfers.  Need to continue a conversation you started at home, but from your car?  No problem.  hullo can move the call to your cell. 

Installing the software is simple.  Simply visit hullo.com, and click on download. It does the usual things installers do.  Because I’m a bit of a legalities nut, I actually read their lengthy license agreement, which, unusually, includes a confidentiality provision.  I installed the software in spite of it, concluding that since hullo was public beta, it wasn’t confidential anymore.   The installer will pull down the .NET runtime if you haven’t already loaded it, so be patient. 

Once installed, the client pops up, asks you to create an account, and then you’re off! 

The first thing hullo does is pop up a screen prompting you to make a call.  Just enter in a phone number, and your own number, and it will make the connection.  Your phone will ring, and the other phone will ring, and then you’re talking.  It’s that easy.

hullo will also prompt you to import contacts from MSN or Outlook.  There appears to be a limit of about 300 contacts, so if you have a large contact list (mine is over 3,000) then you will need to select the buddies you want to include.  Once imported, it will then allow you to send invitations to everyone you’ve selected as well.

Using hullo is dead simple.  Simply click one of your contacts, and click call.  If the contact is also a hullo user, it will use the findme features to hunt that contact down.  Otherwise it will simply ring that persons number. Want to add someone to a call?  Just drag them into the current call window, and hullo will call them and add them to the call.  Want to transfer the call to another of your phones?  Just select a phone.  The photo on the right shows a conference call with the transfer window pulled down.  It’s that simple.

Best of all, all North American calls are free, whether you make them on the softclient, or on a handset, and whether you make them to another hullo member, or to a non-member. When compared to Skype, this means you can make a free call from any handset as well as a PC.  And when compared to Gizmo, you can make a free call to anybody, not just a nother Gizmo member.  This up’s the ante significantly in the price spat Skype and Gizmo started.

The company is focusing their launch on the college and high school crowd.  The features have been designed recognizing that young people are increasingly the most sophisticated users of mobile phones.  hullo’s feature set makes it easy to use those phones to socialize, arrange events, or stay in touch with friends and family who might live in different cities.  It’s not hard to imagine how appealing this will be for students away from home for the first time.

What’s missing?  Instant messaging and presence.  For now the focus seems to be solely on voice.  No doubt these will be addressed in a future release, as they are two popular features with the college crowd. 

With a little luck, viral adoption, and good marketing, hullo could easily surpass Skype and Gizmo in North American usage.  Call quality is better, you can use any handset you like, there are no restrictions on free usage, and you get a bunch of very appealing new features. 

To promote the beta, if you sign up now, you can get a ballot for the August 24th launch party in Ottawa, featuring Kardinal Off!Shall!.  So go for it.  Download it today, and say hullo to your pals.

Flying out of San Diego this morning (yes, my vacation is over), I’ve been thinking about the beaches we visited last week.  Mid-week, we took a break from the desert, and headed to the coast to the shi-shi town of Laguna Beach.  At the end of the week, on our way into San Diego to fly home, we stopped at the wild Torrey Pines State Park. 

Beaches really are a fascinating microcosm of the world around them, and I’m not talking about the wildlife. 

Laguna Beach was like a giant bar.  Full of beautiful, tanned, and fit people, it’s a place to see, to be seen, to strut your stuff.  Surrounded by hotels on the bluffs, and wonderful places to eat and shop at beach level, it’s a jewel.  Interestingly enough, though, it was also restrictive.  At 42, pasty-white, and a little overweight, I was out of my element on Laguna Beach. Even the aging beach boys, despite matts of grey or white hair on their chests, were buff, tanned and wearing stylish trunks.  No matter.  We had a great time, anyway. 

Torrey Pines, on the other hand, was like a neighborhood.  People brought their lawn chairs, towels, sun chairs, boogie boards, surf boards, buckets, shovels, BBQs, and so on.  They made a day of being at the beach. In fact, one had the impression that there were a lot of neighbors at the beach as they socialized and chatted.  At the one end of the beach, most of the surfers congregated.  At the other, the scene was “beach social”.  And, among all the beautiful people there were also plenty of pudge-hounds like me.

At Laguna, a few people swam, but most people stayed on the beach.  At Torrey Pines, there were a lot more people swimming.   In fact, there was generally, just a lot more going on at Torrey Pines.

Laguna Beach, in telecom terms, was a walled garden.  It was really there for only a few things.  If what you were looking for was sun, tanning, and beautiful people, Laguna was the place to be.  Torrey Pines, on the other hand, was the wild west of the Internet; a multitude of things to do, and diverse people. 

At Torrey Pines, my kids started digging a hole in the beach.  It looked well back from the tide.   Soon it grew to be two massive depressions, with a foot high sand wall facing the sea.  A little further down, another group of kids started doing the same.  To the left of us, some local kids with garden spades started on a project of their own.  Soon, the meme among the kids at the beach became “how big a hole and wall can you dig?”.   And then the tide started coming in.  Soon, the walls started to collapse.  Interestingly, what happened next was that kids from one swamped project would move to another and begin to shore it up.  Occasionally, another kid would take over one of the abandoned projects and start to try to rebuild it, or at least maintain it.

Soon, we were down to just one major wall remaining, with a crowd of people trying to trench it, build it up, and maintain it against the sea.  With all those people, bringing all those tools, the young fellow maintaining it was the king of a small empire of helpers.  I dubbed him Captain Ahab, knowing full well that eventually even his frail ship would be sunk by the leviathan of the tide

I laughed watching this, recognizing the open source spirit at work.  As one of the projects clearly gained enough momentum to sustain itself, the leaders of other projects abandoned their efforts (in some cases to new maintainers) to work on the best.  They brought their tools, their ideas, and their muscles to help do the heavy lifting and buttress Captain Ahab’s fortress against the onslaught of the tide.

Eventually, Ahab’s wall was breached and his magnificently large hole swamped like the rest.  Once the water filled in behind, it was just a matter of time before it collapsed.  Perhaps that’s where my open source analogy also collapses.

One of the biggest differences between Laguna and Torrey Pines was commercialism.  Laguna was relentlessly commercial, with just about every scrap of land around the beach devoted to high priced shops and restaurants.  For instance, we wanted to buy ice cream at a small ice cream shop near the beach, but didn’t.  $4 per cone would have been $24 for the six of us.  We ate dinner at a recommended taco bar, Taco Loco.  It was nearly $50 for six tacos, six drinks, and two sides, with no service, and sidewalk seating.  Way overpriced. 

Torrey Pines was the exact opposite.  It’s a state park, bordered on the land side by the Pacific Highway, and a salt marsh.  Now, it’s only a short trip up Camino Del Mar to great eating in Del Mar, but if you wanted to eat at Torrey Pines, you brought lunch.  And people did so, toting in coolers, awnings, and barbecues.  And, because it’s a state park, there were definitely no shops.

That difference neatly encompasses the net neutrality debate, in my mind.  The incumbents want to build a Laguna Beach and all of the commercial opportunities it affords.  Newcomers want the freedom to use “the beach”, or rather, the network,  in any way they can conceive of.  Some have even gone so far as to suggest that that government ought to designate “the beach” a public resource, fearing that commercialism will constrain the potential of “the beach”. 

Laguna was nice to visit, but ultimately you can only watch the plumage and mating rituals of Homo Sapiens “Californicus” for so long before it gets old.  However, I’d go back to Torrey Pines in a heartbeat. 

And I’ll leave it you to try to guess where I stand on Net Neutrality. 

Joshua Tree National Park is an amazing place.  It sits at the confluence of the Colorado Desert ecosystem, and the Mojave Desert ecosystem.  From the high Mojave you descend thousands of feet to the Colorado.  And in between, there are a thousand changes.

The wonderful thing about these deserts, and this park, is the ways that they can instruct us.  The plants and animals here are adapted, and adaptable.  For instance:

• Occotillo is a deciduous shrub, full of spines, which can leaf out and bloom as many as five times per year.  Its adaption is that it is not seasonal.  If leafs out and blooms when moisture is available.  When the moisture disappears, it drops its leaves and flowers, and appears to be dead.  The Occotillo is the guerilla marketer of the desert.  When opportunities present, it takes advantage.  When the climate turns inhospitable, it retreats.  Occotillo is an entreprenuer.
• Creasote is another decidious shrub.  Unlike Occotillo, however, it tries to carve out a permanent position in the desert.  Creasote roots can decend for as much as 60 feet.  Creasote roots also secrete a resinous substance that prevents other plants from taking hold, and therefore competing for water.  Creasote is a long term resident, versus Occotillo’s guerilla strategy.  Creasote is an incumbent.
• Joshua Tree (actually a Yucca) is a platform for the Mojave community.  Whether young or old, Joshua tree’s provide an environment for birds, moths, and termites to thrive in.  This symbiotic relationship allows the Joshua Tree to survive and prosper in a very inhospitable evnvironment.

And while the desert is an inhospitable, and highly competitive environment, perhaps the greatest lesson is in the geology of the Mojave.  Chunks of volcanic granite poke through pink gneiss throughout the region.  The gneiss, however, is soft and easily eroded, which results in the spectacular and bizarre rock formations common through Joshua National Park. 

The above photograph is an HDR image of the arch at Arches viewpoint in Joshua National Park.  Aside from being a spectacular image, it’s also a reminder that even the most permanent structures can be eroded by very basic forces — in this case, wind and water.

What are the wind and water’s of your business?