WombatNation

Once again, it’s that time of the year when you open your wallet and make a large donation to the best college radio station in the country, KALX. Okay, so I’m a little bit biased because my wife is the general manager of the station, but they really are awesome.

And speaking of awesome, this year they have sweatshirts with an amazingly super cool design. Of all the KALX designs, this one is by far my favorite. It was used on a t-shirt about ten years ago. It was so popular that they have brought back the design for a sweatshirt this year. The front of the sweatshirt has El Dee Jay, as seen in the image here, and the back has El Escuchador (the listener). I guarantee you that this black hooded pullover sweatshirt will gain you immediate admission to all cool bars and nightclubs everywhere. The hipness quotient cannot be denied.

In addition to the t-shirt and bumper sticker, this year they have a logo bottle opener also in the $50 package. The bumper sticker design with the chicks hatching from the call letters isn’t quite as cool as the El Dee Jay design, but nothing is.

The fundraiser ends October 30th, so give early and often.

Next week October 23-25 I will be in Phoenix for the ScanSoft/Nuance Conversations 2005 conference. ScanSoft formally changed their name to Nuance yesterday. During most of the time the Solutions Showcase area is open, you’ll be able to find me in the Voxify booth. If you’re also going to be at the conference, please stop by. I’ll be there until late Tuesday morning.

Via Boing Boing I found this NYT article on Life Hackers and interruptions. It’s an excellent update on efforts to reduce the deleterious impacts of interruptions on people who spend lots of time on computers trying to accomplish many things in a short period of time. Well, at least it’s an excellent update on what Microsoft Research is working on.

Interruptions aren’t necessarily bad. As the article points out, an interruption may be someone trying to tell you something that solves the problem you’re working on. Instead of continuing to work on a solved problem, you can take advantage of the new data and move on to your next task.

While it is often stated that people take a long time to return to the task that was interrupted, a recent study more precisely calculates this time period to be about 25 minutes. Many times you return immediately to what you were doing, but sometimes the interruption is so distracting that you forget your previous task and don’t return to it for hours. I find this happens especially when the interruption itself spawns multiple tasks, sort of like being attacked by a MIRV in the old video game Missile Command.

This reminds me of a previous post on multitasking. After I posted about the Task Tracer project at Oregon State, I ended being interviewed by a professor there as part of their research. One aspect of their research is, in fact, assisting users in quickly returning to a previous task.

Perhaps the speech recognition platform and application business has reached a new level of maturity, as a sudden wave of consolidation has begun to sweep through the industry. The biggest recent move was at the most basic level, i.e., the automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech engine level. While ScanSoft/SpeechWorks has been buying up ASR and TTS vendors for a few years, the acquisition of Nuance was the most significant move by far. Nuance and ScanSoft were far and away the leading vendors in this space. IBM has been in this business for a long time, but they are best known for the use of the ViaVoice engine for dictation applications. There are also a few vendors like Loquendo and Cepstral that have certain areas in which they stand out as the best, but they aren’t nearly as widely deployed as ScanSoft and Nuance. Microsoft has also come a long way in the last few years, but their number of enterprise deployments is still relatively low. Outside of the companies willing to lock themselves into almost completely Microsoft-based solutions, I rarely see Microsoft ASR or TTS being used. Of course, that still leaves them with a lot of department level opportunities and a decent number of enterprise level opportunities.

Even more recently, there were two acquistions that were mostly technology acquistions. First, Microsoft picked up some IP, products, and a few engineers from Unveil. The Unveil website and press releases have never really mentioned any customer deployments, so I’m not clear if they had much of a customer base for Microsoft to acquire. Then this Tuesday, Voxeo bought up the products and customer base from Vocomo, along with a few support personnel. The founders of Vocomo, Danny B. Lange and Mitsuru Oshima, played a major role in the development of the GM OnStar Virtual Advisor product when they worked at General Magic.

The Microsoft purchase of Unveil is a little mysterious to me. As far as I know, Unveil’s products were written in Java and targeted at VoiceXML. Since Microsoft’s SALT now includes most of the functionality available in VoiceXML, it shouldn’t be that hard to covert the Unveil product to generate SALT, but I suspect Microsoft will want to rewrite it in C# anyway. Also, Unveil’s graphical tools were mostly redundant with what Microsoft already has. My guess is that they mainly wanted to acquire the IP. I don’t know anything about the developers at Unveil, so it’s quite possible they had some good engineers that Microsoft also wanted. Generally they try to get all their engineers to relocate to Seattle, though.

Voxeo’s acquisition of Vocomo is much more straightforward. Vocomo was never quite able to make it in the on-premise IVR market. They had a very reasonably priced and quite capable VoiceXML IVR, but it can be tough to make it any hardware market if you don’t have the funding to get big enough to take advantage of economies of scale. Vocomo’s products allow Voxeo to augment their hosted offering with a much more comprehensive on-premise offering.

Okay, so maybe three acquisitions isn’t exactly a “wave” of acquisitions.

Update 11/18/2005: Okay, so Intervoice bought Edify for the surprisingly low price of $33m. Also, it hasn’t been that long since Aspect was picked up by Concerto. Maybe I wasn’t too far off the mark.

In a move that probably should have happened from the beginning, it looks like Mississippi is finally going to allow casinos to be built up to 800 feet onshore. The legal change has been approved by the Legislature, and is now just waiting on the Governor’s approval. The owner of the Treasure Bay Casino is already planning his move.

If you’re not heavily involved in the development or use of free and open source software, I imagine it can be very hard to understand the subtleties and the importance of free (as in liberty and speech) software versus open software that you can use for free (as in gratis and beer). For most software users, it’s probably not the most important distinction in their lives for them to grasp. But for many users, and especially for developers, it is very, very important.

Karl Fogel wrote a very nice article at O’Reilly OnLamp.com that does an excellent job of explaining the difference between the two, and why both are very important. If you ever wanted to know more about these software movements, I highly recommend that you read this three page article. Karl did a great job of explaining the history, intellectual property concerns, and impacts on users and developers.

Although it took a month after Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast, my mother has finally gotten someone to come out and put a tarp on her roof. The hurricane had ripped enough shingles from her roof to cause leaks in several places. She had signed a Right of Entry form several weeks ago with FEMA’s Operation Blue Roof (which I prefer to call the Blue Roof Group), and they finally came by last Sunday to nail a blue tarp onto the roof. Although FEMA is formally in charge of the program, the Army Corps of Engineers actually manages it.

The good new is that the blue tarps are being installed at no cost to the homeowner. The bad news is that FEMA, and therefore every taxpayer, is probably paying way too much for this service. Contractors are being paid an average of about $2,500 to perform less than two hours of work. On top of that, the contractors are being given the tarps for free. One estimator interviewed in that story said his company would typically charge about $300 to provide the same service in Austin, Texas. Admittedly, many of these companies have come in from out of state and have high expenses associated with arranging for travel and lodging expenses for their workers, but it’s hard to imagine how they aren’t making a fortune from this program.

One downside to having the tarp nailed to your roof is that enough damage is done to the roof during the process that what might have been an isolated repair will almost certainly turn into a full roof replacement. The nails used to secure the tarp will obviously leave holes that pierce through the shingles. Of course, most homeowners have little choice, as most of the the roofers now have waiting lists that are several months deep. Given the choice of suffering continued water damage through the fall and into winter versus having to talk their insurance agent into covering the cost of a complete roof replacement, most people are likely to opt to spend the extra amount of time on the phone with an insurance adjuster.

Obligatory Disclaimer: This image accurately represents neither my mother’s house nor the workers who nailed the tarp to her roof.