Wanna' teach?

1. Outsourcing has moved and will continue to move the jobs of a number of "knowledge workers" off shore. A number of these workers happen to be computer scientists or engineers.
2. A disturbing number of highschool math, science, physics, and computer teachers didn't even minor in the subjects they are now teaching. Qualifications aside, how can you get someone excited about a topic that you weren't terribly interested in yourself?
3. Computer scientists and engineers tend to be pretty good at (and like) math, science, physics and (ahem) computing.

Now, I'm not suggesting all computer scientists or engineers would make particularly good teachers: I'm proof.

However, there's a huge and largely untapped resource here, and it's one we ought to take advantage of... Now, clearly it's not that simple. There's all the certification stuff, and unions, payscales, etc. but it's a start...

Considering how quickly we (North Americans) are falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to science and technology education, it's worth a second glance.

P.S. This idea really belongs to a friend of mine. Bogdan: You know how you wanted to do a startup that had something to do with education? You might just be on to something. :)

Fake bills aren't cool.

So, Fido just charged me $103.05 for apparently receiving 787 messages to (myphonenumber)@fido.ca ... okay... so

a) This is just not cool. It's clearly impossible that I received that many text messages, especially because:

b) Yup, I use my Treo for eMail... which is why I have a data package... and don't use that @fido.ca -> sms stuff.

Now, after getting severely annoyed and calling Fido, they offered to send me a detailed bill to prove that I'd received all these messages. "It has the addresses and everything." I was assured.

When I received the bill (to their credit, they did send one, and via PDF too), all it lists is:

Date , Text Message Received, Source: e-Mail

Gee guys, thanks... so I have this list showing me that I've received nearly 800 messages... none of which I actually received on my phone itself, not even a list of the addresses that apparently sent me this torrent of unreceived spam, and I'm expected to pay over $100 for this?

Riiiiight.

More reasons to love your iPod

So last night I spent a while helping a friend back up his computer to a removable drive. Why? Well, his computer started to make some funny noises, and that's never a good sign. Just ask the mysteriously red-eyed girl from those Apple commercials a few years ago.

Anyway, I was just thinking about the number of times my iPod has saved me from similar problems. Apple's made it really easy to create secure, encrypted space on any drive, including an iPod. So, just about every day I press a few buttons, wait a few seconds, et voila, all the stuff I really care about is safely sync'd to my iPod.

While it's saved me from the occasionally mysterious loss of files, it's also saved me from my own stupidity (i.e. making big changes to a document and choosing Save instead of Save As).

So while carrying around a removable drive just to back up your laptop is pretty cumbersome (who does that?), you've probably got an iPod stashed in your pocket anyway, right?

Phrase of the day: "His grok is strong."

(or weak).

Acceptable variant: "He has much/little grok."

"Naked" DSL

In some regions, Verizon's going to allow you to get a DSL line without having a phone line to go along with it. Hopefully some of the Canadian service providers will follow a similar route... especially with the residential VoIP marketing heating up the way it has.

Via Techdirt.

"Perfect" audio from the iPod Shuffle?

Okay, so I thought my iPod sounded pretty good (so long as you replace the headphones Apple ships with them... besides, the white-earbud look is pretty tired)... but it turns out that Apple's worked some magic with the new iPod Shuffle, making it quite possibly the best-sounding music player out there.

Bill Machrone over at PC Magazine has an article that discusses this, and then even posts the raw test results to prove his point.

Very cool.

Indy.tv

Ian Clarke's at it again, and this time with a cool music application called Indy.tv that learns your preferences over time to provide new content suggestions. Very cool. Now just need to get it running on OS X. :)

Via boing boing.

Back to school

So one of my old highschool teachers has asked me to come back and talk to some students about future careers.

I'm not so sure I know what to say... especially considering I'm still largely making it up as I go along. :) The list of tips the school provided wasn't too helpful either, suggesting things like "Talk about perks of the job, like having a cellphone."

*sigh* Any suggestions?

Working with friends

Keith talked about having a conversation with someone who was afraid of her personal and professional circles getting too close to one another. I dunno, try working for a startup... the team, your customers, they all become family. It's hard to think about there being a split between the personal and professional world... who wants to work with people who aren't your friends? It's more fun this way anyhow.

Aggregators and filters

I was speaking to a technology columnist at a major newspaper a few days ago, and it's clear that they're worried about the future of print media. With blogs, and aggregators like Del.icio.us and Slashdot, the relevance of the newspaper format is clearly declining. But what about the trust that it engenders? When presented with a list of links about a specific topic, are you more likely to check out the New York Times article, or Joe's Blog?

Well, what if you knew Joe, or had a trust relationship with your peer group and Joe? Would that affect your choice or weighting?

... just another thought about social filters... I'd love to hear what you think.

Connecting CEO's

I'm pretty new to my role, and I'm constantly reaching out to those people who've been in my place before for advice and guidance. One of the people I've turned to explained that he'd rather I make new mistakes, instead of repeating those he'd already made. What a great way of thinking about it... the more people you reach out to, the more aggregate learning you're able to take advantage of. After much urging (read: yelling at) from a great friend, and inspiring CEO I finally took steps to put together our advisory board at Ambient, and without a doubt it's been amazingly helpful for us.

So recently I've been spending some time with an organization called AceTech. It's a group with a simple purpose: to bring together the CEO's of Canadian tech and biotech firms. If you happen to be in that category, have a look at the website... you just might connect with some interesting people.

Wrong-numbers when roaming?

So it turns out that some carriers may have been starting rumors over SMS to drive SMS usage revenues. Ouch.

Now, this got me thinking... when I'm at home (and not roaming onto other networks), I rarely get people calling me by accident. Yet, whenever I'm roaming (and paying that enormous roaming fee for each call), I nearly always receive a "sorry, wrong number" call or two. Coincidence? :-)

New Favorite Song

The Geeks Get the Girls by American Hi-Fi ... check it out on iTunes

Price differentials

So some mobile carriers are running around and delaying the launch of Motorola's new iTunes phone. Why? Well, carriers are used to a LARGE (think 50% or greater sometimes) revenue share on today's hottest mobile content: ringtones. Of a market that's worth nearly $4BN worldwide, 50% is a pretty nice share. What's the problem? Well, the average ringtone can cost anywhere from $2-5.

Anyone who's used Rhapsody, Napster or iTunes recently *must* wonder, "Why are people paying $3 for something that's a vague approximation of the full song I can buy for $1?" Good question. So, clearly we have some basic economic forces that are going to affect ringtone pricing pretty seriously in the near term. What else? Well, if you look closely at how the $1 for youriTunes song get's broken, Apple's only making 15 cents or so. So, if the company that's building all the technology and hosting the infrastructure's getting 15% of a $1 transaction, and carriers are used to making 50% of a $2-5 transaction, we can pretty quickly see that there's a bit of a disparity here.

Also, there's the cost of delivering the media. A typical ringtone is about 30K, whereas a full-length song is about 100 times bigger. So... the actual cost of delivering the content to a handset is a whole lot larger as well.

What does this mean? Well, in the near-term, there'll be a lot of push-back towards getting full-length audio delivered to handsets, especially given the price-point. Long term, I think the more interesting trends to watch will be the per-unit pricing for ringtones, and the percentage of the revenue that carriers are able to obtain.

The next few years promise to be *very* interesting in the mobile content world. Stay tuned.

Why oh why does Nike not get it?

Check out runto.ca ... Nike's again creating a FANTASTIC 10K run for Torontonians. The advertising's fantastic, the pre-race training runs are terrific... even your race fees go to a good cause (putting up a community basketball court in one of Toronto's suburbs, I think)... So my only complaint here is that I CAN'T MAKE IT... and neither can a bunch of other runner friends of mine. Why? Because Nike decided to schedule their run on May 29... the date of the Ottawa Marathon... the best and biggest run in the country.

So, I'm a little grumpy. That said, if you're planning on being in Toronto on that weekend, and happen not to want to head up to Ottawa for an amazing run... do head over to the island and give Nike's run a chance... it looks fantastic... *sniff* if only I could go.

Hello World.

A little about me.

I'm the founder/CEO of AmbientVector (www.ambientvector.com). We're a mobile software startup that's focused on bringing social context to mobile content and services. What does that mean? Well, we let people take content and share it with their peers... more interestingly, we also let them peer into their social network and take a look around, at what their peers are looking at. Why? Because we all care a lot more about our social groups than we do about any top-10 list.

I'm a geek at heart... a "reformed techie" that's fortunate enough to work on the business side of things with fantastic customers, and still get to work with one of the smartest technical teams around. I'm a Mac guy, and if you catch me on the rare occasion where my PowerBook's not in tow, I'm certainly tapping away on my Treo... add those two to my iPod, and I'm typically a pretty happy camper.

I'm sure I'll post a bit more about myself later, but at the moment there're two things that are bugging me... so I'll post about them first :)

Cheers.