There were several voicemails, which I would have loved to preserve and several of them I did preserve as long my cell phone provider would allow me to preserve. One of the e-mails was from my 10-year old son, when he lost his pet guinea pig, Mr. Noonoo, who also happened to be the then President of our household. Then there were several voicemails from my 5-year old daughter telling me about her friends.
I searched around for a suitable utility on the Internet that would allow me to convert those voicemails to MP3 files. In the year 2000, there were none. I ran the same check again a few days back and found that there were some providers, who were in the business of dialing into your phone and converting the voicemails to MP3. You had to buy a 15-minute package for something like $30 to get your voicemails recorded.
The idea is simple but I have yet to see a self-managed and user-configurable Internet utility that will allow voicemails to be converted into MP3 files at a defined schedule and then allow download or e-mailing of those files back to the recipient.
Such a utility could be written using Skype API calls or in several other ways. Technology already exists. The challenge is to build the right business model in a clearly defined competitive space.
Such a business model would have a close affinity with telecommunications industry. If you are able to do it, you would be a natural partner of Verizon or Sprint. The revenue model could be subscriber-based, which is a major benefit. I'm sure that you have already noticed that most of the businesses on the Internet find it hard to build a subscriber-based revenue model.
Communicating Non-Verbally Through Signals on The Internet
Well, the inspiration for this website comes from a very old book of Watergate fame, namely, All The President's Men written by Bob Woodward. Bob has claimed in this book that he communicated with Deep Throat by placing a flowerpot with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment.
This non-verbal method of communication is almost as old as the humans on this earth. However, I'm not aware that there is any website or utility on the Internet that supports such a non-verbal method of communication or signaling. The benefit of such signaling is that that most of such signals are meaningless to everyone except the recepient. Therefore, such private signals don't have to be protected with a password.
There are several ways of building such an Internet utility that can help people communicate through signals. One of the ways is to overlay Google maps with signals or signal objects. Easy enough! The users will have the option of selecting a latitude/longitude combination, an address, intersection or a landmark. Once they have found the appropriate location on the map, users will be able to drag and drop a signal object on that location. This could be a flowerpot, a teddy bear, a message in a bottle, a book, etc. The database will record the latitude/longitude combination as well as the parameters of the object that is placed on that location. There is no need to protect the object with a password. Whoever sees it can either ignore it or delete it. If they delete it, hard luck for the recepient. This is what happens in the real world too. But earth is big enough for anyone to find out a suitable location to drop the signals so that they will be hidden from the prying eyes for some time until the recepient reaches the location to find the signal.
In fact, you can further enhance such a website to mimic the real world. In a real world, if I leave a book at a busy intersection, it will disappear in a pretty short time. Most likely someone will pick it up to either give it to security, read it or throw it in a trash. At a deserted location, the book will last as long as the time taken by the elements of nature to decompose it. That brings us to the concept of life of each signal object. You can write your program to allow the signal objects to disappear after some time depending upon the nature of the object and the location where that object was placed.
One more method is to overlay an Internet URL with a signal/message. Therefore, people will reach this website and enter a URL to retrive the signal placed on top of that URL by someone. Internet is full of billions of URLs, so this will give people a pretty good way of hiding a signal without using a password.
The more important question is how you will make money from such a website. What will be your competitive advantage? First of all competitive advantage will come from network effect. The more people use it, the more people will be likely to use it. Your advantage will be your ownership of the database of locations and signals. You should be able to replace Google maps with maps from Bing. That will give you a leg up your suppliers. Your website focus should be as much as possible on non-verbal communication. This will allow you to create your distinctly unique identity that will drive your business advantage. The topic of money is closely related to the topic of competitive advantage. Unless you have a uniquely defined sustainable marketable identity, you will not be able to make much money from such a website. Once you have that, you can make money, for instance, by delivering thousands of Teddy Bears from Target to the homes of people. This would be a secret signal to them that a discount awaits them at a near by Target store. The problem with this approach is that everyone and their dogs build an Internet business model based on earning revenue from advertisements.
To tell you the truth, advertisement dollars are very hard to get and they disappear quickly if results in terms of increased sales are not produced. Subscriber dollars are also hard to get but generally subscribers dollars are easier to retain as long as subscribers are satisfied. Internet users hate registration. Therefore, adding registration on a such a website that deals with non-verbal, secret signals is likely to be counterproductive. Looks like we are reaching the limits of our imagination on how to monetize this idea. Yes, we are. Secret signals could be URL objects that will lead to some surprise downloads, etc. But it is doubtful that you will ever earn subscriber revenue from such a website. Dollars will have to flow in from businesses and for that you will have to further improve this concept from a marketing/sales point of view.
This non-verbal method of communication is almost as old as the humans on this earth. However, I'm not aware that there is any website or utility on the Internet that supports such a non-verbal method of communication or signaling. The benefit of such signaling is that that most of such signals are meaningless to everyone except the recepient. Therefore, such private signals don't have to be protected with a password.
There are several ways of building such an Internet utility that can help people communicate through signals. One of the ways is to overlay Google maps with signals or signal objects. Easy enough! The users will have the option of selecting a latitude/longitude combination, an address, intersection or a landmark. Once they have found the appropriate location on the map, users will be able to drag and drop a signal object on that location. This could be a flowerpot, a teddy bear, a message in a bottle, a book, etc. The database will record the latitude/longitude combination as well as the parameters of the object that is placed on that location. There is no need to protect the object with a password. Whoever sees it can either ignore it or delete it. If they delete it, hard luck for the recepient. This is what happens in the real world too. But earth is big enough for anyone to find out a suitable location to drop the signals so that they will be hidden from the prying eyes for some time until the recepient reaches the location to find the signal.
In fact, you can further enhance such a website to mimic the real world. In a real world, if I leave a book at a busy intersection, it will disappear in a pretty short time. Most likely someone will pick it up to either give it to security, read it or throw it in a trash. At a deserted location, the book will last as long as the time taken by the elements of nature to decompose it. That brings us to the concept of life of each signal object. You can write your program to allow the signal objects to disappear after some time depending upon the nature of the object and the location where that object was placed.
One more method is to overlay an Internet URL with a signal/message. Therefore, people will reach this website and enter a URL to retrive the signal placed on top of that URL by someone. Internet is full of billions of URLs, so this will give people a pretty good way of hiding a signal without using a password.
The more important question is how you will make money from such a website. What will be your competitive advantage? First of all competitive advantage will come from network effect. The more people use it, the more people will be likely to use it. Your advantage will be your ownership of the database of locations and signals. You should be able to replace Google maps with maps from Bing. That will give you a leg up your suppliers. Your website focus should be as much as possible on non-verbal communication. This will allow you to create your distinctly unique identity that will drive your business advantage. The topic of money is closely related to the topic of competitive advantage. Unless you have a uniquely defined sustainable marketable identity, you will not be able to make much money from such a website. Once you have that, you can make money, for instance, by delivering thousands of Teddy Bears from Target to the homes of people. This would be a secret signal to them that a discount awaits them at a near by Target store. The problem with this approach is that everyone and their dogs build an Internet business model based on earning revenue from advertisements.
To tell you the truth, advertisement dollars are very hard to get and they disappear quickly if results in terms of increased sales are not produced. Subscriber dollars are also hard to get but generally subscribers dollars are easier to retain as long as subscribers are satisfied. Internet users hate registration. Therefore, adding registration on a such a website that deals with non-verbal, secret signals is likely to be counterproductive. Looks like we are reaching the limits of our imagination on how to monetize this idea. Yes, we are. Secret signals could be URL objects that will lead to some surprise downloads, etc. But it is doubtful that you will ever earn subscriber revenue from such a website. Dollars will have to flow in from businesses and for that you will have to further improve this concept from a marketing/sales point of view.
Inter-generational Digital Locker
I often hear that the pace of change has recently increased considerably and tons of tons of information is being created every minute. I doubt that the pace of change has increased more than the pace of change in the 19th century and regarding information-explosion most of it is likely to be noise. Every generation thinks they are different than all the previous ones and every generation thinks that the next one is lazier or less smart than they are. This has been going on for thousands of years this will continue as long as humans live on this earth. Getting back to the topic of pace of change, I think that knowledge continues to accumulate on each subject until it reaches a tipping point of innovation. At that point, an innovation occurs that goes through its product life cycle and drives the pace of innovation and temporary excitement until it reaches a plateau, followed by decline when eventually it is replaced by another innovation.
It is very likely this is what happened when fire, stone tools, wheel and metal were invented. Internet has not yet caused a change in history of the scale of Gutenberg's printing press. Of course, it is too early to evaluate Internet from a historical point of view. But we know that it was the technology provided by the invention of Gutenberg's press that accelerated Protestant Reformation as well as Industrial Revolution - two epochal changes in world history. Shortly after Martin Luther had posted his thesis on the door of the church, it was printed and distributed across Europe leading to a Protestant Reformation. Prior to this monks used to hand-scribe books and it was very hard for a common man to earn enough in his lifetime to own a book.
The way information is created, stored and disseminated has been changing over the course of human history:
1. Our early ancestors stored information as drawings on the walls of caves
2. Written language was developed and inscriptions were created on stone
3. Wood was used for inscriptions
4. It was easier to inscribe on wood bark than on wood
5. Use of paper or silk, which made it easier to write and create books
7. Invention of printing press to print books on a mass scale
8. Invention of media like record players for storing sound
9. Invention of media like photographic film for storing pictures
10. Use of electronic media that made it much easier to store and disseminate tons and tons of information at a very low cost
If we look at this progression of how information was created, stored and disseminated, we notice the following:
1. The relative cost of creating, disseminating and accessing information has continuously declined
2. The relative cost of storing, disseminating, accessing information has declined, though cost of storing, disseminating and accessing information has increased in absolute terms. For instance stone inscriptions did not need any protection from weather, paper needs to be protected. Similarly, electronic media needs suitable electronic devices and related technology to access the information. The more information you store, the higher is the cost of access.
The result is that information has progressively become more fragile. We will have no trouble reading several centuries old Latin inscriptions in Rome but if we have to read a 20-year old 5-1/4 floppy diskette, we will have trouble finding the hardware, drivers, hardware connection interface to computers and finally the application required to read the data on the floppy diskette.
Therefore, here is a million dollar idea. Build an electronic digital locker for storing digital information like music, family videos, family pictures and other family information and guarantee access to it for 100 years. Anyone who has been involved in disaster recovery and business continuity planning will immediately recognize that this is easier said than done. Storage and accessing formats of digital media change, operating systems change, technology is upgraded and in a very short period of time it becomes quite expensive to access old digital information. Therefore, execution of this concept will be expensive but doable.
The bigger challenge will be convincing people that you can do it. You will now have to take a leaf out of Patek Philipe's book. You are dealing with inter-generational stuff now. You will need to have a 100 year old brand name and perhaps develop a marketing partnership with a 100 year old business to convince people that you can do it. Possibly, you may want to partner with a Swiss bank, who have been in business for several hundred years. Most likely, your clientele will be premium clientele, who are worried about their legacy. Your digital locker will have to have an exclusive web access that will give your premium clients an unmistakable impression that they are now accessing a remarkable legacy of a remarkable private life. You will need to do an arrangement on your clients' will that when they pass away, you will provide their heirs access to their personal digital library along with their instructions. You will do the same for their heirs' heirs. This will be the only way to maintain the continuity of your inter-generational digital locker and your clients' private legacy.
It is very likely this is what happened when fire, stone tools, wheel and metal were invented. Internet has not yet caused a change in history of the scale of Gutenberg's printing press. Of course, it is too early to evaluate Internet from a historical point of view. But we know that it was the technology provided by the invention of Gutenberg's press that accelerated Protestant Reformation as well as Industrial Revolution - two epochal changes in world history. Shortly after Martin Luther had posted his thesis on the door of the church, it was printed and distributed across Europe leading to a Protestant Reformation. Prior to this monks used to hand-scribe books and it was very hard for a common man to earn enough in his lifetime to own a book.
The way information is created, stored and disseminated has been changing over the course of human history:
1. Our early ancestors stored information as drawings on the walls of caves
2. Written language was developed and inscriptions were created on stone
3. Wood was used for inscriptions
4. It was easier to inscribe on wood bark than on wood
5. Use of paper or silk, which made it easier to write and create books
7. Invention of printing press to print books on a mass scale
8. Invention of media like record players for storing sound
9. Invention of media like photographic film for storing pictures
10. Use of electronic media that made it much easier to store and disseminate tons and tons of information at a very low cost
If we look at this progression of how information was created, stored and disseminated, we notice the following:
1. The relative cost of creating, disseminating and accessing information has continuously declined
2. The relative cost of storing, disseminating, accessing information has declined, though cost of storing, disseminating and accessing information has increased in absolute terms. For instance stone inscriptions did not need any protection from weather, paper needs to be protected. Similarly, electronic media needs suitable electronic devices and related technology to access the information. The more information you store, the higher is the cost of access.
The result is that information has progressively become more fragile. We will have no trouble reading several centuries old Latin inscriptions in Rome but if we have to read a 20-year old 5-1/4 floppy diskette, we will have trouble finding the hardware, drivers, hardware connection interface to computers and finally the application required to read the data on the floppy diskette.
Therefore, here is a million dollar idea. Build an electronic digital locker for storing digital information like music, family videos, family pictures and other family information and guarantee access to it for 100 years. Anyone who has been involved in disaster recovery and business continuity planning will immediately recognize that this is easier said than done. Storage and accessing formats of digital media change, operating systems change, technology is upgraded and in a very short period of time it becomes quite expensive to access old digital information. Therefore, execution of this concept will be expensive but doable.
The bigger challenge will be convincing people that you can do it. You will now have to take a leaf out of Patek Philipe's book. You are dealing with inter-generational stuff now. You will need to have a 100 year old brand name and perhaps develop a marketing partnership with a 100 year old business to convince people that you can do it. Possibly, you may want to partner with a Swiss bank, who have been in business for several hundred years. Most likely, your clientele will be premium clientele, who are worried about their legacy. Your digital locker will have to have an exclusive web access that will give your premium clients an unmistakable impression that they are now accessing a remarkable legacy of a remarkable private life. You will need to do an arrangement on your clients' will that when they pass away, you will provide their heirs access to their personal digital library along with their instructions. You will do the same for their heirs' heirs. This will be the only way to maintain the continuity of your inter-generational digital locker and your clients' private legacy.
Two-way Talk-back Remote Control
I have discussed this topic in detail in my blog (Please refer to my Lazy Electronics blog.) on infrared remote controls. One of the problems with remote controls is that they do not get and they cannot receive an acknowledgment from the device that they control. For example, if I use a remote control to power-off my DVD player, the remote control will not maintain any information whether my DVD player is off or on. All it does is that it sends an IR signal to my DVD player to power-off in a fire-and-forget manner. What happens after that is none of the business of the remote control. Therefore, the IR signaling protocols used by remote controls are designed as highly unreliable.
These types of remote controls worked pretty well as long as all the electronic gadgets used to sit in our family room giving our family rooms the look of a shrine dedicated to giant TV, receiver, power amplifier, sub-woofer amplifier, 300-DVD jukebox, couple of DVD players, satellite receiver and electronic gaming devices. However, those days are over. People are beginning to move most of their electronic gadgets excluding the giant TV into hidden shelves, attics, basements and garages giving their family rooms a cleaner and less cluttered look.
The idea behind the current generation of remote controls was that the remote control as well as the electronic equipment were both in our visible range. Therefore, there was no need for the remote control to know, if the equipment was turned off or not. The remote control sent a signal in a visible line of sight and the equipment showed the status of whether it had received the signal and what it was doing on a nice little LCD or LED display. Thus completing the visible line-of-sight feedback loop of request, acknowledgment of receipt of request, compliance with the requested action, confirmation of completion of the requested action.
When our electronic equipment moved out-of-sight into another location, remote control manufacturers quickly resolved this problem by building UHF remote controls and bridging devices that translated UHF signal from the remote control into infrared signals for the electronic devices. They added discrete infrared codes instead of toggle codes, so that a "power-off" signal meant power-off no matter how many times you pressed that button. These discrete controls also helped in macro programming allowing you to control multiple devices by touching a single button. However, the device acknowledgment send and receive issue is still unresolved. You cannot look at the remote control and say, "Oh, I forgot to turn off the power amp last night."
Here is a million dollar idea for those who are interested in programming embedded microchips. You can enhance the remote control to receive the UHF signal broadcast by an electronic device. In addition, you can enhance the electronic devices so that the signal that is sent to the electronic display board on the device is UHF broadcast and received by the remote control on its own electronic display board.
Alternatively, two-way remote controls can be based on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi protocol. Wi-Fi already has the entire infrastructure of reliable communication with full request-acknowledgment-action-confirmation cycle. This could be done by hooking up a computer to control the electronic device through the serial port and displaying the status on a TV connected to the computer.
Some of the electronic device manufacturers have started sending the status text as a TV output signal that can be displayed on a TV. Therefore, when you reduce the volume of your hidden receiver using a remote, you can see the status on your TV, if you have made all the necessary connections. Generally, satellite and cable receivers are pretty good about displaying full status on TV, since they were originally designed to be placed in the garage, roof or attic. This is the reason satellite receivers were the first ones to introduce UHF remote controls.
However, the ideal approach is to have the device status available on the remote control. For a receiver, this includes power on/off, volume status, channel status, sound processors, speakers, et cetera. Looks like two-way talk-back remote controls are just a few years away.
These types of remote controls worked pretty well as long as all the electronic gadgets used to sit in our family room giving our family rooms the look of a shrine dedicated to giant TV, receiver, power amplifier, sub-woofer amplifier, 300-DVD jukebox, couple of DVD players, satellite receiver and electronic gaming devices. However, those days are over. People are beginning to move most of their electronic gadgets excluding the giant TV into hidden shelves, attics, basements and garages giving their family rooms a cleaner and less cluttered look.
The idea behind the current generation of remote controls was that the remote control as well as the electronic equipment were both in our visible range. Therefore, there was no need for the remote control to know, if the equipment was turned off or not. The remote control sent a signal in a visible line of sight and the equipment showed the status of whether it had received the signal and what it was doing on a nice little LCD or LED display. Thus completing the visible line-of-sight feedback loop of request, acknowledgment of receipt of request, compliance with the requested action, confirmation of completion of the requested action.
When our electronic equipment moved out-of-sight into another location, remote control manufacturers quickly resolved this problem by building UHF remote controls and bridging devices that translated UHF signal from the remote control into infrared signals for the electronic devices. They added discrete infrared codes instead of toggle codes, so that a "power-off" signal meant power-off no matter how many times you pressed that button. These discrete controls also helped in macro programming allowing you to control multiple devices by touching a single button. However, the device acknowledgment send and receive issue is still unresolved. You cannot look at the remote control and say, "Oh, I forgot to turn off the power amp last night."
Here is a million dollar idea for those who are interested in programming embedded microchips. You can enhance the remote control to receive the UHF signal broadcast by an electronic device. In addition, you can enhance the electronic devices so that the signal that is sent to the electronic display board on the device is UHF broadcast and received by the remote control on its own electronic display board.
Alternatively, two-way remote controls can be based on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi protocol. Wi-Fi already has the entire infrastructure of reliable communication with full request-acknowledgment-action-confirmation cycle. This could be done by hooking up a computer to control the electronic device through the serial port and displaying the status on a TV connected to the computer.
Some of the electronic device manufacturers have started sending the status text as a TV output signal that can be displayed on a TV. Therefore, when you reduce the volume of your hidden receiver using a remote, you can see the status on your TV, if you have made all the necessary connections. Generally, satellite and cable receivers are pretty good about displaying full status on TV, since they were originally designed to be placed in the garage, roof or attic. This is the reason satellite receivers were the first ones to introduce UHF remote controls.
However, the ideal approach is to have the device status available on the remote control. For a receiver, this includes power on/off, volume status, channel status, sound processors, speakers, et cetera. Looks like two-way talk-back remote controls are just a few years away.
Semantic Representation of Internet Knowledge
Why Internet search has emerged as such a powerful tool? One of the reasons is the haphazard growth of knowledge on the Internet. Domain name system of Internet is not intended to classify the knowledge created on Internet. For example, .Org domain is supposed to be used by non-profit entities, which has nothing to do with the content. Similarly, .Com domain is expected to be used for commercial businesses and so on. Internet domain system allows us to virtually mimic the hierarchical structure of organizations. Therefore, once you own MyCompany.Com domain, you can establish multiple sub-domains like Subsidiary1.MyCompany.Com, Subsidiary2.MyCompany.Com and sub-sub-domains. There are root domain servers that classify this naming scheme in a hierarchical tree like structure, which allows you to quickly map from a domain name to an IP address that computers can use to communicate with each other. Well, this was a quick introduction to Internet domain name system to clarify two things:
1. Internet domain naming system has a hierarchical tree like structure
2. Domains are classified into categories
3. Our search of IP addresses from domain names is through the domain name tree
Domain naming system does not have any relationship with the content. Therefore, All-About-Birds.Org content may be related to cooking. This creates tons of opportunities for search engines to index all this knowledge, represent this knowledge in a search-able format and let people search through the knowledge in an easy manner. Most of these searches are based on pattern matches but there is some element of semantic search. A semantic search is based on the meaning of the content. For example, a search of "black African sunflower" is about African sunflower not African people. Due to nascent linguistic capabilities, modern day search engines are able to differentiate such basic semantic differences. However, search engines are likely to be confused if your earlier search referred to a particular brand of jeans for instance.
Clearly, there has to be a better way to semantically organize all the Internet content. In fact, semantic web is considered to be the next big thing after the Internet. Several people are working on using XML for semantic representation of content.
So here is a million dollar idea for you. Build a utility program that website owners can allow people to use on their website. This utility program will go through the content of each page and semantically organize the information as best as it can using cues from the XML schemas as well as some natural language processing capabilities. It will give content owners or web page owners a chance to review the semantic organization of the content and make appropriate changes as needed. Once that is done, the utility program will send that semantically indexed data to a group of semantic root servers to allow people to do more intelligent searches than is currently possible. Semantic root servers will expand and grow as more knowledge is added to them.
Such a search engine will not need as much processing power as the current generation of search engines that crawl through the website content and index that content on their own servers with links to the originating website. Basically, each web server will be responsible for semantically organizing their content and linking that into the root knowledge server. The root knowledge server will be responsible for maintaining the root trees of knowledge in a way similar to the current domain servers. However, such knowledge trees will be evolutionary and organic instead of being static and hard coded like the current root servers of Internet domain name system.
This is not the perfect machine-readable semantic web that computers can process without human intervention. But this is mid-way between where we are now and a perfect semantic web concept.
1. Internet domain naming system has a hierarchical tree like structure
2. Domains are classified into categories
3. Our search of IP addresses from domain names is through the domain name tree
Domain naming system does not have any relationship with the content. Therefore, All-About-Birds.Org content may be related to cooking. This creates tons of opportunities for search engines to index all this knowledge, represent this knowledge in a search-able format and let people search through the knowledge in an easy manner. Most of these searches are based on pattern matches but there is some element of semantic search. A semantic search is based on the meaning of the content. For example, a search of "black African sunflower" is about African sunflower not African people. Due to nascent linguistic capabilities, modern day search engines are able to differentiate such basic semantic differences. However, search engines are likely to be confused if your earlier search referred to a particular brand of jeans for instance.
Clearly, there has to be a better way to semantically organize all the Internet content. In fact, semantic web is considered to be the next big thing after the Internet. Several people are working on using XML for semantic representation of content.
So here is a million dollar idea for you. Build a utility program that website owners can allow people to use on their website. This utility program will go through the content of each page and semantically organize the information as best as it can using cues from the XML schemas as well as some natural language processing capabilities. It will give content owners or web page owners a chance to review the semantic organization of the content and make appropriate changes as needed. Once that is done, the utility program will send that semantically indexed data to a group of semantic root servers to allow people to do more intelligent searches than is currently possible. Semantic root servers will expand and grow as more knowledge is added to them.
Such a search engine will not need as much processing power as the current generation of search engines that crawl through the website content and index that content on their own servers with links to the originating website. Basically, each web server will be responsible for semantically organizing their content and linking that into the root knowledge server. The root knowledge server will be responsible for maintaining the root trees of knowledge in a way similar to the current domain servers. However, such knowledge trees will be evolutionary and organic instead of being static and hard coded like the current root servers of Internet domain name system.
This is not the perfect machine-readable semantic web that computers can process without human intervention. But this is mid-way between where we are now and a perfect semantic web concept.
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