Sekiur My Thoughts » Technology

E-commerce and The End of Search

Jose Vicente Ortega — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 04:40:09 +0000

With the advent of the Internet and the massive amount of information available, we needed to find a way to make it accessible for consumption. Thus, the World Wide Web was born and gave us the capability to present different types of data including text, images and multimedia to the user through the web browser. As the amount of information increased exponentially, it became apparent the information needed to be categorized and organized.

Yahoo was one of the pioneers in this area, looking to create a directory of the Internet. Unfortunately this model was not scalable; others like Altavista and Lycos took a different approach, the same approach used by Google: Creating algorithms that searched and indexed the content on the Internet, providing consumers of information a central place to search that information. The search engine was born.

Most of us consider the Internet a bucket of miscellaneous tidbits, and the modern search engine our personal assistant. But is that analogy correct? You open your browser, bringing up the Google homepage, then enter whatever term you happen to be looking for at the time and bingo. You get a list of results you then have to “search” through to find what you are looking for. So in fact you are searching through the results of what Google searched for.

Google co-founder Larry Page once described the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want”, far from what Google is today.

Searching is not something that comes natural to people. In fact, people actually hate searching. People like to know where stuff is. Throughout our lives we establish systems to store and retrieve information efficiently.

After running across a picture taken eight years ago, of my three-year-old organizing his loot on Halloween night, I realized that we “organize”so we can find. This is very important–we organize so we can later find.

It’s all around us. Our fridge has a specific drawer where we store our vegetables and another for the cheese and ham, the top shelf for the milk and the door for the juice. Our supermarkets have shelves and products are categorized and organized to make it easy for us to find. Imagine what it would be like to go to a grocery store where products weren’t organized in any way.

The search engine is just not compatible with the way people function, it is just a first step to deal with and filter the amount of information on the Internet. The reality is, it is rudimentary and primitive.

A recent study titled “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” by researchers at Columbia, Harvard and Wisconsin-Madison universities studied whether the Internet has become our primary transitive memory source–basically an external memory system. These are the conclusions reached by the four controlled experiments in the study:

1) People share information easily because they rapidly think of computers when they find they need knowledge (Expt. 1).

2) The social form of information storage is also reflected in the findings that people forget items they think will be available externally, and remember items they think will not be available (Expts. 2 and 3).

3) Transactive memory is also evident when people seem better able to remember which computer folder an item has been stored in than the identity of the item itself (Expt. 4).

The effect on whether or not we choose to commit certain information to memory when we know the information is readily available on the computer is what is relevant here. We store specific things in specific places, like food in the fridge, but who remembers what is specifically in the fridge?

It is completely natural for people to minimize what needs to be encoded into memory by organizing and then encoding the location of the information, rather than the information itself. This is where search engines fall short of meeting the basic cognitive needs of humans.

The emergence of the mobile device has been remarkable and Apple’s vision in this space has changed the way people access information. There is data to support the notion that people are not mirroring desktop behavior on mobile devices.

People are not searching on smartphones as much as they do on desktops. Steve Jobs attributes this to the availability of mobile apps and the desktop lacking an app store. In reality, the availability of app, or the lack thereof, is not really the central point. What’s important is information is being categorized, compartmentalized and organized for consumption, and delivered more efficiently through mobile devices. This is clearly a step in the right direction in delivering more relevant and timely information to the user.

Artificial Intelligence will play a major role in the next wave of innovation, starting with Evolving and Adaptive Fuzzy Systems as classification algorithms and then matching the wants with the needs of the user. A recent example of this is an application that gives personalized restaurant recommendations called Alfred—it is all recommendations and no direct search.

GiftWoo takes the next step forward in the e-commerce space in a vertical market. Until now going online to find a gift for your better half involves a search, which results in thousands of choices. Currently, e-commerce websites are designed to deliver a high number of choices, rather than the “right choice” for the consumer. GiftWoo will give the buyer the unique and perfect gift they seek without the searching, by initially building a profile for the gift recipient, then utilizing a proprietary algorithm to match the ideal gift to the profile.

Electronic Health Records and the Cloud

Jose Vicente Ortega — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:52:03 +0000

Last year I was recruited to find an Electronic Healthcare Records System (EHR) for a doctor who had just gone through a foiled implementation. I am always intrigued by being exposed to new sectors of technology and learning systems inside out.

The existing EHR system had a hardware failure and the vendor was asking for over $10,000 to recover the patient data. This combined with high maintenance and licensing fees proved to be too much for the doctor.

A consultant came in and sold the doctor on a hosted EHR system he had developed, unfortunately expectations were not set and the doctor was expecting his patient data to be available on this new system. Once it became apparent that there would be an additional cost in the thousands to recover and import this data into the new system the relationship went south.

This particular project was not only a technical but also a customer service challenge. Right from the start I made sure that the expectations were set and began looking at the possible solutions.

Amongst the many options available including traditional vendors, open source, home-grown systems, etc. (Tolven Healthcare, PatientOS, OpenEMR, Clearhealth, Abraxas, Medworks & Pulse)

I was looking to implement something that not only met the requirements (demographics, Medical history, Medications & allergies, Immunization status, Laboratory test results, Radiology images and Billing) of the client but was also scalable as a potential business. I ruled out the traditional EHR systems because of their high capital expenditure, ongoing costs, and approved VAR requirements. The open source solutions seemed very attractive but I was looking for something that did not require an on-site server thus it had to be hosted and using the cloud made it scalable.

So it came down to hosting an open-source package or using someone who had already done the legwork and I didn’t want to support this long term so the search turned 2 or 3 new cloud service providers of which only one I found to be mature enough to recommend; Practice Fusion.

Practice Fusion provides a free, web-based Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system to physicians. With charting, scheduling, e-prescribing, billing, lab integrations, referral letters, unlimited support and a Personal Health Record for patients, Practice Fusion’s EMR addresses the complex needs of today’s healthcare providers and disrupts the health IT status quo.

Although this did not turn out to be a passive income generator which I always have as a goal, it turned out to be a very educational and the platform for other ideas and projects.

Cloud Home Security

Jose Vicente Ortega — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 04:20:52 +0000

For a while I have been wanting to do a brain dump of ideas I have had onto my blog and finally I have the will to make it happen. Many of the ideas I still think would make great businesses but for one reason or another I just didn’t execute them.

So I started playing around with the idea of revolutionizing the Home Security industry. This has been a market that has remained pretty much unchanged for a long time. A monitored burglar alarm service that relies on the police as first responders, business model which has put them at odds with law enforcement due to the high incidence of false positives.

This industry has had monopolistic tendencies for decades culminating this year in the acquisition of Brink’s Home Security (Broadview Security) by ADT Security Services bringing together the #1 and #2 companies in the US. Despite residential security services being just one of the many markets these companies provide services in, it is definitely the most financially attractive. For years these companies remain in control by forcing competitors out of business by lowering prices below cost.

The business model with a change here or there is basically moving into high-growth areas having a recurring service revenue.

What caught my attention is that despite advances in technology these companies still rely in their old infrastructure. Yes there are more advanced sensors including passive infrared, ultrasonic, microwave, photo-electric, smoke, heat, etc and cameras but what was interesting is that for the most part when the alarm goes off a call is made to the monitoring service using a land line and reporting data gathered from these sensors to give the call center some data to act on after a call is made to the home.

This is were I think there is an astronomic potential. The value of the data gathered by these sensors would be a gold mine allowing the monitoring service and basic sensors to be provided for FREE and a premium charged for more advanced sensors and surveillance via cameras. A highly sophisticated and integrated system reducing the number of false positives. The system would of course go beyond security monitoring and merge with home automation, and home health monitoring. In order for the system to scale the intelligence in the homes (home security panel) would need to move to the cloud and communicate with a hub inside the home interfacing with multiple sensors, telephones, sprinkler system, entertainment system, electrical system (smart meter), appliances, air conditioning, water heater, and use of home areas by means of “mood” sensors.

Sources of income for the business would be advertising, cross-selling smart devices from manufactures, upgrades to premium plans, subscription to additional services such a health monitoring, and selling the raw data collected and even selling the data after qualifying it. Imagine being able to provide bulb companies burn-out rates, provide household advice on their energy uses and how to improve them, water usage and patterns, target marketing based on social status which could easily be determined by energy usage patterns, and mining migrating patterns within the home.

The Reality Mining Project was a social experiment conducted by MIT in which hundreds of hours of proximity data were collected by tracking mobile phones over a period of 9 months. Researchers created algorithms that could predict a person’s next actions accurately over 85% of the time. The program also determined social status and relationships as well as create a list of their friends and acquaintances and be right 90% of the time.

There is no doubt that this idea would have privacy advocates up in arms but in a world that is highly connected and the boundaries between public and private blur, it becomes a feasible business as long as there is not personal identifiable data.

Attached is a deck on the concept.

How to test development on the iPhone

Jose Vicente Ortega — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:17:20 +0000

Working on multiple iPhone application projects and shortly looking at the iPad for other development opportunities, I found an excellent step by step guide on creating a development provisioning profile on http://devclinic.com by Kuix, that I thought I should share.

As simple as it may, I thought i’d contribute and write a tutorial on how to get your development application onto your testing device. Due to the exponential speed and memory differences between your development computer and an actual mobile device, it is very important for you to test your application on a mobile device.

Step 1: Certify
This is the hardest step, so please follow the steps closely.
Open Keychain Access application, inside your Application->Utilities folder. Click on Keychain Access->Certificate Assistant->Request a certificate from a certificate Authority… Enter your email, your name, and for CA Email i used my email again(the last one don’t really matter, for these purposes, but it’s required). Choose Saved to disk and click continue. It will then, by default save to your desktop.

Open up Apple Developer Connection inside your browser and login. Go to the Program Portal section and click on Certificates. Choose add certificate. The page will basically tell you to do what i just told u. scroll all the way to the bottom, where you will upload and submit that new certificate, from your desktop. Now your certificate needs to be approved by you/administrator. Simply click on approve, where your certificate is pending. Now, you will have the option of downloading your approved certificate. Download that, and the WWDR intermediate certificate, linked below your certificate. double click on both downloaded certificates to install them into your Keychain. Use login, instead of System, for both.

Once that is done, move on.

Step 2: Device
Now click on Devices. Here you will get your mobile device recognized as a development device. You can develop your app on either an iPhone or an iPod Touch. Open xCode, and go to Window->Organizer Here you will see the device that is currently connected to your computer. notice the long ass identifier key for Identifier:. now inside your program portal, click on Add Devices. you will make up a device name and then copy past that identifier value, you stole from the xCode organizer. Submit.

Step 3: App IDs
Next step: click on the link App IDs from the left hand side, then New App Id. The Description is for your sake, so you know what the ID is for. Choose Generate New, and for Bundle Identifier, it’s like writing an URL backwards.
com.yourCompanyName.AppName then submit that.

Step 4: Provisioning Profile
Almost done! Go to Provisioning page, then New Profile.Choose a memorable profile name. check the box for your approved certificate. Choose your App ID, created from step 3. check the box for your development device. Submit. Now you can download your provisioning profile. Go back to your xCode organizer and add your provisioning profile into the Provision section, under Devices.

Step 5: Load it!
In your app, go to Resources->appName-info.plist Where it says Bundle identifier, change the value to what you entered for your app ID:com.yourCompanyName.AppName.

On the top left hand corner, in the drop down menu, choose Device – 3.0 (if you’re running 3.0 firmware). Build and Go.
If you’ve done everythign correctly, it will build successfully, and your app will be now on your mobile device!

I know it’s a lot of writing, but every step is pertinent. Good luck, guys=)

~Kuix

GrandCentral to Google Voice

Jose Vicente Ortega — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:29:07 +0000

In just under a minute I migrated a couple of GrandCentral account to Google Voice and I am very exited to see a transcript of a voicemail show up in my Inbox.

I will definitely miss the GrandCentral interface as its much more intuitive than the new Google Voice GUI.

A limitation currently in place on both platforms is the capability to have 2 different accounts ring one same number. I particularly like this to have a personal and a business number both ring my cell and landlines. The workaround for the moment is leaving an account with GrandCentral and on one Google Voice. Lets see how long that lasts.!

One thing that I have seen more and more recently is my GrandCentral dropping calls on me. Maybe its Google’s way of getting users migrated.

Google Voice Emerges from GrandCentral, Transcribes Voicemail (lifehacker.com)
Google Voice: Bells, Whistles, and Voicemail Transcripts (blippitt.com)
Google Voice: A New Approach to Voice Communications (littlegreenfootballs.com)
Google Launching GrandCentral As Google Voice (searchenginewatch.com)

Do You Know Where Your Kids Are?

Jose Vicente Ortega — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:36:57 +0000

Twenty years ago my parents knew where I was and who I was with or so they thought.

Well maybe not but basically it was much easier for parents to keep their kids on the straight and narrow and away from trouble. It basically consisted of keeping an eye on dubious VHS/Betamax tapes and password protecting satellite channels as well as keeping tabs on friends.

With the Internet, social networks and cell phones; you as a parent basically have no insight on who your children interact with, what they see and what shenanigans they might tumble into.

The morals of spying on your kids is beyond the scope of this post, but I start on the premise that involvement in your children’s lives greatly reduces the probability of them getting into shady situations.

The Internet posed the first challenge for parents to unwanted content most of which was porn. Placing the computer in a common area and restricting access to it sufficed. With the widespread use of Instant Messaging it became harder to just restrict access to the computer and once filtering software surfaced the new challenge of unmonitored communications emerged.

Now what makes online communications so much different from phone conversations we could have had 20 years ago with a friend? Its a fact that the anonymity of the Internet may serve as a dis-inhibitor prompting kids to do things they would not have done while just talking on the phone. Chatting log applications emerged to serve this market.

As instant messaging converted to the web from applications running on the PC at home, it has become more difficult to see what’s happening on social networks and with the wide-spread adoption of smart phones by teenagers and young kids, the methods at home for filtering and monitoring communications no longer work.

Schools have put in place measures to ensure that students don’t have access to questionable content but these are useless when students arrive at school with high-bandwidth enabled iPhones.

As every sword has a double edge so does technology. Even though these devices present a new challenge for parents, it also offers unheard of possibilities 20 years ago like the capability to see where your kids are at.

Google Latitude allows a mobile phone user to allow certain other people on his or her Gmail contact list to track where he or she is. This application requires that the user share their location when Google Maps opens on a mobile phone whether using the on-board GPS or triangulation of cell towers. It will however ask the user to continue sharing their location when you exit the application so its not what you would call stealthy.

Moostrax however does run behind the scene running quietly on the options menu on Blackberries, sending location information at regular intervals to a website. Apart from live tracking on Google Maps, it offers additional nifty features like historical tracking that can be exported to a Google Earth format, GeoFences allowing someone to be notified via e-mail when the phone enters or leaves a certain pre-determined area, Location Tagging allowing the tagging of your favorite locations, and a developer API to integrated other applications.

Ronald Reagan once said: “Trust But Verify” when discussing relations with the Soviet Union

How To Trace a Mobile Phone Location with Google Latitude (makeuseof.com)
Satnav seeks integrated solution (guardian.co.uk)
Publish Your Location to Your Blog or Gmail Chat with Google Latitude (blippitt.com)
Your Favorite Location-Based Mobile Apps (readwriteweb.com)
Top 6 iPhone 3.0 Apps to Watch (mashable.com)

Develop an iPhone Application

Jose Vicente Ortega — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:13:44 +0000

With the iPhone Apps store closing in on the 1 billion download mark, its hard to argue that it hasn’t been a huge success and even with the numerous applications available to do just about anything you can think of, there is still room for innovation as long as you keep an open mind and hold on to your imagination.

Standford has made available a course on iTunes that will have you creating your very own application in no time.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php

iPhone 3.0 Gets Copy and Paste and Then Some (smarterware.org)
Apple Is Approaching a Defining Moment (gigaom.com)
Five in Finance for iPhone (paul.kedrosky.com)

PBX in a Flash with CBeyond

Jose Vicente Ortega — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 16:57:11 +0000

Last week I deployed a PBX in a Flash system using SIPConnect from CBeyond. It was so successful that I will start using PIAF in lieu of Trixbox from now on for all future deployments of this type and will replace my home PBX to take advantage of Skype and Google Voice integration.

In this case I used the Aastra 53i (English edition) VoIP phones which when connected to the network, retrieved an IP from the DHCP server, contacted the PBX using mDNSResponse, checked and downloaded the most recent firmware available on the PBX, and downloaded the default configuration which prompts for a user to login. After login in the phone created a config file on the PBX for future restarts.

These Aastra phones come in 2 editions (The English/American edition and the European edition). The power supply for the European edition has different connectors and the display had symbols instead of words. Apart from that they appeared to be identical but getting the European edition to automatically connect to the PBX and configure itself was very painful, having to reset the phone to factory defaults and erase the local configuration multiple times and finally having to define on the phone the TFTP server (PBX) IP address for it to download the configuration.

Two thumbs up for the PBX in a Flash (PIAF) developers who have done a superb job with this distribution holding up the ideals of the original Asterisk@home open source project.

Their documentation was almost flawless although it was difficult trying to find the most recent version of instructions as they are all layed out in bits and pieces across a blog. In pursuit of a perfect install I narrowed down the install to running the iso install, going through the online download and compilation of asterisk and running the update/fix scripts. Now before upgrading/installing any module or OS updates, I downloaded and installed the files necessary to deploy the Aastra phones which is also done by a script and then I proceeded to install/update the software via the FreePBX module admin and finally the OS updates.

Below is the trunk configuration for connecting via SIPConnect to CBeyond from PBX in a Flash:

Outbound caller ID: 5551231234
Never overrride caller ID: checked
Maximum Channels: 6

Outbound Settings

trunk name=cbeyond

allow=ulaw&alaw&gsm&ilbc&g726&adpcm
context=from-trunk
disallow=all
dtmfmode=auto
fromdomain=sipconnect.dal0.cbeyond.net
host=sipconnect.dal0.cbeyond.net
insecure=very
outboundproxy=sip-proxy.dal0.cbeyond.net
qualify=250
secret=[secret-password]
type=peer
username=5551231234

Regitration String: 5551231234:secret-password@cbeyond/5551231234

Note: Notice there is no inbound settings required. DID incoming configuration will determine were each channel from the trunk will ring.

AUDIT: Small Minn. agencies need better computer security (5 Eyewitness News St. Paul) (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)
Call Skype From Any Phone Through OpenSky (mashable.com)
Skype for SIP == Skype for Asterisk DOA? (skypejournal.com)
Skype For SIP: Big Money, Skypeless, Brand Destroyer (skypejournal.com)

Sekiur My Thoughts » Technology

E-commerce and The End of Search

Electronic Health Records and the Cloud

Cloud Home Security

How to test development on the iPhone

GrandCentral to Google Voice

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Do You Know Where Your Kids Are?

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Develop an iPhone Application

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PBX in a Flash with CBeyond

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