The Rose Is On The Bloom

This week, Bloom Energy unveiled its “Energy Server” fuel cell as a significant contribution to the green energy & energy independence movements. It’s perhaps the first bloom of spring, as well as a major blooming of alternative energy technology. Aside from the obvious play on words with the company’s name, just how much of a “bloom” will this development prove to be?

While it is too early to tell for sure, my guess is that Bloom Energy’s electricity generators will mature into either a valuable component of energy production and management or perhaps a game-changing invention that will transform our relationship with energy.

The Bloom Energy Server started out as a NASA research project to make air and fuel from electricity for future expeditions to Mars. When that project ended, Dr. KR Sridhar and his team noted that the technology could also be run in reverse to produce electricity from air and fuel. It took them 5 years to create their first working prototype and another couple of years to scale it up to commercial power levels of 100 KW. The Energy Server can now be considered a production product with installations at Google, Ebay and other major corporations.

So, how does this device work and what makes it better than other green energy solutions? The Bloom Energy Server is what is called a high temperature fuel cell. A fuel cell converts hydrocarbon fuel plus oxygen into water and electricity. We first started hearing about this technology during the Apollo Moon program when NASA put fuel cells on-board their spacecraft to generate electricity. What’s different about the Bloom invention is that it uses a ceramic plate as a dielectric with proprietary ink coatings on each side to create the chemical reactions. Each plate, which you can hold in your hand, generates about 1 KW of electricity. Stack them together in modules and you can scale that up to 10 KW to power a home or 100 KW to power a small business.



What fuels this fuel cell? In this case, natural gas right out of the utility pipe. It can also run on landfill methane or other bio-gases that happen to be available. The oxygen source is plain old air. The fuel cell generates heat and steam during operation, which are needed to sustain the reaction. There is also a relatively small amount of CO2 released as a byproduct, but less than you’d get by burning the gas. In fact, this process is less polluting and more energy efficient than running a gas turbine to turn a generator.

I guess you might think of this as a solid state gas turbine generator, minus the noise and exhaust. That makes it a good candidate to replace engine-based backup generators for residences and businesses. Right now the price is too high for home use. But it has something like a 3 year payback for business use as an alternative energy source, not just for backup power. That’s impressive, when you remember that this product is just rolling out in limited production. As it follows the learning curve for any new technology, prices will come down as quantities go up. There will also be many more models of Bloom Energy Servers available, with both higher and lower power levels available.

If this was nothing more than just another way to turn natural gas into electricity, it would still be an important development. But being a clean, quiet device that can be installed right next to a building with about the same look and footprint as a large electrical transformer, it offers an opportunity to distribute power production farther and wider than ever before. If the price comes down to a one year payoff or better, there will be mad scramble by every medium and large business to install these systems on their property.

We thought that was going to happen with solar panels, but the cost and variable nature of solar power has stunted the adoption of solar. Google, one of the Bloom Energy Server users, has previously deployed massive arrays of solar panels. But these installations are still rare enough to be notable in the U.S. Wind energy has enjoyed more popularity, but wind also suffers from variable output levels depending on how the breezes blow.

Nay sayers to the green energy movement point at these limitations to pooh-pooh the whole idea of abandoning traditional hydrocarbon fuels. But this is too limited a view. The right solution is not going to be a single killer-app like fusion. It’s far more likely to be a systems approach using all sorts of technologies managed by a smart grid that takes energy from where it is available and delivers it to where it is needed. For instance, solar is well suited to provide peak air conditioning needs. After all, when do you run an air conditioner the hardest? It’s when the sun in beating down mid-day in summer. That’s exactly when solar panels produce their highest power outputs.

There is talk that a really smart grid could even tap into millions of electric cars sitting in their garages to provide power smoothing for the grid by quickly supplying or absorbing small amounts of electricity each. The Bloom Energy Server might also serve this function on a commercial scale. Imagine if each company had a Bloom unit outside and an array of solar panels on the room. Our poor teetering energy grid would have a much easier job and there might be enough excess capacity to start shutting down obsolete coal fired generators.

Of course, there is still a need for baseload power, which is beyond the capability of any alternative sources right now. That argues for additional nuclear plants to curb carbon dioxide emissions. Bloom Energy Servers, in mass quantities, might also provide baseload power. However, there’s a real question of how much natural gas reserves we’ll have if we start using gas to replace coal on a major scale. There’s also some level of CO2 release inherent with any fossil fuel to electricity conversion.

What we really don’t know yet is how well we can do if we go after energy independence and green energy in a big way. We can’t say that we’ve really tried until you look around and see solar panels on every roof and windmills in every field and hear your neighbors bragging about how much money they make selling electricity to the grid. Hey, we got to the moon in less than 10 years with fuel cells. How fast can we solve our energy issues with wind, solar and fuel cells if we really put our hearts into it?

Prepaid Cell Phones Are Cheap

Do you feel yourself getting faint when it comes time to sign-up for a 2 year cell phone contract. Sure, they’ll give you a free phone or offer a big discount on the latest technology smartphone. But then comes the heartburn of facing up to a service plan that can run into thousands of dollars before you can escape. You don’t want that. Maybe you’re even getting by without a cellphone just to dodge that financial commitment. Well, here’s another option -- pay only for what you need when you need it.

Now you can have a cell phone and know exactly how much you’ll pay, without ever getting one of those killer overage bills. With Net10, it’s a real simple calculation. You pay 10 cents a minute for local, long distance, or roaming. It’s not a fixed amount of minutes every month that you use or lose. You talk 10 minutes, you pay a buck. That’s it. You can yap to your heart’s content or hold it down to just the necessary calls. You’ve got complete control of your cell phone bill with Net10.

You can’t get dinged with overage fees on the Net10 plan, because they don’t allow it. With Net10, you buy your minutes up-front. Then you use them down until you need more. Sure, you can run out of minutes during a busy month. But the solution is easy. Just buy some more. You can buy them online, at all sorts of retail stores, and by calling a special toll free number. You’ll always know where you stand, because the special Net10 cell phones display your exact airtime balance and remind you when you need to add minutes.

Now isn’t that better than forking over $30, $60, or even $100 a month just to make sure you have enough minutes? Most months you’re probably paying for service that you don’t use. That’s the way traditional cellular plans are structured. With pay-as-you-go cellular service, the minutes you don’t use automatically carry over to the next month. All you need to do is to keep the service active. That means you do have to add minutes from time to time, but you get the use of all those minutes. You have the option to buy these airtime minutes in packages that are good for anywhere from 30 days to 2 years of service. If you want, you can set up a monthly plan to automatically add time to your account and keep it active. But you won’t ever have to sign a contract or make a commitment for how long you are going to keep using your phone.

That’s another advantage of Net10 service. If you will only be in the U.S. for a limited time, going to school or for a job, you can buy airtime while you are here and just not renew when you go back to your home country. Your service will expire without any additional charges. You’ll never get a bill for ongoing service or a disconnection fee. Remember, it’s pay as you go.

Sounds good for making phone calls, but what about texting? Text messages are 5 cents each. Your voice calls are 10 cents a minute. Simple, right?

OK, but what about these special phones? They aren’t old lame models, are they? No way. Net 10 has a variety of up to date cell phones to meet your needs. They range form the Motorola W375G flip phone with digital camera to the Samsung T401G with a slide out QWERTY keyboard for texting, to all sorts of models by Motorola, LG, Nokia, Kyhocera, and samsung that includes such handy features as speakerphones, downloadable ringtones and graphics, and Bluetooth wireless capability.

No, you won’t find any 3G wireless smartphones in this collection. Net10 is basic cellular service for the 90% of people who simply want to talk and text without paying a fortune or getting stuck in an unbreakable contract. There are no credit checks on this service, so you won’t be humiliated by some bureaucrat denying you service because they don’t like your credit score. You don’t need that abuse, so why put up with it? Get the cellular service YOU control by ordering Net10 wireless service and low cost cell phones.

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Olympic Curling’s Got Its Eye On The Hog

One sport we’ve really enjoyed watching at the Vancouver Winter Olympics is curling. I think it’s the intense strategy that makes these games so interesting, especially when you’re relaxing in the wee hours of the night and enjoy something less frenzied than many of the events. Being a technical guy, I couldn’t help but notice the green lights that would illuminate on the stones when they were released. An electronic rock? What’s that all about?

Actually, the electronics is located in the handle, not the rock. It’s there to serve a special purpose, which is to detect an improper delivery. Specifically, a player must release the stone before it reaches a black foul line called the “hog line.” Otherwise players might just go sliding down the ice holding onto the stone to give themselves an advantage in shot accuracy.

This automated hog-line-violation-detection system is called Eye on the Hog. It is manufactured by Startco Engineering Ltd. of Saskatoon, SK, Canada. Interestingly, the device started out as a fourth-year design project for a group of electrical engineering students at the University of Saskatchewan. The students and their professor came up with a system that installed a permanent magnet in the bottom of the rock and embedded a magnetic field sensor in the ice that was connected to a display. Startco refined the design to bury the magnet in the ice and keep all the electronics on-board the rock handle. The university and students receive royalties for their work on the design concepts.

Here’s how the production system works. The largely plastic handle is attached to the granite curling stone through a hole that runs vertically through the center of the stone. Within the handle is the electronic components, magnetic sensor, batteries, LED indicators, tilt sensor, and touch sensitive grip. The electronics is activated when the rock is tilted to clean its running surface before each throw. The LEDs flash to indicate the system is working. When the player grips the touch sensitive handle to deliver the rock, the LEDs go out so they won’t be distracting. The crucial operation comes when the stone reaches the hog line. When the rock is released prior to it reaching the hog line, the green LEDs flash until the center line of the rock crosses the hog line. Then they illuminate for 5 seconds to indicate a valid delivery.

This is what you see if the TV camera is focused closely on the curling stone during release. I didn’t see any invalid deliveries in all the games I watched. If one did occur, the red LEDs on the handle would have flashed for 25 seconds to indicate a violation. How does it know to do that? If the grip detects it is being touched while the magnetic sensor detects a magnetic strip embedded in the ice exactly one stone radius before the hog line, then it knows that the stone has not been released before the front edge of it has reached the line. If the grip is touched after the stone crosses the hog line, it also activates the red violation LEDs. You can’t fool this system with fancy hand work.

How accurate is the Eye on the Hog? It’s specified at 3 mm or 0.12 inches at 10 ft/sec. That’s far more accurate than the best human eyes that it replaces for judging hog line violations.

Startco has a nice animation of the Eye on the Hog in action on their Web site. Check out the Technical Info page. If you find this wireless technology as fascinating as I did, you may also enjoy reading the manual and seeing how they set up the magnet locating jig to get that extreme accuracy on the ice. Who knows, you might even find yourself becoming captivated with the intriguing sport of curling.

Don’t know about Aardvark? You should.

Q. Why did Google buy Aardvark for a reported $50 million? A. Because the highly addictive social network is a nearly perfect multi-platform, interactive ecosystem. As such, it sets the standard – for the moment, at least – for interactive publishing. If you want to understand the evolution of the media, you need to see it and use it. Then, try to figure out how it applies to your business.

Diverse Connections For Data Centers

When you are running a data center or collocating your servers in a colo data center, the reliability of the data connection is critical to the availability of your services. Any one single piece of equipment and any one data line can fail. To ensure that no link failure will take you down, you need more than just several separate network connections. You need multiple diverse data connections.

The difference between multiple connections and multiple diverse connections is in where those connections go to. If you simply have 3 Fast Ethernet or OC3 links to a single service provider, you’ve only gained a small amount of protection. Especially within the colo facility, it’s relatively unlikely that only the network cable for a particular feed or the interface circuits on both ends will fail. It’s more likely that something more catastrophic will take down the entire connection with that provider.

If you are in your own facility, you’ve got the same concern only multiplied. A service provider within a colocation facility probably has multiple incoming connections. The line that comes to your building is likely a single connection that runs for miles underground or overhead. There’s lots of opportunity for a natural disaster or someone doing construction to break that line or multi-pair bundle.

So how do you protect your interests for services that absolutely can’t afford to go down even for a few hours? In addition to the usual server redundancies, you need to get multiple data line services from different providers coming in on different routes. It does you no good to contract with three separate vendors only to find that they are all bundled in the same copper or fiber optic cable. In fact, you don’t even want them sharing the same trench or poles, if at all possible. The ideal situation is to be fed by unrelated suppliers coming from different geographical directions. The only place they’ll be in proximity is within your facility.

This requirement is common for large colocation data centers that host hundreds or thousands of companies. Within the colo center, you can typically order service from several carriers who will individually provide lines to your racks. For your own facilities, you’ll need to do your homework to ensure that your are, indeed, getting diverse data connections.

Sounds like a lot of work to find and evaluate multiple providers who will serve your business location, doesn’t it? Fortunately, there’s help available from a telecommunications service broker who routinely works with dozens of service providers offering everything from point of sale wireless data connections, through the popular T1 lines and DS3 connections, on up to OC3 and above SONET fiber optic services and Ethernet at the GigE and 10GigE levels. You can save yourself a lot of grief and a lot of time by letting the broker work with the available carriers to meet your requirements. What’s that extra service going to cost you? Nothing. Nothing, at all.

Seems to only make sense to get some complementary expert consulting help with your critical infrastructure projects. Call the toll free number or put in an online inquiry now and you’ll be getting the support you need almost immediately.

Telecom Cost Savings Strategies

Every company is scouring the books for potential cost savings these days. How about your telecom expenses. Do you think there is any potential for savings there? I’ll bet there is.

First thing you need to do is collect those monthly bills and take a close look. For starters, just pick last month’s bill. What are all those line items that you are paying for? You need to know what each item is and why you have it.

In a larger organization, you can easily drown in the detail of every long distance phone call. I’d suggest just a quick scan to see if what sticks out like a sore thumb. Are a few users running up bills that are ten times everybody else’s? Do they have jobs where you’d expect that?

Especially be on the outlook for services that were ordered a long time ago but aren’t being used anymore. Do you have a special FAX line with no FAX machine attached? Are there a dozen phone lines coming into a building that has only a hand full of employees? How about dedicated point to point lines that link to locations you don’t even own or lease anymore? Cell phones that are sitting in drawers unused but still activated? All of these things are candidates to cancel immediately.

Highlight the rest of your telecom line services and how much you are paying for them. Generally data lines have a fixed cost per month. Telephone lines have both a fixed cost and a per minute cost. You want to know the bandwidth and cost of each data line and the per minute rate and number of minutes for each voice line. Why? So you can comparison shop, of course.

Oh, but isn’t that a painful and horribly time consuming process? Not anymore. Not since there’s a telecom brokerage service available that offers an array of competitive voice and data line and networking services. There may be several options available for each of your needs.

Best of all, there’s a free consulting service that can help you narrow the options and compare costs directly with what you have now on a line for line basis. That information you gathered to get a handle on your current telecom expenses is all you need to get started. Call the toll free number or submit an online inquiry to get the process started. You may be shocked by how much you are spending now that can be cost reduced in short order.

‘Tip jar’ vanishes at Miami Herald website

In an utterly unsurprising development, the tip jar quietly has disappeared from the Miami Herald website. Guffaws and groans greeted the paper’s decision in mid-December to add a heartfelt plea for voluntary donations from readers to the bottom of each of its web pages. But the plea and the link to an accompanying payment page were nowhere in evidence on the website over the weekend.

Magic Mouse Is Here To Save The Day

I love my Apple iMac. It’s a beautiful piece of equipment that’s a pleasure to use. All except for that infernal rodent, the Mighty Mouse. Mighty? Mighty frustrating is what I say. It’s all the fault of that dirty little pea on top. You can hardly use the thing a for a few hours without it starting to feel crunchy, and refusing to scroll until you rub it back and forth on some paper or your hand. Then you’re only good for some hours until you have to do it again. Can’t even open the case up and pull out whatever crumbs or hairball this thing swallowed. You can shake it or clean it with a wet cloth as Apple recommends, but that is also a short term fix. Arrgh! Won’t somebody come to save me from this beast?

Look! There in the mail! it’s a box. It’s a box from Apple. It’s a box from Apple for me!

What was planned as a Valentine gift from my wonderful wife showed up a few days late due to "Snowmageddon". Even so, it’s a gift wrapped box from Apple. A gift wrapped box from Godiva might be just as mouth watering, but gifts with the Apple logo tend to last a lot longer.

So, what was in that intriguing package? It’s something called a Magic Mouse. It’s sleek and low and perfectly smooth on top. With a little imagination, you might mistake it for a model of the latest in stealth aircraft or alien spacecraft. The perfectly smooth shiny upper surface is where the magic takes place. You don’t see any buttons or trackballs, but they’re virtually in there. You just need to place your fingers gently on the device and gesture to make your wishes known.

For instance, if you want to click you just press down on the front left. For right click, press down on the front right. To scroll down the page, just stroke two fingers like you’d pet a real mouse. To go back a page, swipe two fingers left. Go forward by swiping two fingers to the right. Gently push the mouse in the direction you want the arrow on the screen to move and it will do just that.

Say, those sound like regular mouse features except for all that swiping. That’s exactly right. This is a wireless Bluetooth laser tracking mouse at heart. The magical addition is the touch sensitive top surface that takes the place of mechanical wheels and trackballs. There’s nothing mechanical to gum up, so there’s no need to ever shake, rub or vigorously work any parts on this mouse.

Ding-dong the wicked pea is gone! Not where the goblins go, mind you. Just back into the back it arrived in, sans batteries. I’ll consider it a backup on the off chance something goes haywire with its new higher tech replacement.

If you are on the verge of high blood pressure, foul language, or hair-pulling frustration with a mighty ornery mouse on your Mac, I can tell you that the Magic Mouse has sure made mousing a pleasure for me again. I was comfortable using it almost immediately -- it’s that intuitive. You may have to adjust some of the software settings to your liking, like the right click function and mouse speed, and there’s no double button function to bring up the dashboard the way the old Mighty Mouse did. But I can say that even after a few days use, there’s no way that any of those old mechanical rodents are getting out of their cages again.

Is Twitter Really 75 Years Old?

Would you be surprised to know learn that Twitter is older than you, your parents and maybe your grandparents?

Well, not Twitter itself but the germ of the idea. BoingBoing published a report of a robot messenger called the Notificator that served a similar need in London in 1935. It was a type of vending machine installed in public places that let people leave notes for their friends. You walked up to this device, wrote your message on the next blank space of a continuous strip of paper, and then dropped a coin into the slot. With that, your message moved up one place on the list leaving a new blank area for the next message. After at least two hours, your message would roll off the top of the list so it couldn’t be seen anymore. But that assumes that by then your friends would have checked the messages and seen what you left for them.

Seems like a good implementation of the technology of the times to create a social networking system where people could follow their friends and leave messages that would be viewed by all users. Sounds a bit like “tweeting,” doesn’t it? How the Notificator would have evolved, we’ll never know. World War II moved the focus of inventing and manufacturing to military needs. From that conflict, the British gave us both radar and the jet aircraft.

We think we know the narrow class of genius geeks who are uniquely qualified to make major advances in technology today. But a lot of that is just stereotypes and popular culture. Would you believe that the basis of Bluetooth technology was patented by a gorgeous movie star of the 1930’s?

Yes, you can thank Hedy Lamarr for Bluetooth. Of course, there were no cell phone headsets or wireless computer mice in 1940. But WWII was already raging in Europe would soon engulf the United States. Hedy Lamarr, popular actress and former wife of an Austrian arms manufacturer, had an idea for an undetectable radio control scheme for torpedoes. She discussed it with her music composer neighbor and they created a scheme using player piano rolls to constantly shift the radio control frequency to keep it stealthy. The key was in synchronizing identical piano rolls at each end, so the transmitting and receiving frequencies would be coordinated only for that particular transmitter and receiver.

Today we know that technology as FHSS or Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum transmission. It traces its lineage to patent number 2,292,387, “Secret Communication System,” awarded to George Antheil and Hedy Kiesler Markey. Markey is the remarried name of Hedy Lamarr.

So, is everything old new again? Could be that those steampunks are sensing some hidden truth when they build modern computers and related technology that have the appearance of something Jules Verne would have cooked up. By the way, Verne had the basics of the moon landing worked out in 1865 and we still haven’t mastered time travel.

Covad Offers A Nationwide MPLS VPN Network For Business

Businesses with many office locations nationwide are getting a new secure networking option. Covad has just completed its Intelligent Network Platform designed to expand WAN networking capabilities at lower costs than you may be used to paying.

Covad has designed its MPLS VPNs for the small to medium size businesses and larger distributed enterprises that need to solve the problem of how to interconnect multiple business locations. That may be franchises, field offices, warehouses, retail locations, factories, hotels and other buildings. There are two problems to be addressed with any multi-location networking scheme. First is how you reliably and securely link all of the sites together. Second is how you do that cost effectively.

MPLS is becoming the new standard in private line communications. Previous solutions have included Frame Relay networks and T1 point to point telecom lines. MPLS stands for Multi-Protocol Label Switching, which hints at its power. This is a system that will transport whatever protocol you require, be that switched circuit telephone calls, enormous data downloads, or broadcast video. It’s a network cloud in the sense that it has the capability to connect any location to any other location. You simply specify what that connectivity is going to be and the network operator takes care of enabling those connections.

Covad describes its MPLS network as a VPN or Virtual Private Network. Being a privately run network, it is inherently more secure than a public utility such as the Internet. You can’t get data on or off the network unless you are a Covad customer. MPLS is not the same technology as the Internet. Special label switching routers are needed at every ingress and egress point to attach and remove the labels that are used to get data packets where they are intended.

Another advantage of MPLS networks is that they offer a means to prioritize packets to establish CoS Class of Service and QoS Quality of Service for traffic management. You know that if you send voice or video down the Internet, you are taking your chances on the quality of the real time transmissions. That’s because every packet is treated like every other packet and it’s just your bad luck if some node become congested and disrupts your data flow. As a managed network, MPLS networks can ensure that each packet gets the bandwidth and minimized latency that ensures high quality voice and video transport.

Do you need to network multiple locations with ensured quality at reasonable costs? If so, you need to investigate your options with Covad and other MPLS VPN Networks for Business.

Freelance unions to the rescue, sort of

Two unions are offering succor to self-employed journalists in a brutal environment that has vaporized thousands of jobs and driven freelance rates to zero – or something awfully close to it. One union is fairly well established and the other is just getting on its feet. But neither appears likely to ever help solve the principal problem that unions were organized to address: Raising wages.

Year of the Tiger Poken

Did you know that February 14 was a momentous day? Yes, of course, it was Valentine’s Day. But it was also the start of the Chinese New Year. The Chinese name the years using a Zodiac cycle of 12 animal signs that include the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. The year that is just beginning, 2010, is known as the "Year of the Tiger".

The year 2010 is also expected to become known as the “Year of the Poken.” We introduced you to the Poken social networking gadget toward the end of last year, when they began to come to America in large numbers from their native Switzerland. Poken has been making a splash at celebrity events such as this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Pretty soon you’ll be seeing them with influential people everywhere you go. If you don’t have a Poken, you’ll be left out of the fun.

Fear not. It’s really easy to get your own Poken and you don’t have to be a celebrity to afford one... or an entire collection. They’re less than $20 each. For that, you get your choice of PokenSPARK characters, a secure online portal where you can create your own virtual business cards and review your contacts, and your entree into the worldwide Poken community. Considering the importance of tigers this year, the Poken Tiger might just be your lucky Poken.

Were you born in the Year of the Tiger? If so, you are smart, instinctive, generally well liked, with lots of charisma and a strong desire to climb the ladder of success. Of course, you were born in one of these tiger years: 1902, 1914, 1926, 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, or 2010. Even if you weren’t born in the Year of the Tiger, a tiger talisman can still be your lucky charm... especially if it is a Poken Tiger.

Another way you can honor the tiger this year is to support efforts that protect the mere 3,500 tigers still in the wild. Yes, their numbers have dwindled from more than 100,000 just a century ago to near extinction today. Only 50 of the South China or Amoy tiger remain. There still is time to save the world’s last tigers before we lose them completely. Learn more about Tigers Under Threat and consider donating help save this magnificent species.

A preposterous argument for plagiarism

The ease with which content can be remixed these days not only has eliminated every technological barrier to plagiarism but also enabled some jaw-dropping justifications for this utterly indefensible practice. A preposterous example of the pro-plagiarism argument is the case of a 16-year-old German writer, whose novel won wide acclaim before it was learned that she had copied whole pages

RingCentral Makes Your Office Mobile

You know what an office is, right? It’s got a desk, a chair, carpet, maybe walls and maybe dividers, all bathed in glorious fluorescent light. Well, not anymore. With RingCentral, your office is in your pocket. You don’t sit in it, you take it with you.

RingCentral Mobile is a low cost telecommunications service that lets you take your business anywhere. That’s important when you could miss an important call just because you’re out of the “office.” You won’t now, because you and the office are always together.

This service is just the thing for anyone who isn’t literally chained to their desk. That’s just about anyone in sales, technical consulting, or running a home based business. Mobile phones have given us the ability to cut the telephone cord. Smartphones added the capability to cut the broadband cord. RingCentral Mobile takes advantage of this freedom to enable your cell phone to be your office phone.

How does it do that? It’s starts with a special local phone number or toll free number that goes directly into the system. The “system” is RingCentral’s virtual PBX business telephone system. It’s all hosted and maintained by RingCentral, so you don’t have to buy any equipment or worry about maintenance procedures. What you get is the power of an office phone system without the headaches of owning one and without the limitations of being tethered to a landline based phone system.

Since this is a complete business phone system, only virtual, it is designed to accommodate business with only a single employee or as many employees as you want. They are all interconnected by this virtual PBX system. That means there is no need to round everybody up and make sure they sit cheek to jowl in the same room all day. The employees using this virtual office can all be on the go anywhere in the US or Canada. That’s one BIG office space, isn’t it?

The RingCentral virtual PBX can have a toll free or local main company number. An automated attendant, also known as an auto-receptionist, will take care of directing incoming calls that aren’t directly dialed to a particular employee. Of course, if you can’t take the call immediately it will go to your personal voicemail. You can set up answering rules so that callers will be directed to voicemail, extensions and alternate phone numbers based on the data and time or Caller ID as well as which number they are calling. If you need to put them on hold, play some pleasant music or an informative recording so they won’t be drumming their fingers as they wait.

Each RingCentral number can be used for both phone calls and fax messages. Unlike some services, you can send and receive faxes using nothing but your computer or cell phone.

Why continue to limit your business activities to the confines of a bricks and mortar office, when you could be free to visit clients or work from wherever makes sense at the moment. With RingCentral Mobile, no one needs to be the wiser unless you elect to tell them. But why do that and risk them getting jealous of your personal freedom? We’ll keep it our little secret.

Price Your Telecom Lines Before You Move

If you are in the process of relocating your business or starting up a new venture, you’ll be in the market for new telecommunications services. That could be telephone, data, video streaming or some combination of these. You’re probably aware that the lease price for professional telecom services is not a standard price, but varies with your business location. So it stands to reason that you should pick your business location to minimize telecom expenses.

What? Nobody chooses their business address based on what bandwidth services cost... do they?

Well, if they don’t they should. Of course, other considerations such as the amount of drive by and foot traffic are probably more important to a retail location than how much the Internet connection costs. But even the price of a simple T1 line can more than double if you decide to locate in some picturesque locale that has no infrastructure.

If we’re only talking few hundred dollars a month, line lease costs will probably take a back seat to other factors. But, still, if you have a couple of suitable locations in mind and are looking for some tie-breaker to help you choose, why not price out your telecom services and see if the difference is significant?

Where you really get into the big bucks is when you are going to lease major amounts of bandwidth. Perhaps you are building a new data center or developing content for motion picture companies. You can easily be looking as DS3 (45 Mbps), OC3 (155 Mbps), or even Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbps). These are pricey bandwidth services that may cost as much as your monthly rent... or more. It’s definitely worth the trouble of comparing costs for each address you are considering.

Even more importantly, you may find that many out-of-the-way locations are really bandwidth limited. You can likely get T1 service (1.5 Mbps) at any business location. You may even be able to bond T1 lines to double or triple that. But if you are looking for 10, 45, 100 or more Mbps, where you are located may well determine if you can even get service.

The higher bandwidths require fiber optic connections, which are common in major metropolitan areas and less available as you leave the suburbs. Even in the city, you want to be in or near a building that is already lit for fiber. If not, you may have to budget some serious construction costs to have the fiber cable trenched into your location. Downtown, you may be lucky enough to get EoC or Ethernet over Copper if you are near a carrier office. That can get you up to 45 Mbps without fiber construction costs.

Do you have a need for high bandwidth voice, data or video telecom services? Let our Telarus expert consultants run some numbers on the locations you have in mind so you can compare costs and factor that into your decision. It a complementary service for serious business users.

Maybe others should copy early LAT deadlines

Newspaper traditionalists recoiled when the Los Angeles Times announced a few weeks back that it would move its front-page deadline to the shockingly early hour of 5:25 p.m. from the prior 11:25 p.m. Although I shuddered along with those who worried about the paper’s ability to cover late-breaking news, the initial results have persuaded me that most newspapers would benefit from the

The Fiber Gold Rush Is On

We’ve known for some time that ultimately we’d need to move from copper wires to fiber optic strands to get the bandwidth we’ll need as technology advances. Internet service providers, Cable TV companies, medical centers, telephone switching offices and major corporations have gradually embraced this move over the last couple of decades. New services, such as Metro Ethernet, have made fiber optic connections affordable for even mid-size companies. Small businesses and consumers are now getting their turn.

Indeed, there has been one company that saw the light, so to speak, on fiber to the home and made the commitment to build out the infrastructure. That’s Verizon. Their FiOS passive optical fiber service has been moving into one community after another as a replacement for DSL, Satellite, and Cable. You can get bundles of phone, Internet and TV. Or, you can just get really fast Internet service at up to 50 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload.

Did I say really fast internet service? Most people are getting somewhere between 3 and 10 Mbps broadband via DSL, Cable or wireless. But DOCSIS 3.0 is being rolled out on Comcast and other cable systems with 50 Mbps service offerings to rival fiber. The next tier will be 100 Mbps for those who can and will pay for it. DSL over copper telephone wire is going to struggle as the bandwidth wars speed past 100 Mbps. But there’s a new service on the horizon that will blow right past all of these broadband choices. It’s a 1 Gbps fiber optic service about to be launched as a pilot program by none other than Google.

Yes, some lucky consumers in the test markets are going to get their hands on the kind of bandwidth that makes IT managers green with envy. A Gigabit per second. That’s 1000 Mbps. There’s nothing over coaxial or twisted pair copper and certainly nothing wireless that can even come close to delivering that kind of consumer bandwidth. Even Verizon may have to change out a lot of terminal equipment to pump a Gbps into home networks.

Google swears that they are not planning to become a nationwide ISP. Their intention is to create an environment that can showcase the next developments in technology. What sort of cloud computing, virtual reality, telepresence, or HD 3D video applications need that kind of bandwidth? They’re yet to appear. But this does get past the chicken and egg conundrum, where application development stagnates because of bandwidth limitations and only cutting edge aficionados pony up for the top tiers in broadband service. Google plans to make their service cheap and plentiful so that even the common user can have a crack at this massive bandwidth connectivity.

ISP or not, it’s almost a sure bet that Google will prime the pump with some of their own cutting edge experimental apps. There’s probably all sorts of cool things brewing in the lab that just aren’t practical to launch on today’s broadband networks. Once the bottle’s open and the genies start flying out, you can bet that the development communities will fall all over themselves to get their own offerings out for evaluation.

This pitiful era of a bandwidth starved United States is about to end. That’s exceptionally good news for anyone living out in the boonies who’s stuck with dial-up, or paying a goodly price for satellite broadband and swearing at the latency. Google is, perhaps, the last straw in forcing universal fiber optic connections to the premises. Right now, smart telephone and cable companies are grabbing federal stimulus financing to trench fiber everywhere it isn’t already. It’s more than just serving the populations in low density areas who need and deserve better broadband. Another driving factor is the burgeoning wireless bandwidth demand to support smartphones, such as the iPhone and Droid. The cellular sites are bandwidth limited by the copper lines they have for backhaul. They are going to need fiber to support LTE and speed-ups in WiMAX.

How will wireless fare in the long run? It’s hard to tell how fast will be fast enough for wireless broadband. We’re not there yet. Right now, the relatively small size of cellphone screens takes some pressure off the need for massive bandwidth, even for HD video. But what about that iPad? It’s surely just the first in a whole class of tablet size products with bigger screens and more processing power. That’s going to lead to higher bandwidth demands to support content to feed the tablets. The FCC is already eyeing underutilized TV channels and other portions of the spectrum to press into service for wireless broadband. There will likely be some technology advances needed in the wireless arena to satisfy the ultimate need. After all, you can put more fiber bandwidth in the ground that there are Gbps in the entire regulated electromagnetic spectrum.

Maxed Out On Bandwidth?

Are you close to maxing out your WAN bandwidth? Has it gotten so bad that you occasionally experience network congestion at the worst time of all... during peak business hours? Well, don’t panic. Here are some ideas that can improve that situation.

First of all, are you using your network in the most efficient manner? In other words, do you just let every device launch its packets and hope for the best, or do you manage quality of service. If the problem is VoIP telephone conversations breaking up but everything else seems fine, then giving voice packets the priority they need will probably improve that situation without bringing every other process to its knees.

Similarly, if you’re trying to do backups over the network to a remote site during working hours you could be hurting employee productivity. Make the backup process low priority or try to run those processes overnight when they’ll have the network all to themselves.

Oh, you’ve done all that? You’ve fine tuned both the LAN and WAN as much as you can and you’re still running out of bandwidth. OK. That’s going to happen to everyone sooner or later. There are a couple of ways to go next.

One technical solution is to accelerate your WAN, usually the weak link in the system, with a hardware appliance. Riverbed is an acknowledged leader in this technology. Basically, you add a piece of equipment to each end of the line that manages the packets. One thing it does is look for repeating patterns and only sends the changes, not the entire data stream. It also makes cached copies of data frequently accessed, so you aren’t constantly uploading or downloading the same information over a limited bandwidth line.

WAN acceleration is particularly valuable when bandwidth is very expensive and hard to come by. But the acceleration hardware isn’t cheap either. So, before you shell out for any solution, it makes sense to compare all your options. Don’t just assume that you’ll pay through the nose for a bandwidth upgrade. Many, if not most, companies are probably paying more for both voice and data bandwidth than they would have to. How can that be? Bandwidth solutions have become more competitive than ever over the last few years. If your contract ran out years ago but you’ve just kept paying by the month for the same line service, you can almost certainly see a cost savings by checking the latest WAN bandwidth options for your business location.

You may have installed a T1 line at a time when that seemed like all the bandwidth you’d ever need. Now you’re maxing out the line. But, do you know that you can get additional T1 lines added to your service so that they act as one larger conduit? There are also newer options, such as Ethernet over DS1 and Ethernet over Copper, that give you lots of bandwidth at very reasonable prices. In some areas, wireless solutions are the best option. In others, fiber optic offers all the bandwidth you could want but lets you pay for only the amount you need currently.

What you need right now is a plan. You can start laying out ideas on paper yourself, but why not get some free consulting help at least to bounce ideas off? A Shop For T1 consultant is waiting to talk to you now. Call the toll free number or enter an online quote request now at T1 Rex to get the ball rolling.

How one enterprising journalist hit it big

The entrepreneurial business model for journalism may not succeed as often as we would like, but it worked perfectly for Michelle Leder, who just sold her home-brewed publishing business to a $2.2 billion company. You may not have heard of Michelle Leder or her website, Footnoted.Org, which she started in 2003 in her suburban home in Peekskill, NY. But dozens of billion-dollar, hedge-fund

Ethernet Over Copper Vs T1

The standard business bandwidth connection is the versatile T1 line. These connections are available just about everywhere, they offer a dedicated and reliable bandwidth and prices have been getting lower over the years. It’s hard to go wrong with a T1 line, but there’s another service that is gaining popularity that you should also consider. That’s EoC or Ethernet over Copper.

EoC is an Ethernet WAN connection that can link multiple business locations or give you a high speed dedicated Ethernet connection. It also makes a good on-ramp to private cloud networks such as nationwide or international MPLS networks.

What Ethernet over Copper and T1 lines have in common is that they are both provisioned over multiple twisted pair telco wiring. That’s what’s in the bundle of telephone wiring that’s connected to your business now. Both T1 and EoC can use multiple wire pairs to increase bandwidth in a process known as bonding.

There are technology differences in the protocols and modulation schemes that are used to transport the signal between your business location and the closest carrier office, but you generally don't need to be concerned about that level of detail. Both technologies can transport your packets quickly and reliably. What you need to really compare is how much bandwidth you can get for a particular price level.

Where available, EoC often offers both higher bandwidths and lower prices. Part of that is due to the efficiency of the technology involved in transmitting higher bandwidths over common copper wiring. The other factor reducing prices is that EoC is often promoted by competitive carriers looking to establish a foothold or even dominance in a particular market.

What sort of bandwidths are available? T1 lines offer a rock solid 1.5 Mbps per line. Each additional line bonded-in increases that by 1.5 Mbps, so a double bonded solution is 3 Mbps. Bonding is practical up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. Above that, other solutions such as DS3 are often more cost effective.

Ethernet offers a wide variety of bandwidth options, including low speeds of around 1 Mbps, the standard 10 Mbps Ethernet that is also the basic Ethernet LAN speed, and other steps up to around 45 Mbps. That seems to give EoC a bandwidth advantage, but there’s a rub. Ethernet over Copper has distance limitations. You need to be within a few miles of a carrier point of presence to get this service. T1 and bonded T1 does not have these limitations.

If you are located in a small town, rural area or are otherwise not eligible for EoC service, there is another option rapidly becoming available called EoDS1 or Ethernet over DS1. This uses the data specification for T1 lines, called DS1, to transport Ethernet. In effect, this is Ethernet delivered over a T1 line using special interface equipment at both ends.

So what’s best service to order? The answer depends a lot on where you are located. Why not get a set of competitive quotes for your business location so you can make an informed decision? Take just a second to put in a request for Ethernet over Copper vs T1 Pricing and Availability. A friendly Telarus consultant will be happy to review the options with you and make recommendations for your particular situation. Sorry, no residential service available.

Try Internet Fax For Free

In these days of hyperactive texting, fax machines may seem a bit quaint to the uninitiated. But fax messages are a staple of business and used to exchange contracts and other important business documents. So, does that mean you need to buy an armada of dedicated fax machines and run to the office when you need to send or receive a fax message? No way. You can do it all online from wherever you happen to be. That is, if you have the right fax plan.

What’s better than a fax machine in this business environment is a fax service plan. A fax machine is a one task dedicated piece of equipment that sits in a designated space, tethered to its own phone line. A fax service plan lets you receive and send faxes by email and online account. It works on your desktop PC. It works on your laptop computer.

Oh, I know. You remember those early fax software programs that ran on your computer. You needed a special fax modem and they tied up both your computer and your phone line. This service is nothing like that. You don’t need a fax modem or even a phone line. This is an Internet-based fax service that you access over your broadband Internet connection like other online applications.

Here’s what you get when you sign up for a RingCentral Internet Fax Service Plan or take the free trial offer. You get your own toll free or local phone number. What’s that for? It is so people can send fax messages to you. Remember that fax machines send and receive messages over telephone lines. RingCentral gives you a virtual fax machine, but it still needs a number for those other fax machines to call. Those incoming messages will be stored in your online account and sent to you via email. You can even get text messages on your cell phone or PDA alerting you to new faxes so you never miss an important message.

How about sending faxes? You can send a fax right from email. Your email message becomes the cover sheet. The attached documents become the fax pages. That’s the simple way to fax. You also get a free software application that adds a fax button to your Microsoft Windows applications, such as Outlook and Word. Click the button and you can send your document out as a fax message. You can electronically sign faxes using a bitmap of your signature. No need to print documents, sign them with a pen, and then scan them back in as you would with a standard fax machine.

The RingCentral Internet Fax is as powerful as a large dedicated fax machine. You can create groups of contacts and easily send faxes to the whole group from your computer. You don’t tie up any phone lines. You’ll be notified by the system when your faxes have been sent. Both the software app and online account let you create custom cover sheets. Over a dozen different page styles are included with the service. If you are having a problem with junk faxes, you can block those so they won’t come in.

By the way, your computer doesn’t even have to be on for you to get a fax message. The sender never gets a busy signal when someone is on the phone, either. Remember, this is a virtual fax machine that is hosted online.

How much does it cost for all this faxing goodness? Plans start as low as $7.99 a month for 300 pages with a small charge per page over that. If you regularly deal with high fax volumes, other plans will push that up to include 2,500 pages per month. That includes your toll free or local fax number. You can pay that much just for a toll free number from other suppliers.

Winter Conference - Clearleap

The Killer App on TV is TV.



Last week we announced that we’ll be showing off an unbound, EBIF weather application produced by us and including The Weather Channel and a new TV Widgets plug-in from Clearleap. The Clearleap plug-in helps us close the loop between personalized, dynamic content and dynamic video. In this case, our personalized weather TV Widget lets you pick locations, get dynamic text content on conditions, and then get localized video forecasts from the Weather Channel’s meteorologists. Pre, post, and mid roll ads can be inserted into the video. The killer app on TV is TV, and we intend to include contextual video in every one of our TV Widgets. Clearleap’s TV Widget plug-in allows us to dynamically (within 3 minutes) attach video from the web to any TV Widget. Weather is a great TV Widget, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg –imagine dynamic news stories, sports highlights, local news, local ads, movie trailers, etc. TV Widgets are supporting and extending the TV Platform, effectively creating a new world of programming by bringing dynamic personalization and context to on-demand video.

Why it’s perfectly OK to blog for free

In response to my recent posts saying journalists should insist on being paid properly for their work, several people have asked how I justify blogging for free. Good question. Easy answer: Blogging for fun and profit – or, ideally, for both – is a victimless pursuit. But it is unethical to abet the exploitation of fellow journalists by working for publishers who pay nothing or something

FourthWall Media-Rovi Mashup

Today (Monday, February 8, 2010) we announced our partnership with Rovi. If you’re in the industry, you know about Rovi’s tremendous scope: they are in over 100 million homes worldwide, they manage digital rights across literally billions of pieces of media, and with their Passport Guide and i-Guide, they provide the most widely deployed interactive program guide in the industry. Our TV Widgets and EBIF platform will be integrated with Rovi Guides, creating a new, innovative way to interact inside an app-guide mashup. Together we’ll be providing a starter set of TV Widgets: News, Weather, Sports from every league, team and college, Finance, Yellow Pages and eBay on TV. Our partnership will make EBIF and TV Widgets available to tens of millions of subscribers across the Americas.

This is a real signal that 2010 is the year for interactive TV and EBIF. EBIF is now available on any set top box platform, and our TV Widgets support the cable operators’ offering, the advertisers’ needs, and the viewers’ desires.

They Buy Used Cell Phones

When you get a new cell phone and service plan, what’s the best thing to do with the phone you are no longer using?

A. Toss it in the trash. It’s worthless now.

B. Toss it in a drawer. It might come in handy someday.

C. Sell it immediately while it has maximum value.

If you answered anything but “C,” you are losing money. So run, don’t walk, to wherever you stashed that cellphone that just came out of service and bring it over here to the computer. You’re about to find out just how much of a jackpot you hit as you check the current market value of your cell phone.

Find your phone on the list and answer a few questions about what shape it’s in and the accessories you have. Hit the “calculate” button and you’ll find out how much this buyer will pay for your old cell phone. If you take the offer, they’ll send you a free postage paid mailer box and, when the condition of your phone has been verified, you’ll get a check in the mail.

Pretty easy, right? It doesn’t really get easier than this. But notice that time is of the essence. The pricing graph for your phone shows you the historical price of your used phone and a projection of how much it will be worth in the near future. As you can see, cell phones lose value with time. They’re not exactly heirlooms. There’s always a new model right around the corner that everyone’s going to want. So if you are going to sell, the best time is right when your phone goes out of service. The second best time is right now.

How about all those other electronic gadgets taking up space in your closet? Are they worth anything. You bet they are. That unwanted eBook reader, digital camera, MP3 player, camcorder, GPS device, gaming console, satellite radio home audio system, Blu-Ray player, PDA, external drive, video game, laptop or desktop computer, projector, streaming media device, camera lens, or movie is worth cash right now. Round up all your recent vintage gadgets and check their value now. You may be surprised how much it all adds up to. And you were going to throw that stuff out, why?

Journos aren’t helpless against market forces

Without question, there never has been a bigger response to this blog than the one that greeted the piece the other day encouraging journalists to demand to be paid decently for their work. The preponderance of comments – which apparently were authored (for free) by starving journalists – was quite favorable. Thanks, guys. But the most interesting reaction came from people (here and

Tech Jobs Come Calling

While the Great Recession drags on, not all sectors are getting hit equally hard. In fact, technology is doing rather well on the jobs front. Employers shed 85,000 positions from November to December of last year. But they added 5,200 tech jobs during the same month. Seems like technology is the place to be.

That doesn’t mean that having technology credentials is guaranteed employment. Just ask anyone working in a factory. U.S. manufacturing was moving out of the country even during the good times. With weakened demand for products, most companies are feeling the pinch and many have responded by laying off people. Even the best employers may have to thin the ranks when survival of the company is at stake.

Aside from the depth of this downturn, there’s really nothing new going on here. Business has always been somewhat cyclical. Some years you can have your pick of several good opportunities. Other years the employment section of the newspaper is bare. But, in general, you are better off with marketable skills in the current technologies than without them. During tough times, companies will tend to keep the people that are essential to delivering the product or service that is core to the business. If they need to bring in outside talent, they’ll be scanning resumes for specific skills that exactly match the job that needs doing. Even as business starts to pick up, employers want to selectively add talent that can be productive immediately. Only in the boom times of full employment will they settle for the best of whatever’s available.

Know what’s really booming right now? Technical and skills training of all types. The trade schools and junior colleges are flooded with students who want to learn everything from computer networking to nursing to welding to truck driving. The junior college nearby recently added a truck driving school and now I see their students driving the big rigs around town. Another community college in a nearby town offers a wind turbine technician program. Talk about preparing for the future jobs!

So, here’s your strategy. If you like technical things and are considering entering a certificate or degree program, I’d enthusiastically encourage you to do so. What the job market will be like on graduation day is always a coin toss. But chances are that if you start a two or four year program now, employment prospects will be better when you are ready to start work than they are at the moment. Even if that timing is off, there will still be some really good jobs that go begging for the right skills and someone willing to go where they are.

You can improve your prospects by investigating what technical fields and what businesses are growing at the same time you are busy learning your lessons. Green energy is almost certainly a growth field. So is health care. E-commerce has been hot for a decade. What’s beyond Web 2.0? You need to know and learn the skills that employers want and will pay for.

How about if you’ve been out of school for a long time or are even between jobs? Find out what skill set companies in your area would hire if they could find someone qualified. Thirty years ago it was people who knew something about microprocessors. I picked up a couple of courses at that community college in town and landed a good engineering job based on having just the right flavor of training at the right time. Somebody needs something accomplished even in this economy. Find out what it is, and if you can fill the requirements with your background plus some specific coursework... there’s your opportunity.

Why many newspaper pay sites may fail

If modern publishers shared the smarts of Benjamin Franklin, one of the shrewdest of their number who ever lived, they might today be selling content successfully on the web. “Gentlemen,” intoned Franklin, urging fellow patriots to sign the Declaration of Independence in the sweltering summer of 1776. “If we don’t hang together, we most assuredly will all hang separately.”While Franklin

Gannett profit slide points up industry peril

Gannett Inc., long regarded as one of the most parsimonious newspaper publishers, may be running out of expenses to cut. But this is no reason for the company’s oft-furloughed employees to cheer. Quite the opposite. Gannett’s inability to reduce costs fast enough in recent years to sustain its traditionally high operating margins illustrates the grave challenge facing the newspaper

Stop the exploitation of journalists

It’s time for journalists to stop participating in their own exploitation by working for a pittance – or, worse, giving away their valuable services for free. Apart from the sheer righteousness of being paid an honest dollar for an honest day’s work, journalists need to stand together – and stand tall – to reassert the stature of their profession. The reason is simple: If they don’t