Passing the Turing Test

Back in September I linked to a very funny post by Jason Striegel about how he was encountering people randomly through IM and was having trouble convincing them that he was a real person. Here is the post by Jason again. Lately I have been thinking about this because I am increasingly encountering one version of the Turing test called Captcha.

You've probably seen these tests as well - an image that has certain letters in it which you must type in to prove that you are a human being. That is, for as long as computers can't do a good job analyzing these images and discovering the letters. Unfortunately, the Captcha project reports that this has already happened:

Thayananthan, Stenger, Torr, and Cipolla of the Cambridge vision group have written a program that can achieve 93% correct recognition rate against ez-gimpy, and Malik and Mori have matched their accuracy. Their programs represent siginifcant advancements to the field of computer vision.

But don't worry! The good folks at Captcha are hard at work on the next set of tests that will help separate the humans from the machines... Try out ESP-PIX for example, in which you have to evaluate four images and choose the best word to describe what the images have in common... Not only does it keep out the machines (for now) but it is also child-proof!

But there is an easier way to defeat these things. A number of people have already documented systems that parse out the problem of defeating a Captcha challenge to an eletronic sweatshop in India or China -- hundreds of people who go to work each day to sit there and defeat the Captcha challenges...

Why would anyone go to the trouble of having a room of people in India defeating Captcha? Unfortunately lots of reasons. The same reasons that companies like Google are now using Captcha on Blogger -- one example: if you can use computers to automatically generate web pages that link to your product, you can elevate the place that your prouduct shows up in results pages... ditto product rankings or the results of surveys... In factm Captcha got started because of an online poll about the best computer science school:

In November 1999, http://www.slashdot.com released an online poll asking which was the best graduate school in computer science (a dangerous question to ask over the web!). As is the case with most online polls, IP addresses of voters were recorded in order to prevent single users from voting more than once. However, students at Carnegie Mellon found a way to stuff the ballots using programs that voted for CMU thousands of times. CMU's score started growing rapidly. The next day, students at MIT wrote their own program and the poll became a contest between voting "bots". MIT finished with 21,156 votes, Carnegie Mellon with 21,032 and every other school with less than 1,000. Can the result of any online poll be trusted? Not unless the poll requires that only humans can vote.

So, where will this all end? Biometric challenges. It has to happen. How else will we be able to tell the machines apart from the people?

Worried About Climate

With Wilma the most powerful storm ever in the Atlantic, destruction of Cozumel and Cancun certain, and who knows what is to come in the US (one forecaster suggests snow and a powerful extratropical storm...) you have to worry a bit about climate change. And the latest issue of Scientific American has the rest of the story. Title: Climate Model Predicts Extreme Changes for the US.

"Climate change is going to be even more dramatic than we previously thought," says Noah Diffenbaugh, who reported his team's findings in the October 17 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ...Diffenbaugh's model predicts several events: the desert Southwest will have more frequent and intense heat waves, combined with less precipitation during the summer; the Gulf Coast will grow hotter and experience heavier rainfalls in short time periods; the Northeast will suffer under longer, hotter summers; overall, the continental U.S. will undergo a warming trend that will reduce the length of winter.

This isn't something that can be stopped. But it is something that we can be planning for - both as individuals and as a community. And we are not. That does have me worried.

Not Worried About Oil

For the past year my partner Erika has been driving a standard 2002 VW Golf on "biodiesel." It burns cleaner than gasoline (or diesel), emits fewer greenhouse gasses, and most importantly it does not come from the middle east, Venezuala, an alaskan wildlife refuge or offshore drilling rigs in California, Florida, and the Gulf. It comes from good old American soy beans.

Our government and media are doing a lousy job. We are constantly being scared by reports that oil reserves are running well behind consumption. This is an ECONOMIC problem, and NOT a science or natural resource problem. It is an economic problem for two reasons -- (a) we have an enormous infrastructure of gas burning products that would have to be converted to diesel and (b) the scale of production of biodiesel is, today, insufficient to get the some economies that gasoline production enjoys and thus the price per gallon of biodiesel is higher.

But during the recent price spike, the price of gasoline started to come close to the $3.50 per gallon price that we have been paying for biodiesel. And since most diesel engines get better gas mileage (20-40% according to Edmunds) than gasoline engines, the per mile price for most consumers would still be lower today.

So why all of the worry about the price of oil? With a concerted push by government and industry, we could start getting consumers and businesses to purchase diesel vehicles, and begin investing in biofuel manufacturing and distribution infrastructure. Over the next decade, as our national vehicle base naturally turns over, we would, as a nation, become increasingly less dependent upon foreign oil and eventually less dependent on oil altogether.

There are about 150 million passenger vehicles on the roads in North America today, and about 8 million new ones are purchased each year. This doesn't include figures for commercial vehicles which adds another 100 million vehicles, and another 6 million new vehicles purchased each year. Thus out of 250 million vehicles on the roads, we could be replacing 14 million, or 6% per year with biodiesel burning alternatives every year.

Gasoline accounts 2/3 of America's oil use according to the Department of Energy and represents 95% of our transportation energy use. For every 5 million biodiesel vehicles sold, we could reduce our dependence on oil for transportation by 2% and our overall dependence on oil by 1 1/3%. Add subsidies and incentive programs and the pace at which this conversion occurs could be significantly accelerated.

Biodiesel is no longer a strange topic to be left to hippies. It is a mainstream product, running in mainstream production vehicles. Adoption of biodiesel is an important step (although not the only one) in breaking the world's dependence on cheap oil to fuel our economies. I would rather see us burning hydrogen, but the technology and infrastructure for biodiesel is HERE TODAY.

My next car will be diesel. BIOdiesel.

Hurts Golf more than Wie

The disqualification of Michelle Wie this past Sunday has been widely reported as being bad news for Wie... but in my opinion this is much worse for the game of Golf.

According to reports, she dropped her ball about one foot too close to the hole, after a bad lie. Even the Sports Illustrated reporter who reported the infraction stated that he felt she had been "hasty" rather than feeling that she had in any way intended to "cheat."

If she had understood that the drop was closer to the hole, she should have added 2 strokes to her score (giving her 76 instead of 74). Her disqualification was for signing her score card without these two strokes.

Disqualify? Why not just add the two strokes, and re-determine the rankings based on her new score of 76? If all are in agreement that she did not intentionally cheat, that this was merely an error, why punish her in this way?

In my opinion, Professional Golf comes off as ridiculous in this dispute. After playing for days, to disqualify a player for a misjudgement that all would regard as difficult to be sure about, makes Golf look like a game for accountants, not for athletes. No offense to accountants intended.

DARPA Grand Challenge

It looks as if the MDV sponsored Stanford Racing Team will win the DARPA Gran Challenge -- a desert race sponsored by the Defense Department to help develop autonomous vehicles. The Stanford vehicle finished the 132 mile course in 7 1/2 hours. Here is some terrific footage of the unmanned vehicles rolling by...

No winner has been declared yet because there are still two vehicles on the course. Start times were staggered, so there is a chance that one of these vehicles will still complete the race in a shorter time...

UPDATE: Stanford declared the winner, with a race time of 6 hours, 53 minutes. Dan posted a comment complaining that the video isn't "terrific" -- hey folks, remember these are driverless cars!

Fuel Cell Bus

Driving down to San Hill Road yesterday in my gas guzzling (25.6 mpg average) automobile, I saw an interesting freight item loaded on the back of a flat bed truck. An AC Transit bus emblazoned with the words ZERO EMISSIONS across the top. A handwritten note in the windshield read "FC Bus #3, Deliver to Oakland, CA." Today I found an article that appears on the "Fuel Cell Works" website, describing this amazing bus:

"When we integrate hybrid-electric components with fuel cell power, we get a vehicle that is quiet, fuel-efficient, and zero-emission," said Dave Mazaika, President and CEO of ISE. "We’ve taken this bus up to 70 miles per hour on the freeway, and in our testing phase, we have achieved twice the energy efficiency of diesel."

Here's a modest proposal -- when the current administration in Washington talks, as they did this morning, about "diversifying" away from the current high level of dependence upon the Gulf, instead of thinking about offshore wells on the California coast perhaps we should be working harder on developing a hydrogen economy.

United Airlines is Evil

Wow. Just tried to log onto the United Mileage Plus membership site and received the following error:

We're sorry, but we're currently unable to provide access to the My Mileage Plus web site without a valid e-mail address in your online profile. In addition, you must have opted in to the category of Mileage Plus Communications within your profile e-mail selections.

That's right. You have to agree to be spammed by United if you want to access the Mileage Plus website. This has to be a new low.

Of course, maybe it is an error - part of their site not working properly... Here is a link to the "validation error" page...

United Airlines is Doomed...

Dear United Airlines, have you noticed that your customer prevention department is the only part of the company that seems to be operating at maximum efficiency? First of all, I think you should probably test your website on something other than Internet Explorer. At least I hope it works on IE! On Firefox, trying to navigate to different sections often results in an error that I have never seen before -- "Redirection limit for this URL exceeded. Unable to load the requested page."

Since your website doesn't work, I tried calling your 800 number. Well that was a mistake. You have a new "voice recognition" front end -- which is *ok* if your caller wants to do something simple. But you don't make it easy to get to a live operator. Of course, when I finally did get to a live operator, the person had (a) a very bad phone connection and (b) a very thick Indian accent and (c) DIDN'T HAVE ANY CLUE ABOUT HOW TO DO ANYTHING RELATED TO UNITED.

As a result I am a very frustrated and unhappy customer. I can't imagine that other people calling are having any better experience. Customer service on a budget is not impossible! CALL JET BLUE. They have it figured out. Even Southwest is a good experience. On the other hand, just go out of business already.

Silicon Valley Traffic

Traffic in Silicon Valley has been my barometer for the economy since the early 1990s. When times are good, the freeways on the Peninsula back up with commuters headed from San Francisco down to tech jobs stretching from Redwood Shores to Cupertino... During the bubble the traffic on 101 and 280 (and even 880) through Silicon Valley became horrific.

This morning, for the first time since 2000, headed southbound on 280 through Woodside, there was a backup... no accident, just tons of cars headed South to consumer Internet jobs... Now all we need as a final indicator is for every billboard on 101 to be purchased by a dot com...

Party like its 1999: Bubble 2.0

The phrase "Bubble 2.0" is taking off at an incredible pace in the blogosphere. Accotding to a Google Search there are already over 70,000 references to the exact phrase "Bubble 2.0." Here is a typical one from Fred Wilson at Flat Iron Investments in New York City. Fred writes in part:

You went to a great party, had too good of a time, woke up with a terrible hangover, and promised yourself you wouldn't do that again.

Then the people who threw the party invite you to the next one.

What do you do? Go, of course.

I was at a dinner on Thursday night where the subject came up, and the number one question was, is it 1997? 98? or 99? In other words, how long will this bubble cycle go? With the recent IPO of WebMD (up 26% on their opening day) and others, I'd say 1998. The conditions are similar -- significant macroeconomic issues clouded the horizon (Russian currency collapse, the collapse of long term capital management, the asian economic crises...) and yet, in late 1998 with the IPO of TheGlobe.com an incredible bubble market was launched.

I think we are more likely in early 1998 -- broadbased market speculation in Internet issues is still a little ways off. Also this cycle will be different in a number of ways -- with a number of solid existing large Internet companies, more startups will be acquired rather than go public. Secondly, again because of those existing companies, there are comparables out there that will help value the market. On the other hand, the Internet has grown enormously in the past 7 years -- significantly more people are online, they are using the Internet for more things and for more time, their connections are faster...

I think the key trend to watch is the way in which Internet companies begin to invade rich media (radio, TV, film) industries. If the last decade was largely about how the Internet transformed the print industry, the next decade will be about rich digital content and transforming those industries. I suppose I should include voice and the telecommunications industry in that as well.

It should prove to be an exciting time once again

Failing the Turing Test

One man's online quest to pass the turing test...

That's It!

I was sad to learn this morning that today is my last day with Orb Networks. It has been a fun ride since January trying to make this company a success. I will miss working with the team at Orb, but I wish them all the best of luck bringing this truly incredible technology to market.

Now on to a new challenge!

WVoIP It Is!

Longtime readers of this blog may remember my ranting a little over a year ago about the new acronym for Voice over IP on WiFi networks... Om Malik's "V oWLAN". One suggestion that no one made back then, but is really the most reasonable is WVoIP -- for Wireless VoIP... Along comes a new conference called WVoIP ("...it's on the way, and it's poised to transform the landscape..."). I'm not sure what all the fuss is about anyway. I've been using Skype from my WiFi connected laptop all during the last year... But at least we have a reasonable acronym now.

2 New Downloads from Orb Networks

VoiceMail for Skype (V4S) and a photo screensaver -- demonstrating the power of the Orb API... http://www.orb.com/download

V4S, the Skype download, is quite clever -- install on the same computer you run Orb and Skype on. When you receive a call that you cannot answer, V4S picks up the call for you, plays your greeting, and records the incoming caller's message. This audio file is then stored in a special folder accessible via Orb and you can set the program to notify you of a new call... so you are out running errands and an SMS message beeps on your phone alerting you of a new voicemail. You can then launch your mobile browser, go to Orb, and listen to your Skype voicemail on your handset!

The photo screensaver also shows off how powerful Orb is for moving your personal media around. Install the screensaver on any Windows machine and you can access a shared folder from your home Orb machine. Here is how I use this feature -- grandma always wants to see the latest photos of her granddaughter. I gave her the screensaver and now I can update the photos (just by adding them to the shared folder on my home machine) and they auto-magically show up on my mother's screen!

Get both of these new downloads from http://www.orb.com/download

Orb as Platform

Today marks an important day in the history of Orb Networks. Today we expose to 3rd party developers the platform that Orb is based upon. I wrote about it on my Orb Blog.

There is a new thing happening on the web today. Companies that are promoting specific application functionality are finding that users are taking that functionality and doing entirely new and unexpected things... Google maps is a great example. Flickr is another. To a lesser extent, Paypal and others have provided at least minimal interfaces to a portion of what their products can do. All of these APIs mean that a developer can much more rapidly build interesting web applications that have robust functionality built right in.

But Orb takes this one step further. One of the developer's challenges is still having to host an application somewhere on the Internet to make it accessible to users. Orb makes the user's own home machine into the server. So a developer can build an application and deploy it directly to the consumer -- then Orb makes that application web-accessible from any device.

In the first phase the API is all about personal access to content or applications. But in the second phase (later this year) we will also start exposing a collaborative framework... developers will be able to leverage all of the functionality of orb to build mobile collaborative applications and deploy them to the marketplace through P2P infrastucture. This is what Web 2.0 is all about.

$200 Billion toward a hydrogen economy

As the total cost of the Iraq war approaches $200 Billion, it is sobering to think about what else this money might have purchases for the US.

For example, with about 200,000 gas stations around the US, this is $1 million per gas station. Wouldn't that have been enough to install hydrogen refueling equipment at every gas station in the country? Now that BMW and others have announced cars that can run on hydrogen or gas aren't we just waiting for the production and distribution infrastructure? $200 billion could have solved that problem.

Pot vs. Crack

Maybe it will turn out to be true. Maybe, as the Feds allege, the folks running medicinal pot facilities in San Francisco were really fronts for organized crime.

But on the other hand it might just be an excuse for the Feds to spend time arresting 61-year-old Iris Lai Hung Tam, of San Bruno, who is likely to put up a lot less of a fight then gun-toting gang members in Richmond.

The government is focused on cracking down on aging hippies with terminal diseases trying to smoke pot in the privacy of their own homes while drive by shootings and drug related gang activity have made Richmond one of the most dangerous cities in the country.

2005 SDForum Visionary Awards

As some may recall, I posted an entry last year after attending the 2004 SDForum Visionary Awards. Last year I was very impressed with the event, the awardees, and the speeches.

Last night I attended the 2005 version of this annual event which was again hosted by Heidi Roizen at her Atherton home. While the party was just as nice, and the hostess just as gracious, I have to say that I was dissapointed by the awardees and by their speeches.

Last year awards were given to four individuals who truly oversaw the creation of each of their respective companies. John Chambers of Cisco, Craig Barret of Intel, Scott Cook of Intuit and even Marc Benioff of Salesforce are all amazing entrepreneurs well deserving of the SDForum Visionary award.

While this year's honorees were all interesting valley players, only Carol Bartz of Autodesk could really claim to have built her company and even Carol joined Autodesk after it was a public company and already had $285 million in revenue. On an inflation adjusted basis that is almost $400 million in today's dollars. With $1.2 billion in revenue this year, that means that Carol merely tripled her company's revenue in 13 years. Nothing compared to the growth of Cisco, Intel, and Intuit.

And the other winners? Bill Draper (a venture capitalist), Carly Fiorina, and Ray Ozzie. Of these three, perhaps you could say that Ray Ozzie is deserving of the award -- certainly he is a visionary, although of a technology rather than entrepreneurial variety.

But the more dissapointing aspect of this year's awards was the speeched themselves. Sure, it was funny to hear Scott McNeally's story about firing Sun's VP of Marketing just to keep Carol Bartz from quitting. It was hilarious to have the very carefully worded introduction of Carly Fiorina by legal eagle Larry Sonsini. But nowhere this year did we hear the rousing call to action from the Silicon Valley community to be bigger than ourselves -- to focus on the world's problems not just on our techology and profits.

I left last year's event feeling inspired and wanting to do more for my country and my fellow man. I left this year's event feeling full of good food and interesting ideas -- but far from inspired.

Air travel SUCKS

So I flew out from California to Kansas today -- meeting with Sprint tomorrow and Thursday (Orb Networks' latest partner) -- and I am reminded of how truly terrible air travel has become. Flew on United from San Francisco to Denver, and then switched planes to fly from Denver to Kansas. All they fed us was peanuts -- 6 hours of travel and all we got was peanuts.

But the funniest/saddest moment was when I got up to see what kind of magazines they had on board. Nothing. I said to the flight attendent "kind of slim on the magazines today!" She replied with a bitter tone, "we are BANKRUPT you know."

OK, so its been awhile since I have done any business travel. But this is crazy. Why are business travellers putting up with this?

As a side note, its GREAT to be able to write in my blog that I am out in Kansas meeting with our partner Sprint. Back when I worked for Borland (public company) I could never write in my blog where I actually was and who I was actually meeting with. SEC regulation FD and all that...

Cokie Roberts on Ted Koppel

I was listening to the radio last night (the actual radio, not Orb Media...) and NPR had a program from the World Affairs Council where they interviewed Cokie Roberts. She is an interesting person, having had a long career at NPR in addition to her ABC career. But I found it especially interesting to hear her talk about Ted Koppel's decision to leave Nightline -- because of the attitude she displayed about how the broadcast industry thinks.

She said "I don't know what the networks have decided to do with the time slot," speaking of the likelihood that Nightline would be cancelled. When asked what viewers who enjoy programs like Nightline can do, she said something about how "we now have minute by minute polls that show that people click away when a TV program covers issues outside the US..."

This is the fundamental problem with the broadcast industry. Because it has to think in terms of "time slots" it worries about how to build the biggest (and/or most valuable) audience in any given slot. Thus if you can get a bigger audience share for mud wrestling, international news goes out the window.

I believe that we are on the cusp though of a monumental change in media. Just as the print media has been radically transformed over the past decade by the Internet, the broadcast industry wil be transformed over the next one. Web news sites and blogs have been the dominant forces changing print media. It will be interesting to see whether Orb Networks (where I work) will provide the model for the change in the broadcast industry.

But whatever the vehicle is, I believe that consumers will make a fundamental shift in their viewing pattern -- from asking "which channel should I watch" to asking "which SHOW should I watch" and that they will increasingly want to watch that show when, where, and how they want. While it may mean that more people watch mud wrestling (because it will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) it also means that those of us interested in international news will have access to thoughtful programs on the subject.

And this will be a boon to producers of content because they will have access to an audience of faithful viewers who can be counted and analyzed and monetized independent of a "time slot" in a broadcast schedule.

A new renaissance for "broadcast" media is upon us.