Alec Saunders SquawkBox

We are looking for smart, creative, energetic, honest and hardworking people to help us build our QA team.

Your role will include being responsible for designing, developing and executing a comprehensive test strategy for the full suite of applications and services that Iotum provides. For the right candidate, this Quality Assurance position can evolve into a position of responsibility for building and leading a team of Quality Assurance engineers.

Primary Responsibilities:
• Provide continuity with the existing QA and test procedures in place at iotum

• Design, develop and execute test strategies and plans that cover all Iotum service offerings.
• Design and implement QA processes and QA infrastructure
• Work closely with internal groups such as Product Management, Engineering and Support to improve the overall offering as well as help resolve critical customer issues.
• Establish, track and report Quality Assurance support metrics

Secondary Responsibilities:

• Build, manage and mentor a Quality Assurance team

Qualifications/Skills/Competencies
• 3+ years in Quality Assurance working within the software industry – mobile applications and internet/networking experience preferred
• Knowledge of QA testing methodologies with experience in software development.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams including development, marketing and support to ship quality product on schedule.
• Excellent Communication Skills (verbal and written): Ability to communicate with both technical and non-technical customers.
• Excellent Project Management and Coordination Skills
• Entrepreneurial attitude, takes initiative and invites responsibility; comfortable in an unstructured, fast-paced environment

• Leadership experience building and managing world-class QA teams

• Knowledge and experience with security will be an important asset.

Personal Characteristics:
A passion to build a world class organization and accomplish great things
An assertive, entrepreneurial, get-it-done attitude
A desire to work hard and play hard! Email resumes to: hr@iotum.com

Location:  Ottawa.

Start Date: Immediately.

Contact: hr@iotum.com

Interested in moving to the top of the list?

Our ideal candidate will be able to demonstrate familiarity with software development concepts, as well as working knowledge of writing test plans. Here are two of our interview questions for the QA position. By completing them in advance, on your own time and without the presence of an interview panel, you have the opportunity to show that our mutual expectations are in alignment, and bump yourself to the top of the list.

1. For an array (list) of random integers that may be both positive and negative, write a procedure that will find a set of sequences of length ‘n’ with the maximum sum. So if the list was {4, 1, 3, 2} and n=2, the output should be {4, 1}, {3, 2}.

2. Choose a favourite software application or web process, and write a test plan to ensure that the product is ready for public consumption. For example, you might test the sign-up procedure for a web-based e-mail service.

Jangl officially unveiled their beta this morning. Available everywhere in the US, on any mobile handset, and targeted at the same dating crowd as TalkPlus, it seems as if the companies must have been in an unofficial horse-race to get their beta’s into market. 

Free until sometime in 2007, Jangl allocates a new number for each contact, and based on a combination of call-in number, and caller-id, determines where the call should terminate.  It’s a very clever system, and just the ticket for people who value privacy.

I had a chance to talk with Jangl CEO Michael Cerda, and Tim Johnson last night on the telephone about their beta, which they characterize as being more like the Google Beta, or a Skype Beta — out there for a while to gather user feedback, and validate some of their ideas.  The idea is to use the Jangl branded beta to vet those ideas, and then roll them out to their partner networks, like Match.com (announced last week).  So, Jangl direct will hint at future, and is the place where you will see the early adopters. They have a bunch of ideas around SMS, and MMS and publishing content to a phone number that they will explore. 

Jangl sees itself capitalizing on the benefits of anonymity and privacy. The basic thrust is that people, more so now than ever, meet other people on line. Most are people you’ve never met face to face.  In addition to phone calls there are all kinds of other places to embed their service.  For instance, Michael talked about building a widget for myspace or blogs allowing customers totake advantage of the ubiquity of the internet, while preserving the anonymity. Click the widget, and have a privacy protected conversation with the blog owner.   In fact, they see users having multiple Jangl ID’s for different roles –myspace, business.  Marshall, over at TechCrunch, is a skeptic about the value of the business Jangl ID, but who knows?

As always, I am interested in funding stories.  They closed $2 million in funding 12 months ago, and another $7 million last July.  With just $1 million they got Match.com into a pilot and private beta, and it was then that they raised the other $7 million.  One of the secrets of keeping their burn low is having just 18 people.  The other is that, even just 5 years ago, they would have had to build their own infrastructure.  Today they “rent” the infrastructure from Synoverse and Level 3. 

Nice job!

I asked about a developer play.  Not yet.  They haven’t figured out the details of how to handle third parties being able to programmatically create Jangl numbers.

911?  That’s handled by the network operator, not them.  No problem.

Law Enforcement?  Handled by the infrastructure owner, not Jangl.  No problem.

Jangl is neat, and another great example of a new Voice 2.0 application made possible by the shift we’re experiencing in the telecom market today. 

TalkPlus announced a US West Coast beta today.  For customers on Cingular, T-Mobile, or Sprint, you can get a second number for your cellular mobile — a TalkPlus number.  The idea is that the number can be used as a “second line” for business, dating, classified ads, online auctions, social groups, or for a second residence. TalkPlus works like your current mobile phone number, with the ability to make or receive calls from anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Billed as a “Sneak Peek”, the limited beta started today.  Beta participants get a TalkPlus Number within California or a selection of other major US cities.  Mobile users can sign up by visiting www.talkplus.com.  All beta participants get a FREE 30 day trial which includes 250 domestic minutes of TalkPlus service.  Participants who successfully complete the beta program will receive one additional month of free service (not including any overage charges).

I’m bummed that it’s not available here in Canada, or any of the handsets that I own.

PhoneGnome 2.0 just went live. David Beckemeyer and his team have dropped a blockbuster update on the world.

The price has been cut dramatically.  The introductory price of $59.99 is pretty compelling.  But, what would you think if that was $59.99… and it included all the long distance calling you wanted to friends, and family?  That’s right!  Starting now, anyone can become a “member” of PhoneGnome without having to pay anything.  Once a member, other PhoneGnome users can call them for free.  So, got get yourself a $59.99 PhoneGnome device, sign your friends up and ditch your long distance plan. They even have an option for you to use an existing ATA and avoid the $59.99 fee. As David says on the PhoneGnome blog:

With the holidays approaching quickly, what better way to connect with the people close to you, for free. Set up accounts for your mobile phone or second home line and save even more

For iotum users, you can get a PhoneGnome, sign up for the iotum service (an annual $40 charge), and freely forward calls to any of your phones as well. 

I’m impressed!

The Nokia N93 has three major groups of features:  phone, photography, and music. I’ve written about the phone, and photography features previously.  Now for music. 

Nokia provides a simple music manager application on the PC to synchronize tracks with the phone and media player capabilities on the handset.  Think of it as a simplified Windows Media Player or iTunes.  It allows you to group tracks, create playlists, and download them to the device.  While downloading it is also capable of converting music files from the storage format to Nokia’s mobile-optimized eAAC.

Once on the device, you can then open the media player, import the files to the media player library, and play your music.  The headphones provided are decent quality, and it sounds pretty good.

And that’s eventually where I ended up last night. It was a painful experience getting there.

My music is stored on an AudioRequest ARQ1 media server in a server closet, and delivered to various devices around my house either via wireless networking, ethernet, or good old fashioned RCA cables.  The files on the ARQ1 are stored as MP3s, and can be access either from its console, or via the SAMBA network interface (it mounts on the network as a standard Windows file server).  The PCs I used were running Windows XP SP2, and Windows Vista. 

The first problem I encountered was simply that the Nokia the music manager application doesn’t know about networked devices.  It cannot take a fully qualified pathname (such as \\arq1\mp3s) as an input, which means that all files must be on the local PC.  The problem was solved by opening a command line window, and mapping the server share to a local drive (net use x: \\arq1\mp3s). After that, you can simply use the scan PC command in the Nokia software to search the X drive to find all the media files.  Nokia could have avoided the whole problem by using the standard Windows file open dialog rather than writing custom Nokia boxes.  Writing a custom dialog is a great example of Not Invented Here syndrome, delivering no tangible benefit to the user.

Once the files are loaded you can then select a few, add them to your “collection”, and have the software compress them, download them, and send them to the device.  First, however, you must connect the device to the PC, so that this synchronization can take place.  My second big problem cropped up here.

Connectivity on the N93 is a step backward from the N91.  The N91 finally implemented a USB connector for file transfer.  With the N93, we’re back to the proprietary Nokia “pop-top” cable.  And, of course, at this point the drivers for this cable in Windows Vista are broken.  Yes, they load, but Nokia’s PC Suite software doesn’t recognize the devices. On Windows XP they work fine, but not on Vista. Eventually, I made a connection to the N93 using the standard Bluetooth driver included with Windows Vista, which worked fine, but was quite slow.  However, if Nokia had used a standard USB connector and driver, the situation might have been different.  Note: As I was struggling to get the music onto my N93 using Windows Vista, I was listening to music on my new Blackberry Pearl, which interfaces via a standard USB cable.  The Blackberry had no trouble being recognized by Windows Vista. 

Transferring the files turned out to be an exercise in frustration also.  A bug in the music manager software caused it to crash each time I started a transfer.  Eventually, through trial and error, it became clear that it was Nokia’s MP3 to eAAC compression algorithm that was the culprit.  Turning off the compression allowed the transfer to continue.  However, turning off the compression also meant I was downloading 320kbps MP3 files (6 to 8 megabytes per song) to the device rather than the skinny minny eAAC files I had been hoping for.  Bob Dylan’s fabulous Blonde on Blonde was the only CD I downloaded as a result.  It took 45 minutes uncompressed, via Bluetooth.

Et Voila, music.  Phew!

I wondered if there was a better way.  A little research on the internet revealed an agreement betweeen Nokia and Microsoft to integrate the N Series devices into Windows Media Player, which looked very promising.  If integrated, I would be able to use all my standard playlists, and management tools.

Windows Media player, initially, did not recognize the N93.  Plugging the N93 in via USB, however, will cause the N93 to present a menu of “modes”, one of which is media player mode.  Once selected, the PC treats the N93 like any other Windows Media player device.  Cool! 

Or… not so cool. 

I plugged the cable in, Windows dutifully went to fetch the driver, and announced that the .INF file for the driver had an error in it.  A problem on Windows Vista, I thought? Maybe a driver format change from one OS to the next? Nope.  Also broken on Windows XP. 

There you have it.  A Windows Vista driver for a proprietary cable missing, and two pieces of broken software conspired to turn what would have been a 20 minute exercise on an iPod into 4 hours of agony.

Nokia isn’t a software company.  Their hardware is beautiful and works well, but the lack of software smarts kills them everytime.  Unfortunately, this application — synching music from a PC to a handheld device — demands software expertise.  These music features aren’t close to ready for prime time, and will be agony for all but the most dedicated of users.  I certainly won’t use them again until they’re more thoroughly debugged by Nokia.