Monthly Archives: April 2008

Security error accessing url

By | April 26, 2008

Adobe recently rolled out a patch to Flash Player 9 to mitigate some bad security vulnerabilities (my favorite Flash vulnerability was hilariously described at Matasano Chargen). One of our Flash apps at work suffered collateral damage from the update. If you get the message “Security error accessing url” after applying the April 8 Flash Player… Read More »

Bizarre Bike Safety Video

By | April 24, 2008

When I think bike safety or car safety video, I mostly think about boring instructions on how to ride a bike or drive a car in the most conservative fashion. But what if the kids in the safety video had monkey faces and curly tails? That would make even the most Ritalin deprived kid pay… Read More »

2008 MySQL Conference

By | April 14, 2008

I’ll be at the 2008 MySQL Conference the next three days. If any of the three or so of you that read these posts will be there, let me know and I would love to meet up down in Santa Clara. Even better, I’d love to carpool with someone from Oakland to Santa Clara. Besides… Read More »

Earthquakes are Back

By | April 14, 2008

The San Jose Earthquakes played their first regular season home MLS match (though at the Oakland Coliseum) last Saturday since the team got moved to Houston by the low lifes at AEG. Sadly, they lost 1-0 to the Chicago Fire, though the Earthquakes far outplayed the Fire. Chicago is a pretty good team, but they… Read More »

Voicemail to Text

By | April 9, 2008

When I posted a couple days ago about Spinvox taking in a very large funding round, I missed an announcement that same day about Nuance’s new voicemail to text service, which they have decided to cryptically call Voicemail to Text. Nuance is providing this service only through telecom carriers. The thing I found most interesting… Read More »

Gartner’s IVR Magic Quadrant

By | April 9, 2008

An article in Speech Technology magazine reports that in the most recent update to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IVRs, Microsoft Speech Server and Nuance Voice Portal got dropped. The disappearance of NVP is no surprise, since Nuance announced at their Conversations conference over two years ago that they would no longer enhance it. Microsoft moved… Read More »

LCD Segments of Death

By | April 5, 2008

Just over an hour into my bike ride today while I was slogging up a steep hill, my Polar CS200 heart rate monitor rebooted. The screen went blank, a few cryptic symbols appeared on the display, and then the display filled with a union of all possible characters and symbols that it ever displays. And… Read More »

Proactive Flight Check In

By | April 3, 2008

Nancy Jamison posted a nice write up on her blog about a recent Voxify webcast where Voxify presented with Continental on a new outbound voice app we just rolled out for Continental that calls customers up to 24 hours before their flight and offers to check them into their flight. It’s an especially great app… Read More »

SpinVox Takes in $200 Million

By | April 2, 2008

SpinVox certainly has come a long way in the last few years since I checked out their service for converting voicemails to text. They launched at nearly the perfect time. Large vocabulary speech recognizers have been around for a long time, but in the last few years they have become particularly plentiful and cheap. Also,… Read More »