Erich Stauffer

Category: Technology

  • Stereotypes

    Stereotypes of young professionals I learned last night from interaction with some college kids last night at a meetup:

    They think being an entrepreneur means coding an app. They don’t know how to make paper airplanes. They use their Mac laptops as word processors. They use Twitter to communicate (via app on their phones, not SMS). They think assembly lines are inneficient based on a paper they wrote in high school. They don’t like Mountain Dew because it decays stuff fast. They prefer cities that offer mass transit because they are hard wired to preserve carbon and cash.

    Here’s what hasn’t changed:

    They love pizza. They have passion. They have new ideas. They’re willing to drive to another city to learn more (road trip!). They think they know everything, but are still willing to learn. We need them.

  • Job Interview – A Review

    It started out with a verbal technical questionnaire about how I’d merge two data sets. They were mostly Access questions and I didn’t do too hot on these. They use Access to update customer lists using the ‘join’ functions (apparently).

    Next, I was sat in front of a computer with sample data and asked to do something with it. This was similar to Jason’s rapid fire exercises except that he was sitting there watching everything I did and I had no example functions to copy.

    Finally, there was the general discussion and question time. I discussed how I’d given presentations of data to mid-level executives and that I used Tufte’s principals. It turns out that he had gone to the very same presentation in Indianapolis that Jason had and had recently just published his first supergraphic. They also had been using Tufte’s sparklines program until they upgraded to 2010, which is what I was using. Yes, it’s different than 2007. That was fun, too.

    I had no reactions greatly in either way from the guy. I’m not even sure if he’s the one making the decision. If I had to guess I’d say he’s leaning to the no side, but that’s on the transparent metrics like memorization of functions and experience presenting in front of a board of directors. If he measures my other qualities like equal height, same hair color, similar demeanor, and ability to show up on time I think I’m golden.

  • Why Warby Parker Will Be the Next Apple

    Warby Parker, the fashion company specializing in discount, specialty eyeglasses, is in the perfect position to take over the next wave in personal, wearable computing via Google Glass.

    After recently raising almost $37 million in venture capital the eyeglasses company, Warby Parker, seems poised to do more than just make ultra-hip eyewear with a side of delicious customer service. Investors are known for looking ahead to future trends and it’s now become obvious that augmented-reality glasses are the new future of mobile devices. The popularity of Warby Parker and Google’s need for an existing market base makes them good partners as product designer, McKay Thomas, pointed out on September 11, 2012, stating, “Like any new piece of hardware looking for its first customer base, Google Glass, Google’s heads-up display device, needs a distribution platform. A platform for Google’s eyeglasses attachment could offer a sales channel, as well as type of social proof that it is acceptable to use the new wearable computer.” Filmmaker, Albert Art, agrees, stating, “IF Google decides to team up with an eyewear company, might I suggest Warby Parker.”

    As LeVar Burton once said, “But don’t take my word for it.” Warby Parker is hiring a “Principal Software Engineer, Computer Vision” who can “develop computer / machine vision applications that make our company succeed.”

    Why Compare Warby Parker to Apple?

    As Marc Andreessen said on August 20, 2011, “Software is eating the world,” and as David Kirkpatrick argued in Forbes, “Every company is a software company.” Warby Parker is no exception. At their very core they are a e-commerce store, which is it’s very nature, software running on a web server, but it’s more than that. They have “virtual try-on” functions on their website that allow you to upload a picture and see what you look like without every touching a frame. They have developed a pattern for making money and an e-commerce blueprint for how to be successful in 2013 and beyond. This includes doing things like hiring directors of Data Science, Software Engineering, and Computer Vision. Nokia was the number one smartphone manufacture for 15 years and until Apple started making the iPhone they were pretty hard to unseat. Warby Parker has already begun to unseat Luxottica in a $16 Billion dollar industry. If they can develop a platform for Google Glass or other wearable, augmented reality applications from Microsoft like Apple did with iTunes, they can create the one-two punch of selling the hardware and the applications developed for them. It’s safe to assume Google will want to do the same with Google Play, but unless they go the route they did of developing their own Nexus smartphones and purchasing Motorola they are unlikely to control the eyeglass market and will need someone like Warby Parker to deliver their products.

  • Mira Award Nominees for 2012

    Here is a list of the Indiana Mira Award Nominees for 2012. I started to hyperlink and list each town as part of a project I was working on for TEDxLafayette, but I never finished so I’m posting what I got done so far. (more…)

  • Personal Computing

    I recently wrote about the first computer I ever used (a Timex Sinclair TS-1000), but recently felt inclined to share my personal version of the PC, Internet, and Mobile revolutions. Although much has been written about this period between 1980 and 2010, I felt that, like the rapid advances in transportation, we are in a period of rapid transition, and that those who experienced it first-hand owe those who follow the courtesy of sharing what happened.

    I have done my share of computer repair service calls and have heard the same stories over and over from a generation born between 1950 and 1960 about how they had to learn Cobalt programming on punch cards at their college or university. I just nod my head and wonder what they’re lives would have been like had they continued to use Cobalt. This is Bill Gates and Steve Jobs‘ generation, the group that got ‘into computers’ after they had become more accessible. Those two, along with the great ‘think’ers at IBM and HP, started the PC revolution that has made all of our lives easier, more efficient, and productive.

    Sopwith GameI mostly grew up with PCs, my first being a Zenith model with two 5-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives. It had no hard drive at first, but later we added a 5MB drive. It came with an orange monochrome CRT (cathode ray tube) screen that we later upgraded to full color. I remember playing games like Sopwith and Dig Dug. I used Print Shop to make banners and PFS Write to write letters and paper. I was quite the nerd.

    Later my dad bought several 386 and 486 PCs from his co-workers at GM. We connected them with Laplink and serial cables and practiced formatting and unformatting them with Norton Tools. The Internet still went “eeeeaaaeeeahhaeeaahhheaa” then when it connected via 14.4 Kbps modems using Windows 3.1 and Winsock TCP. Email was in HyperTerminal in a program called Pine and the whole family had to share the same email address. My dad actually toured the Internet Service Provider in our area before deciding on them over a competitor.

    Our first “new” computer was a Gateway 2000 PC with a Pentium 1.2 Ghz processor, 16 MB of RAM, and a 2 GB hard drive. It’s hard to imagine, but this was really fast at the time. It ran Windows 95 and I spent a lot of time just figuring out how to tweak it and how to use the file system. At the time, this system cost $2000. I used it mostly for word processing. 4 years later I would buy my first PC for $1600 from Best Buy. It was a Compaq PC with a 40 GB hard drive and a CD-burner. That’s all I remember about it because all I ever used it for was to burn CDs and get on the Internet.

    The first college I went to still didn’t have broadband Internet access in 1998 or 1999, but by 2000 (at a different college), I had broadband for the first time. I actually had to go buy a 10 Mbit ethernet card from the college bookstore and I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t work when I installed it. I actually had to call the college tech support department and as it turned out I wasn’t seating the card well enough. Lesson learned. I was running Windows 2000 by this point, but the only thing I was doing on it was burning CDs and getting on the Internet. That’s when I discovered CollegeClub.com.

    By 2001 I was in my own apartment at my third college and I bought my first cell phone. It was an Ericson bar phone from AT&T, which was “free” with a two-year agreement. The price had fallen for the first time to a price-point that almost anyone could afford one: $30 a month. There was no apps, no texting, and no data plan. It was a phone that you could use to call other phones with. If you went over your minutes, you were charged what’s called “overage charges”. I got a girlfriend using AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM for short) and those overage charges bit me more than once. I ended up marrying that girl so I can also share that she got a cell phone at the same time, too. In fact, most people did. 2001 was kind of a turning point in cell-phone adoption. In 2000, bag phones in your mom’s car were only to be used for “emergencies” and were relatively expensive, but in just one year they became accessible and the ‘killer app’.

    In 2002 I got married and bought my first laptop – a 14.4 inch Compaq. I bought it from Staples on a whim so I could use it at the library at my fourth college. I ended up selling it to my brother so I could pay my mortgage insurance to buy my first house. It turns out you have to have your mortgage insurance money as separate from your mortgage when you buy a house. I didn’t know that. In 2004, a friend and I started Neighborhood Geeks and started doing in-home computer repair. Windows XP was in it’s prime and hardware parts were still expensive enough that you could justify repairing a PC rather than buying a new one. We were still upgrading PCs from Windows 98 and installing ethernet cards. It was a hoot, but it didn’t last. By the the time Vista came out, computers had shrunk in price and people were storing their email and files in the cloud. When your computer broke, there was nothing to recover and the cost to replace it was less than the cost of the repair. The golden age of home PC repair was over.

    I got my first smartphone in 2007. It was the first generation iPhone. I ended up giving this to my wife and went back to a flip phone for a time before trying out an Android smartphone in 2010. I began texting in 2005 around the same time I started using Facebook and Myspace for the first time. Back then, not everyone did it so you kind of had to know who ‘had texting’ and who didn’t. Some people got mad even if they did have texting because they were charged 10 cents for every text. Eventually I learned how to auto-forward text messages to email in Android so I wouldn’t have to have my phone on at work. It was clear that the mobile revolution had shook my life in more ways than one. Facebook, the cell phone, and the Internet have all led to very good and very bad things in my life. I hate them for that, but I appreciate them for what they allow us to do. I’ve made my living for the last decade off of manipulating bits on the screen, but how much has the technology manipulated me?

    Read what’s next for smartphones.

  • How to Host a Website Using a Laptop and a 3G Connection

    Web hosting is best in a redundant, highly scalable, and dependable environment like at 1and1 or Bluehost, but I wondered how successful the other end of that spectrum would be. I didn’t know if a smart phone was capable of hosting a web site, but I knew that there’s not much difference between a laptop and a server besides the mobility. I realize that not all laptops are mobile and that many people use them as desktop replacements, but this article focuses on how you would take a website mobile using a 3G connection.

  • Bet Your Apps on Google Glass

    How Augmented Reality Will Usurp the Smartphone

    On May 1, 2012 I wrote a post about how Google Goggles would be the next big thing after smartphones and on November 22, 2012, Business Insider wrote in The End of The Smartphone Era is Coming about how Google Glass will be the new, default way people communicate, usurping the current cellphone. Nicholas Carlson writes, “Something like Google Glass or whatever Microsoft is working on could end up replacing the smartphone as the dominant way people access the Internet and connect to each other.”

    While Google Glass uses a tiny screen displayed on the inside of glasses, Microsoft is working on augmented reality, where data and illustrations overlay the actual world around you. And while these still new technologies are being built around wearable glasses, they will enevitably get smaller and be embedded in contact lenses. The US military is already developing augmented reality contact lenses as seen in Mission Impossible 4, Ghost Protocol.

    I’ve always thought that anything we see in the movies is just a pre-cursor for real life (but we’re all still waiting on flying cars and cold fusion). The one I think about the most is the smartphone used in The Saint. It was a bar phone that flipped open like a mini-laptop that had Internet access. The movie came out in 1997 when the Internet still meant dial-up for most people and cell phones had yet to become ubiquitous. It took ten years, but by 2007 I had a better phone than Val Kilmer, but then Tom Cruise had to go and up me with his augmented reality contact lenses. I guess I’ll have to wait for Microsoft or Google to catch me up in another 10 years.

    UPDATE 12/17/2012: Scientists in Belgium have taken a crucial step toward building screens into contact lenses, “Jelle De Smet and a team of researchers at Ghent University built an LCD screen in a curved contact lens.”

  • Indianapolis Video Surveillance Analysts

    The other day I was in downtown Indianapolis at the Circle Center Mall where I noticed two video surveillance cameras in one of the parking garage escalator areas. This would not have been a big deal, but all one camera was doing was looking at the other. It seemed like perfect fodder for Fail Blog, whose ironic content fits perfectly with Roman poet Juvenal’s famous line, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” from his Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–8), which is literally translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?” One video surveillance camera had probably just replaced the other without the former being removed, but it still goes to show the value of a good Indianapolis video surveillance analyst.

    Who Will Watch the WatchersThe video surveillance system you choose to purchase and/or update could be purchased on Amazon.com or from a variety of different resellers, but how do you know if it will give you the results you need and how do you know if your IT system can support it? That’s the value that AllThingsIT provides with their Indianapolis video surveillance design services. They have been providing IT networking and video surveillance system support for over 30 years. Their new “Safe Small Towns” initiative is focused on helping small towns and municipality police and fire departments develop and implement video surveillance cameras that give them evidence they can use in court.

    As an IT business analyst myself, I can understand the value of working with a company like AllThingsIT for Indianapolis network management because video surveillance technology changes fast and there are hundreds of different cameras out there – each with their different light sensors and lens types that create a myriad of features. AllThingsIT has the tools to create a turn-key video surveillance solution for your organization that can be proven effective before it’s even installed. If you’re in the market for a new video surveillance system or are looking to upgrade, contact AllThingsIT at 317-755-0200.

  • Indianapolis Video Surveillance Systems

    We recently learned about a video surveillance vendor, AllThingsIT, who provides video surveillance systems and cameras to small towns, municipalities, and businesses in and around Indiana under the brand, “Safe Small Towns”. The idea is that video surveillance systems can help keep small towns safe by providing business owners and police departments with the evidence they need to find and convict criminals. They call this, “civic surveillance”.

    Safe Small Towns’ website talks a lot about educating the consumer on how camera and other technology works and about providing “performance-based work statements”. They seem to really be up on results-based solutions and the primary way they do this is through JPEG 2000 technology, which takes multiple still images to make a video instead of traditional interlaced video. However, the primary value AllThingsIT brings to the table is in their knowledge of not just how to choose the right video camera solution, but how to integrate that solution into your existing computer network.

    AllThingsIT has provided IT network support, video systems, and computer monitoring for a wide variety of corporate and government entities over the years. Their experience with servers, networks, video cameras, and monitoring makes them the ideal video surveillance vendor in the Indianapolis area. Safe Small Towns takes everything AllThingsIT has done with video and wrapped it up into a comprehensive package suitable for small towns, police departments, and other industries in order to offer them specific solutions for their video surveillance needs.