New Florence. New Renaissance.

Westwood One's Content Delivery Investments

As the National Association of Broadcasters show convened in Las Vegas this week, I had a chance to talk to Conrad Trautmann, SVP of Operations and Engineering at Westwood One, the largest provider of audio content in the US.

“The broadcast business of the future is all about HD radio, satellite radio, HDTV, audio and video on your mobile phone, wi-fi, wi-max, ipods, Iphones, itunes, podcasts, the list goes on. If you look at all of the above and the buzz at NAB the common theme is of course, digital.”

Ok, so us consumers know all that. What’s the big deal?

Well, they have to worry about sizable investment in IP based broadcast infrastructure, satellites and related modulation and things like “spring sun outages”, “cartchunks”(to attach metadata to wav. files) , “copy splitting” (to allow advertisers to target specific markets in their national campaigns)

In the last couple of years, Westwood has been investing in Media Access Xchange (MAX). They shipped MAX receivers to 2,000 radio stations across the country. The receivers are part of International Datacasting Corp.’s SuperFlex Pro Audio suite of products.

They allow content delivery direct to the affiliate’s automation system -  no more ripping CD's or downloading from an ftp site. And authentication to make sure only authorized, in good standing affiliates are getting the content.

That’s the future of consumer content too. Fewer visits to Blockbuster. Fewer Netflix deliveries. Personalized content delivered via IP. And much as we may dread it - “copy splitting” – yes targeted ads.

Google's Mobile App Store?

“More significant than the (new Gmail mobile) interface, however, is the underlying technology that enables it. Google took advantage of features of the browsers running on both platforms (iPhone and Android) to create a Web application that looks and feels like one that has been downloaded onto the device. Representatives from Google claim that this is just the beginning. The company hopes that the new mobile Gmail will kick-start a trend in mobile Web apps with developers using the Internet to build and deploy more powerful applications.

According to some analysts, this approach to mobile development could have large implications for the way that developers distribute their software and the way that people buy it. It's even possible that more-powerful mobile Web apps could undercut some of the business of Apple's App Store, says Chetan Sharma, an analyst who runs his own consulting firm in Issaquah, WA.”

MIT Technology Review

Guest Column: Technology and Global Home Improvement

This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions  – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.

This time it is my former Gartner colleague, Helmuth Guembel, who now runs Strategy Partners International. Here he talks about his home improvement project in Switzerland, and the global supply chain it has involved

“I have analyzed the software industry for decades now. And I have watched with admiration how “follow the sun” techniques have matured to coordinate global software development in US, Europe, India and other parts of the world. So, when it came to a home improvement project, I said – why not apply those some principles? The architect, Romedi Castellani's estimate to use Swiss labor and materials made the decision easier. As you may know Switzerland has one of the highest cost of living in the world.

But as with software projects, we had “scope creep”. We started with the need to fix the decrepit in-door pool building. It was an all aluminum structure that had proven to be too weak to withstand the extreme snow loads Swiss alpine winters can bring. Then we decided to use the opportunity to add substantially to the square footage. Thus, a generous home office, a room for our daughter, a library, 2 bathrooms and a bedroom were added to the design.

We are still at it four years later – yes, it has become my hobby :)

Technology, including 500 pieces of emails used during the project, helped at every step of the way.

The Planning and Design

Having traveled extensively in Asia we knew what luxury hotels and villas are like these days. We had brought many books about these dream places and showed them to our architect. He was fascinated, but being a young man, we had to compensate for the fact that he has not seen much of the world yet.

After some research and a few trips to Bali and India, we decided to source extensively from these two areas.

We got from Bali:

- 200 sq ft of marble flooring

- all the wood flooring (massive teak)

- all the doors (teak, hand carved)

- all the furniture (custom designs for the most part)

- many of the light fixtures

- all the marble basins for the bathrooms

From India:

- 5 wooden ebony pillars – each 500 pound in weight

– other materials from homes in state of disrepair

(All of this came from Cochin in South India, an excellent source for those who are interested in such materials.)

I used a version of Autocad that the specialist store, Hettich distributes to craftsmen to design furniture. Once I had learnt how to use the software, and used the their on-line catalog, I could design a cabinet in 10 minutes and create all the necessary drawings as in one on the right

The Construction

My “joiner” (a trade term for wood craftsmen), Jaleel in Bali had e-mail, but no Autocad. So I converted all the drawings into PDFs. The hardware I specified, however, did not mean a thing to the good man – he had never seen such stuff and had no idea where to get it from.

Hettich has an office in Jakarta, but does not carry the product line I needed in Indonesia. Their VP of International Business Development offered to ship the goods directly from his Singapore hub to the joiner – a generous offer given the fact that my needs were really chicken feed compared to the lot sizes they are used. His payback was in better understanding the Bali market, where a lot of furniture is made for Australia.

We forgot completely that Indonesia is not that open a trade economy and the joiner, of course, had no import license for the hardware. So the hinges got stuck in customs for more than 3 months and I had to transfer additional money to get them out. Don’t ask me for an audit trail for that. I do not have access to any Governance, Risk and Compliance software and I suspect it would not translate into Bahasa :)

At home, our young architect, bless his heart, added to initial project challenges. He had overlooked that with more recent legislation cause the pool new structure was 2 feet too close to the neighboring plot. Since the geometry was dictated by the pre-existing pool dugout, we had to find a compromise which we negotiated with our neighbor.

It ultimately meant that there was a small strip on the east side of the pool that was inaccessible. Here we have to credit our architect with creativity. How about a bridge across the pool? Having just returned from Cambodia, we had seen many bridges near temples – all with naga handrails- and we wanted one of those. The joiner who had by finished working on our hinges offered to make that bridge and submitted a superb design .

He did not provide detailed specs though – just assured us it would span the pool. Well, you can imagine what came next!

On our next trip to Bali, we got to see it and we were overwhelmed by its size. It was significantly higher and wider than we had expected. The joiner defended his design – he insisted that anything smaller would not have worked. He loves massive teak and the piece, indeed, is a masterpiece when it comes to size!

The Logistics

In the course of time, no fewer than 7 containers totaling over 420000 pounds in weight were shipped from the other side of the world. I got most of the logistics papers in PDF-format by email. But customs authorities and forwarding authorities still require paper documents that had to be delivered via courier. My Bali freight forwarding company, Sapta Prima, did the trucking of very skillfully packed containers to Surabaya, where the containers were loaded on a ship.

From then on I could track the load all the way to Hamburg using a free and very useful in web service, called Vesseltracker that is an extension to Google Earth. This allowed me to synchronize the arrival of the container with the last leg of the transport, a combination of track (to Salzburg) and then by road, to my town, Scuol. The largest container, 40ft high, was skillfully delivered by a young lady trucker, Sabine, who did a great job driving her large Scania truck through our narrow roads.

All in all, this was a very challenging project that yielded quite unusual results blending European construction methods with Asian style and craftsmanship. The impressive thing the trade specialists were not required to travel. Sure, this is not something for everybody – it requires a solid amount of determination, skill, and, above all, endless patience and improvisation. But to us, it certainly was worth the while and all of the efforts.

And I have new found respect for those who manage global software development with teams around the world.”

Computational Fluid Dynamics in Data Centers

“In the past, most data-center cooling systems were designed based on rules of thumb or trial and error, and large margins of safety were used to compensate for the inaccuracies in those approaches …Computational-fluid-dynamics (CFD) software tools provide the ability to simulate the performance of data centers and predict the effects of air handlers, power-dissipation sources, raised floors, and other features on temperatures throughout a data center.”

HPAC Engineering

Photo Credit: Data Center Knowledge

Guest Column: Technology and Gastronomy

This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.

This time it is William Mougayar, CEO of Eqentia. Between launching new products (Outsourcing, Cloud Computing) and companies he somehow finds time to pursue his gourmet food interests.

"I like to make bread and pizza dough from scratch. From scratch means that even the yeast is naturally leavened over several days in a jar. You may call me a food snob – I like to think of myself as a gourmet food fanatic, a passionate cook, a bread baker hobbyist, a local produce addict.

And I am a judicious, but early, adopter of food technology. You could say I have traveled to all three "poles" of cooking - low-tech, online social-tech and high-tech.

In the early days, online food forums were today’s social networks. In 2001, I jumped on Chowhound. It was “the” place where foodies came to discuss their recent experiences. It was as real-time as one could get. In an industry where your reputation is as good as the last meal, the premise was that standard reviews and restaurant guides were too stale to trust after they were published. Food aficionados wanted to hear recent experiences from other like-minded patrons. Soon after, I joined eGullet, and then Opinionated About. The vibrancy and user obsession of these online forums still rival many of the current social networks. But today's tools have given them fancier buzzwords.

In an online forum, user-generated content is the main content, so there was no need to call it “user-generated”. We went there to read other diners experiences, reports and arguments and to admire beautiful food pictures (aka “food porn”). There were no formal rankings of posts or users, but you could quickly gather who the experts were, based on the frequency and details of their contributions. Loosely coupled Friend of a Friend (FOAF) networks would emerge. Users visited these forums to get or give advice, decide which restaurants to go to, and stay updated on the latest ups and downs of establishments, chef’s openings, and food trends. You could receive notifications when others commented on posts they are interested in, and I can attest to the fact that these forums were very addictive, especially prior to planning a trip to a restaurant. I’ve been active on these 3 forums, and without them, my culinary experiences would have been a lot less well guided. I’ve made new friends there and shared meals with them

At home, when it comes to cooking, frankly no technology can replace a most basic compulsion for locating the best quality food products or ingredients. Since I live in Toronto, we can only source fresh local produce from April to October. Although, super-optimized global food supply chains and preservation techniques have allowed us to receive grapes from Chile in April, or fresh beans from Africa in the middle of winter, nothing replaces locally produced fruit and vegetables that have not traveled for weeks.

Back to my love of bread baking. The photo on right is that of a Rustic Baguette, made by a long fermentation method (including 24 hrs of refrigeration), following a version of Philippe Gosselin's pain a l'ancienne which Peter Reinhart popularized. It yields excellent results of improved flavor, very close to the "old methods" of Parisian bakers. Break bread and you will notice irregular holes which indicate it was made by hand, the old-fashioned way. Too much technology and the holes would be perfect looking - a giveaway sign it was made by machine and in large quantities.

For both the dough and yeast, the key parameters to watch for are the temperature and humidity of the room. The ideal temperature range for the dough to rise is 75F-85F. A digital Springfield meter does the trick wonderfully. It has allowed me to vary the hydration levels and fermentation cycles slightly in order to reach optimal results. Another parameter is the hardness of the water. Medium soft water (50 to 100 ppm) is ideal, and since our home has a reverse osmosis (RO) water purification system which yields 15-20 ppm water, I mix that water with non-RO water in order to achieve the right levels.

There is however a gadget that I’d like on my gift wish list: an infrared temperature meter, which allows you to point at the food, oven, or barbeque to determine the precise temperature. The one I need is the Raytek industrial model, which can measure up to temperatures of 999F- that’s because real Neapolitan pizza needs to bake at 950F.

Bordering on the technology of science, a current hot food trend is “molecular gastronomy” which consists of pushing the envelope of food science by altering what we traditionally know about food textures, and cooking techniques. The results produce a mind-bending, taste-surprising experience of culinary fireworks. I can’t say that molecular gastronomy has made it into the homes of aficionados due to the difficulty it takes and the cost of specialized equipment such as freeze-drying machines, centrifuges, rotary evaporators or Vacuum sealers. However, three of my favourite chefs are at the top of this trend: Ferrán Adrià of El Bulli in Spain, Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck in the UK, and Grant Achatz of Alinea in Chicago. In the words of Chef Achatz, molecular gastronomy allows them to “turn oil into powder, serve a gelled liquid hot, or thicken an infusion by simply blending in a magical white substance”,- all of these exploits being out of reach for most home cooks. The video below shows off Chef Achatz’s magic.

What’s next for gastronomy-minded consumers? I think that Twitter is the next frontier. Real “real-time” comments while having a meal is where food reviewers will go. Previously, we used to take laborious notes during a meal, snap a few pictures then go home and spend 2 to 3 hours to write a review. Today, you can Tweet your remarks and SnapTweet a photograph of the dish you are describing, instantaneously. I carry an iPhone, ready to take food pictures anytime, anywhere, and I’m able to post them via my food Twitter account which is separate from the personal one and anonymous for privacy reasons.

On the business side, we will soon open an Eqentia Semantic knowledge space grouping the top culinary blogs, sites and forums, and I’m working on a yet to be announced Twitter-related initiative for foodies.

Less technology is the right balance for food - do not want those perfect holes in the bread - but I expect more online social networking and Tweeting will be in vogue. “

Earth Day

On this, the 40th anniversary readers may find interesting the history of the day and other green thinking here

"Stream" Computing

“Now IBM has shown that stream computing can be used to analyze market data faster than ever before. The result is a machine that helps automated trading systems determine the price of securities using financial events that have just occurred. To build the system, the computing company partnered with TD Securities, an investment-banking firm, to tweak IBM software called InfoSphere Streams for financial data. The firm ran the software on one of the latest IBM supercomputers, known as Blue Gene/P.”

MIT Technology Review

Photo Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

Guest Column: Technology and Little League Baseball

This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.

This time it is Mike O'Brien at appirio. appirio is one of the new generation of "cloud" systems integrators which works with software-as-a-service from salesforce.com, Google, Facebook and others. Here he writes about his baseball coaching.

"You know what it is like to be a tech-husband and tech-dad. The family expects you to know every arcane aspect of computing. But they dread any tech changes or innovations you propose. The groaning is particularly loud when you announce it is time to switch Internet service providers. This, of course, leads to the inevitable dread of switching email domains, new addresses and trying to inform friends and family that we've 'moved'.  But there was little groaning when I signed up for Google Apps and tied it to our own family domain purchased through GoDaddy.com.  Forever more we will have the same domain and email addresses regardless of our Internet provider. 

It wasn't long before the entire family became experts at GMail and Google Calendar.   With shared calendaring my wife could now schedule family events that I could see overlaid on my work schedule.   She of course was thrilled with this and I could stay out of trouble by not missing important family events like school plays and such.

One of the things that we love about Google Apps is the incredible rate at which Google is innovating and adding new features to the products.  Shortly after we locked onto Google Apps, they released Google Sites as part of the Apps suite.  Think of Google Sites as an amazingly simple yet powerful wiki. 

I quickly stood up a site for a family reunion just to learn the mechanics.  Before long I had a complete site with everything from the floor plans of our ten room beach rental to the packing list reminder to chow schedules and much much more.  After sharing it with the family across the country it became a virtual gathering place for us to share ideas, plans and excitement of the upcoming reunion.  Best of all, there was no learning curve for aunts, uncles, grandparents or the kids - it's just a super-intuitive environment.

So the success we had with the family site really opened my eyes to other uses of Google Sites.  I've helped numerous friends, family and neighbors stand up their own sites for various things but the one that I'm most passionate about is our Buccaneers Baseball Site.  As one of the little league team coaches, I have the usual responsibilities of communicating practice and game schedules, inclement weather plans, fund raising events and the list goes on.  So after socializing the idea with the other coaches over a year ago, we put the site together and it has truly taken center stage for all means of communication and collaboration when we are not at the fields. 

And I'm not talking about just the coaches - rather, the site is used by the kids, the parents and proud grandparents.  Of course, for security reasons we control access to the site but once you have a login and password, you can edit to your hearts content.  Aside from the obvious stuff to include on the site such as game schedules, field directions and contact information, we are using the site for things like:

· Instructional 'how to' videos - batting, stealing, sliding, ect. There is a wealth of these on the web and Google sites makes it super easy to embed these Google or Youtube videos

· Batting practice videos - you can tell the kid a hundred times that they are dropping their shoulder through the swing but seeing is believing and it's made a huge difference for our boys

· Game Summaries - one of my favorite parts of the site.  Parents take turns writing game summaries each weekend, which are always very entertaining

· Slideshows - each player has their own page with their playing stats, complemented by a slideshow (powered by Picasa)

· A ton of other fun stuff like tournament plans, fundraisers, practice routines

· And of course, our all important code of conduct

Google Sites has completely changed the way both our family and our baseball team communicates, collaborates and stays organized.  And of course - it's fun tech!"

The US Cyber-Security Agenda

 Government Technology column on Melissa Hathaway’s mission and challenge

“Another encouraging sign that the Obama administration is serious about cyber-security is that its agenda contains specific goals, including:

• strengthening federal leadership on cyber-security;
• initiating a safe computing research and development effort and hardening the nation's cyber-infrastructure;
• protecting the IT infrastructure that keeps America's economy safe;
• preventing corporate cyber-espionage;
• developing a cyber-crime strategy to minimize the opportunities for criminal profit; and
• mandating standards for securing personal data and requiring companies to disclose personal information data breaches.

While my optimism is fueled by the belief that bold leadership is truly powerful, it's also dampened by the reality that the cultural inertia within government actively resists change.”

Guest Post: Technology and Musical Discoveries

This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.

This time it is good friend, Mike Laven, currently COO of Traiana. Over the two decades I have known Mike I have seen him involved with more startups and turnarounds than any other tech exec. I have also had a drink with him in more cities around the world than any other tech exec. Widely traveled in every sense of the word. Here he talks about his "musical travels". 

"It started five years ago when I transferred my large collection of classical, opera, jazz, blues and rock CDs to a hard drive. Vinyl lovers could not bear the loss of fidelity in moving to CD, but I’m too clumsy to care for LPs, so CDs were a godsend. The move from CD’s to a personal, searchable, indexed database was straightforward but time consuming. CDs compress the soundwave and eliminate the extremes of the sound spectrum--think of a sine curve with the highs and lows lopped off. Moving from CDs to digital audio standards like AAC, MP3 and MP4 involves a further compression and loss of perfection. Maybe, maybe you hear it when Maria Callas hits a high C, but you certainly don’t notice in Led Zeppelin.

Now I can listen to 14 different versions of Summertime from Angelique Kidjo to Leontyne Price. (For audiophiles I’ve got a mid to high-end system with most components from Linn, a small UK manufacturer and speakers from B&W and all sorts of cable and filters). Then I linked the system directly to the internet, added downloads of all kinds, podcasts, internet radio, a little box that records from radio, artist sites and on and on. Congolese music—no problem, daily from Kinshasa.

Having avoided my day job thinking intensely about problems of indexing classical music, I got the bug and decided to leave the recorded world and ‘go live.’ As a child my grandmother’s grand piano occupied half our living room. She studied at the Conservatory and played daily. Though the piano bench was full of serious classical sheet music, all I really remember is the Gilbert & Sullivan she played in her ‘80s. I never had formal lessons and for my last ‘big birthday,’ I started piano lessons.

I once had a Board member who had been a professional athlete and whose Board wisdom was, ‘Everybody wants to win, I want managers who want to practice.’ Learning is about practice (and lots of it), but resources and knowledge are about Google and web sites. Web sites for music theory with on-line practice, web sites for jazz and blues chords, web sites for downloadable sheet music and practice pages, web sites with video clips of great performers, web sites with on-line music notation programs with fill in accompaniment, web sites for comparing piano vendors, web sites for finding piano teachers and Wikipedia for just about everything.

After a long search and trial period I ordered a piano from a small German manufacturer, Steingraeber in Bayreuth. On their web site Steingraeber asks, ‘Is computer-generated production demonstrably superior to human craftsmanship? Are there still secrets left in piano building that can be heard or felt?’

I figured digital piano was the way to go. With the headphones plugged in I could save my family and neighbors the pain of listening to my learning. Digital pianos store sampled and recorded tones from each key on a traditional acoustic piano to be replayed when the key is struck. Better digital pianos like Yamaha approach acoustic fidelity and build ‘piano feel’ into the keys. But I found the loss of any fidelity and ‘touch’ intolerable no matter how imperceptible, so Steingraeber is right - there are still secrets. Score one against technology advances.

Years ago, I heard Bobby Short at the Carlyle Hotel on E 76^th St and said, ‘I want to do that!’ Technology has advanced my access to know how, speeded up finding a piano teacher, informed the selection of a piano and video conferencing has released me from some travel for practice but nothing makes getting a perfect 12 bar blues progression come any faster."