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Several weeks ago, I wrote about how much more effective Hulu is than conventional TV at getting me to watch commercials. PC World recently caught on too and wrote an interesting article on the subject this week. It turns out that advertisers are paying 1.5 - 3 times more (per thousand viewers) for ads shown on Hulu than on prime-time television:

The Simpsons: Worth More on Hulu than Fox

As one commenter, chuckchuck, to the PC World article puts it:

“watching shows online is beneficial to the viewer because it’s when we want it, with few (if any interruptions) - take the basic 15-30 second commerical on sites like HULU and increase it, and it’s back to downloading illegally - think people! When you’ve got something good, don’t screw it up!”

I agree wholeheartedly. Should Hulu decide to lengthen commercial spots, allowing me time to actually make it to the fridge and back, I am lost and the commercial has zero value. Hulu knows exactly the same thing that Google does: Show people ads in an unobtrusive way and we will react more positively overall. Hulu IS turning our brains to mush… and making a good buck at it too!

Filed under: Business, Marketing, Technology | No Comments »

This is an update to my April, 2009 post about using Callcentric to receive incoming faxes.

Back in April, I recommended using Callcentric’s fax reception feature as a cost-effective way to receive incoming faxes. In the past few days, I have had several people report that they were unable to send me faxes; both senders received messages related to poor line condition after a failure to transmit faxes to me. This seemed unusual since both fax machines are connected to regular phone lines (ie: no VoIP problems to blame) and both faxes were able to transmit faxes to other machines without issue. Additionally, each fax machine is in a different state and connected to a different telephone provider, making issues with service on the other end seem unlikely.

I started by looking for help on Callcentric’s web site to make sure I was not doing something wrong. During my search, I found this page on Callcentric’s site that states that fax reception is currently unsupported, but it sounded to me like perhaps only receiving faxes to regular machines connected to a VoIP telephone adapter were unsupported. When I wrote my post in April, the warning about fax reception was not on the page.

Unfortunately, Callcentric support has confirmed that any fax reception using their service is unsupported at this time, though they continue to tweak the service regularly; even faxes received using Callcentric’s own fax-to-PDF function (what I was using) are unsupported as of this moment.

Boo. Hiss. According to Callcentric’s support team, the fax reception feature is still being developed fully and they are unable to say when they might support fax reception again.

Filed under: Business, SIP, Technology, VoIP / Telephone | 1 Comment »

A friend of mine and I were interviewed about a week ago by Paul Krill from Computerworld and it looks like Google picked up the Norwegian version of the story first. What are your thoughts on Linux Certification?

Read my thoughts and the Computerworld article here

Filed under: Business, Linux, Technology | No Comments »

A good deal of my TV viewing is done through Hulu. If you are not familiar with the service, Hulu is bascially a web-based television — allowing you to watch the latest episodes of a number of popular TV programs through your computer. To boot, they have quite an archive of old favorites too; I enjoy the Alfred Hitchcock hour.

What intrigues me about Hulu is how many commercials I see when I watch a TV show online through the web. More appropriately, I should say that I am intrigued by how many fewer commercials Hulu has to show to pay for programming vs. conventional TV. On average, Hulu-hosted shows of 30 minutes have only 3-4 commercial breaks and they are all under 30 seconds each. On the high end, just 9% (2 minutes commercials for 22 minutes programming) of my viewing experience is spent watching commercials.

I suspect that Hulu has a firm grasp of what I am about to say next…. I watch nearly all of the commercials and in their entirety.

Why is this such a big deal?

Well, for one, I am a much better informed consumer in the eyes of the advertiser when watching TV through Hulu. If I were an advertiser and had to take my pick, Hulu would get the deal and for more money at that.

With convential TV, I know that I have 90 seconds, minimum, before I need to be back in front of the set. At commercial break, I rarely see the commercials because I am off doing something else. While a typical conventional TV broadcast spends nearly 27% of the time (8 minutes of every 30) showing TV commercials, I bet that the conversion rate for a typical TV commercial is pretty darn low. While I searched for conversion stats for both conventional and Hulu-based TV, I was not able to find anything comprehensive; I would love to see the numbers though, so if you have insight, please share!

In my experience,  Hulu is doing a much better job for their advertisers and conventional TV could learn a thing or two from them. Getting the consumer to absorb the ad and act is the name of the game. Hulu makes this happen by keeping it short. In turn, I am much less likely to leave during commercials. Also, because the commercials are so much less of an annoyance, I am less inclined to want to skip them.

Hulu, if you are listening, keep up the good work! I think we can all fall in love with fewer commercials and who doesn’t like watching their TV on their own schedule too?

P.S. to ABC: Your Linux computer users cannot watch your programming and having to install and use your clunky DRM viewer on Windows is both annoying and way too restrictive. Even on Windows, the experience is mediocre at best; streaming issues are par for the course and ruin the experience completely. Why not get with the program and license with Hulu instead? It may turn our brains to mush, but we will be so much happier in the end.

Filed under: Business, Linux, Marketing, Targeted Advertising, Technology, Ubuntu, Windows | 1 Comment »

A month or so back, a few members of Direct Brands‘ IT group presented to the Central PA VMUG (VMware User Group). The talk was focused on VMware’s View product and one item of special interest to me was how they got their SIP client software (soft phone) for Windows XP working on VMware View virtual machines.

Apparently, getting SIP softphone client software to work on a VM is not supported out of the box and some hacking of the registry is required to make the software functional.

Sarah Miller at Direct Brands was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the presentation and the registry hacks they used to get Nortel’s i2050 and Avaya’s IP Agent Release 6 working on their VMs. I have not tested this configuration myself, but Sarah reports that they have quite a few remote users with this setup working successfully. I believe that Direct Brands is using USB headsets with the VMware View Client in this scenario.

Thank you for the tip, Sarah!

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMWare, Inc.\Client\RDP Settings\

  DWORD: AudioRedirectionMode = 1
  STRING:RedirectPlugandPlayDevices = True

Filed under: Asterisk / Trixbox / Telephony, Linux, SIP, Technology, VMware, VoIP / Telephone, Windows | No Comments »

UPDATED 2009/06/21 - Read my important update

I used to be a MyFax customer and they provide a great service. I have rarely ever had problems with reliability of MyFax, but the $10 per month price was pretty high when I considered that I only receive and send a few pages a month; at that price MyFax allows you to send 100 pages and receive up to 200 incoming pages.

I have been a CallCentric user for a while now; they provide VoIP telephone service on a pay-as-you-go basis and also offer extremely reliable service. What I like most about CallCentric is the level of flexibility that they offer; you can buy only what you need to use. Additionally, CallCentric provides fax receipt capability and emails the faxes received to any email address as a PDF attachment.

CallCentric allows faxes to be received two different ways:

1. Via a rule: Call treatments allow CallCentric users to set up either a) a timeframe during which calls will automatically be routed to fax receipt b) redirect all calls from a particular number to the fax receiver c) send calls to fax when you are on a call or not registered with the SIP provider.
2. Via dedicated fax numbers: A DID (direct inward dial) phone number can be set up to receive faxes full time and this is the option I chose. In about 3 minutes, I had a local phone number dedicated to receiving faxes set up in my CallCentric account.

Using a dedicated fax number will cost me $1.95 per month, plus 1.5 cents per minute for each incoming call. Most fax machines are capable of sending faxes at a speed of up to 33.6 kbps; even if I figure that incoming faxes would only be transmitted at a fraction of that speed, 9600 baud, I could still receive about 1 page every 10 seconds.

So, I would have to receive about 3,200 pages in any given month to meet the $10 per month I was spending with MyFax. Over time, using CallCentric to receive my faxes instead will save a good deal of money.

I still need to work out how to best send outgoing faxes. One option would be to hook up my fax machine to a telephone adapter and use CallCentric. Another is to just email a scanned attachment instead. Perhaps CallCentric will offer the ability to send outgoing faxes via the web interface in a future upgrade.

Filed under: Business, SIP, Technology, VoIP / Telephone | 1 Comment »

Union card check, as presented in the dubiously named “Employee Free Choice Act”, is pretty scary stuff for both workers and entrepreneurs alike. The legislation would primarily do two things:

1. Allow organized labor establishment at any business, regardless of size, with a simple majority. In other words, unionization could be forced on a small business owner if he had only two employees and they both voted to unionize. Additionally, card check legislation would allow the employees to unionize without the employer’s knowledge; the business owner would not know his business was being unionized until it was too late. Additionally, this scheme would force workers who did not wish to unionize to join the union or face retribution.Should card check legislation pass, the risk to entrepreneurs may be so great that they may choose not to hire any employees at all. What this could mean for outsourcing and lost job creation is anyone’s guess. In a recession, the last thing we need to do is stifle entrepreneurship with heavier burden on job creators.
2. Card check eliminates the secret ballot. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that the probability for worker abuse and retribution is quite high once the right to a secret ballot is removed. If a secret ballot is such a bad idea, why is it the basis of our democracy?Under proposed card check legislation, workers would write their names on open and public ballots to vote pro-union, making it very easy for unions to identify and pressure those who are against unionization to join up or be forced out of their jobs.

Frankly, unions are bad for our economy for the simple fact that they remove the common-sense application of merit-based pay. I do not know about you, but I prefer to be paid for the unique value that I bring to an organization. Unionization, on the other hand, forces a regimented compensation that includes the least valuable and productive in an organization. Thus, those worth the most actually end up earning less as a result of the dead weight that tags along.

If you would like to learn more about card check legislation and the negative impact it will have on our economy, I encourage you to listen to Matt Brouillette this Saturday, March 20 on WHP 580AM at 8am. From the show announcement:

With the introduction of the so-called “Employee Free Choice Act” in Congress last week, organized labor is looking to cash in on its political investments in the Obama campaign. This week, Matt will look at the “Card Check” legislation and its impact on workers’ rights in America.

Rick Smith, a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and Vice-President of the International Labor Communications Association, will make the case for abolishing the secret ballot and mandatory arbitration. Kevin Shivers, state director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, will discuss why “Card Check” is bad for the economy, bad for business, and bad for employees.

If you are not able to catch the show live, you can listen to the show on-demand at TheBOXprogram.com immediately after it airs each and every Saturday.

Filed under: Business, General, Leadership, Politics | No Comments »

Pat Wittle and I had the pleasure of attending FOSE 2009: day 2 yesterday at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in downtown Washington, D.C. We had the pleasure to take in some of the latest and greatest new technology available to government and the private sector. FOSE hosted several hundred exhibitors this year and below are my top picks for the best of show:

• SolidAccess USSD I/O accelerators (winner of FOSE Best in Show 2009, Storage Category)

  I/O acceleration does not even begin to describe what SolidAccess is able to pull off with their latest product offerings and I encourage you to visit their web site to learn more. As we all know, mechanical I/O latency is the killer hurdle to overcome in any situation where you have a ton of data to process and need to capture or read it as quickly as possible. SolidAccess is 100% standards-based and can connect via Fibre Channel, SCSI or SAS. Access times are measured in microseconds and pricing is incredibly attractive given the benchmarks and capabilities I saw on display yesterday.

• Napatech NT* data capture technology

  On hand at FOSE, Napatech was showing off the capabilities of their advanced hardware that allows full-speed network traffic analysis and application off-loading at speeds up to 20 Gbps with frame sizes ranging from 64-10,000 bytes. Napatech offers 10ns multi-adapter capture timestamping, multi-adapter time sync, process off-loading redirection to a max of 32 CPU cores, a native Linux-compatible API and Napatech’s own LibPCAP library.

• PhoneFactor tokenless two-factor authentication

  If you are a geek like me, chances are that you have one or more tokens that enable you to utilize two-factor authentication. The added protection of two-factor authentication is quite nice, but having to carry around a bunch of tokens is not. PhoneFactor turns your cellular phone into the token instead. An SDK is available for a wide variety of programming languages and the system can integrate with OWA, Citrix, LogMeIn, VPNs and RADIUS. A free version is available to support up to 25 users.

• SolarStik portable wind/solar power generators

  These things are slick and if I had the dough, I would buy one just to play with; for the money, I do not think that you could come up with a more elegant and effective solution to mobile power generation. Additionally, if you regularly need sustained power in the field, I think that the SolarStik would pay for itself in fuel savings alone. The beauty of SolarStik’s system is that it is plug-n-play, which allows for rapid connection and use with a variety of DC and AC powered devices.

Filed under: Business, Linux, On the Radar, Technology | No Comments »

Thank you to everyone that came out to the CPLUG meeting tonight to hear Bob Igo and I talk about Magento /VirtualBox and LimeSurvey.

You can download my Introduction to LimeSurvey PowerPoint slides: HERE

Filed under: Business, Linux, Marketing, Technology | No Comments »

I will be presenting an overview and demo of the LimeSurvey open source electronic survey software this evening at 6:30pm for the Central Pennsylvania Linux User Group (CPLUG); we meet at ITT Tech on Eisenhower Blvd in Harrisburg, PA. The meeting details can be found here if you would like to attend: CPLUG Meeting Details

Some of the topics that I will include in my discussion:

• Brief history of the project
• LimeSurvey requirements & compatibility
• Features & functionality
• My applications & best practices
• A live test-drive of an ongoing survey
• Areas for improvement where community help is needed
• Question / answer period

Filed under: Business, Linux, Marketing, Technology | No Comments »