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October 31, 2003
Skype Hype
Skype has been making the news lately, the new voice IM client from the same people who brought us the peer-to-peer music sharing system KaZaa. With over two million downloads since its launch this summer, and hosting over a 100,000 simultaneous users, Skype hype would have us believe that this is the Second Coming. Actually it is more like the fourth or fifth. The valley is still littered with the ashes of the companies who collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars and used hundreds of man-years to develop essentially the same thing - free internet phone calling through your computer. Some of the companies are still running, but at orders of magnitude lower valuations. My former company Multitude's product Firetalk was one of the more feature-rich of the Internet phones at the time. We too had over two million downloads of our Windows application and tens of thousands of simultaneous users. The current version of Skype is reminiscent of the early versions of Firetalk - presence information, buddy lists, instant messaging, do-not-disturb signs indicators. The main difference is that Skype is built on a peer-to-peer architecture, which although limiting in conferencing functionality (Firetalk's server architecture allowed up to a thousand people on one conference call), is ultimately more scalable at a fraction of the cost. Unlike previous peer-to-peer Internet phones, Skype can work through firewalls, making user adoption much easier.
Posted by elise at 5:42 PM | Comments (3)
October 24, 2003
Swopper Review
I bought a Swopper chair two years ago and I have to say that it works. I love it. My back loves it. My posture has improved dramatically because of it. When I first sat in it at a local design studio in Sacramento, I felt like I was sitting on a cushioned pogo stick that swayed all over the place. It was sort of like being on one of those large green exercise balls, but with a lot more stability. My back had been complaining a lot, mostly due to too much power yoga and sitting in front of a computer 8 hours a day. I didn't know if my back could handle this chair, but if it could I could see the benefits. I'm a chronic squirmer, and this chair would let me squirm away, stretching the lower back and hip muscles to my heart's content. The nice man at the shop let me take one home to test it out and a couple of days later he had my credit card number. Perhaps Swoppers were some come and gone SOMA fad, but if so, I missed it. I had never seen one. Here it is:
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Posted by elise at 9:40 PM | Comments (14)
October 20, 2003
Lawrence Lessig - Free Culture
Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford Law School, and chair of the Creative Commons Project, speaks out about how our copywrite and intellectual property laws are stifling creativity and innovation. His flash presentation can be found at http://www.eff.org/IP/freeculture/free.html. In this presentation, professor Lessig describes how the length of term for copyright protection keeps getting extended. He calls this the "Mickey Mouse" Protection Act as every time Disney is about to lose its protection for Mickey, the law gets extended. Lessig discusses how so much of our innovation comes from building on innovations and the creativity of others (Disney himself based his animations on fairy tales in the public domain) and that by restricting our ability to create derivate works, we are squashing our ability to innovate. (The flash presentation itself is a great communications piece. Good use of technology to get a point across.)
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Posted by elise at 12:02 AM
October 9, 2003
How I Met My Wife
Another title for this could be "Mind Twisters from the English Language".
How I Met My Wife, published July 25, 1994 in The New Yorker, by Jack Winter
It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate.
I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it since I was travelling cognito.
Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn't be peccable.
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Posted by elise at 1:53 PM
October 6, 2003
Hormesis - Radiation Is Good For You?
I recently had a conversation with a retired X-Ray specialist physicist who claimed that radiation in low doses was actually good for you, citing the phenomena called "hormesis". Incredulous, I looked up hormesis in Google and sure enough, there are thousands of studies showing that all sorts of toxins at low doses, including radiation, produce a beneficial effect biologically.
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Posted by elise at 12:16 PM