The Tomigaia Blog

New Osama web site.

I saw a very interesting new web site today about Osama bin Laden (AKA Usama bin Laden). It is called Where's Osama???

If you want to do something concrete to help the USA, try this site out!!! (And enjoy the lovely DHTML!)

New Method of Generating Electricity Discovered

A new, clean source of electricity was discovered recently (see this article "Researchers generate electricity from tap water").

I hope this can be commercialized soon!

The blackout of 2003 hits, and I hit the road....

Yesterday, at 4:11pm, I was working on my computer. Suddenly, the screen looked warped and wobbly. I heard funny noises coming from my UPS. Then it all goes black.

I think to myself "oh, just another fire drill". We had a fire drill in the office last month, and I thought that the building management were giving us a pop quiz. I went out into the hallway, and saw that it was pitch black. It was only then that I realized it was a real power failure.

I ran back to my office and shut down my computer (without a screen to help). Despite the fact that so many people were in trouble, stuck in elevators and subway cars, all I could think about was that my UPS was working and that all my data on the computer were safe. Then I ran around guess what I should do.

The phones were working, so I called my father, and he said that he still had power in his office, about 5 blocks away. Only later did I find out that his building had a backup power source. This made me think that it was a local outage in only my building, but it turned out to be the whole Northeast!

At that point I decided to give up on doing any more work, and I ran down 20 flights of stairs, and got to the street. After talking to some people on the street, I found out that the subways were all stopped, so I went to Pier 11 to see if I could catch a ferry uptown. The roads were already badly clogged, and police cars were trying to get through. There was already a giant crowd at Pier 11, and I quickly gave up on taking a ferry and started walking uptown.

[I felt a memory rush into my mind... A discussion back in 1998 with a manager of the Tokyo Electric Power corporation. He said that Tokyo could never have a giant blackout. The grid was so well designed with redundancy in mind that a surge blackout was incoceivable. Now I am beginning to wonder....]

The heat of the afternoon sun was excrutiatlingly hot. Thousands of workers walked with me, and we all headed north. I had a plan in mind: get the ferry across the east river at 34th St. About 1.5 hours later, I arrived at 34th St, and it was a bedlam. There were fistfights in the ticket line which was hundreds of yards in length. I asked a cop what was going on, and he said that the police had just convinced the ferry operator to allow customers to pay on the boat instead of forcing them to buy tickets before boarding. This news gave me hope. I jumped into the end of the shorter ferry boarding line, and was able to get on the 2nd boat that arrived. On the first boat, a woman fainted and had to be put on the dock by the police. She looked green with heatstroke, so I gave her one of my bottles of water. She drank some, and seemed to get better.

As the ferry pulled away from the dock, I was able to see the thousands of people still waiting at the ferry terminal. No one looked happy!

After the 7 minute ride across the east river, I started walking to Roosevelt Island. I arrived home at 8:30, four hours after leaving my office in downtown Manhattan. My feet hurt, and my Teva sandles were worn down, but I was happy to be home. It was only then that I remembered that I had to climb up the stairs to the 19th floor! (It was then that I wished I could post a rant on I HATE NYC.)

Since the cell phones had stopped working immedieately after the blackout, I had no idea how my wife and son were doing. Luckily they were fine, and so were my sister and parents. Our landline was still working, and it felt great to get some good news.

I listened to the radio in the dark for a while, and then lit some candles. Soon Kerstin and Darius came home.

After a night of deep sleep in the warm muggy bedroom, I woke at 6:00 am to the cries of my son screaming "The sun is up! Time to wake up!" In my dream, the one that had intruded upon, all the power had been restored throughout New York. I was shocked to see that reality was very different. Most of the city was still without power. My home regained electricity at around 5pm today.

It feels great to have a computer to work on, a light to see by, a ice cube from the fridge. I appreciate them much more today than I did yesterday.

But I also feel that our dependence of technology and electricity has gone too far. 2 more days without power, and the whole region would have become a living nightmare. I now want to become less dependent on the Grid, if I can.

Data-Tapping problems ahead

At this week's IETF meeting, I attended a session where there was a presentation about the way that Cisco proposes to enable Legal Interception (Also describe in this Internet Draft). I saw a related article on a PBS web site about big problems with the current legal data-tapping situation.

If this article by Robert Cringley is even partially true, the future of legal surveillance does not look good. If the security of CALEA systems in the US is lax, they are probably even more lax in Japan. There are more slippery slopes here, and I hope to look into this some more in the future.

Internet Cash Tournaments: A new way to go?

After years of growth the Internet is said to be stagnating by some. Many sites are shutting down because there is no more money out there to be made in advertising or in selling content to consumers.

In fact, some sites have been forced to change into sex related businesses to survive. In parallel growth with porn and sex-related sites, there are gambling sites. The number of ways to gamble on the net always seems to be growing. One new kind of gambling site that I discovered recently allows users to participate in a legal kind of gambling, called "cash tournaments". These are games, like pool, where players put money into a pot, and then play in a tournament. The winner of the tournament wins most the money in the pot (games site takes it's flat fee out of the pot for facilitating the game). One restriction is that only US citizens and read or residents of the US over age 18 are allowed to play. When you win a tournament, you get points, and you can then convert those points back into money at the same rates of 100 points to one dollar. MiniClip and GameTrust, built the this gaming system together, and it seems popular was sometimes 500 users in games at a time. They seem to have solved all the security issues with Java applet games, as well as the physics of pool.

For people who are lovers of pool and gambling this game system must be extremely addictive. I worry about compulsive gamblers and how they could lose all their money very quickly to games like this. Some people are winning hundreds of dollars per week playing this game! On the other hand, this may be a valid form of entertainment on the Internet.

If the GameTrust system ever is integrated with the micro payment systems developed by Peppercoin and the like, I believe that there will be an explosion in Internet gambling, and perhaps a new business model for many gaming sites.

Visual Thesaurus

I have been showing this site to a lot of people,

and everybody seems to find it interesting. It is a Visual Thesaurus and it was made by a local, New York, company called Plumb Design. They used a product of their's called a "ThinkMap" to make it. This interface widget can be used to represent many kinds of data, not just semantic networks.

Also, my friend Adam Lindemann pointed me to a interesting search engine called Kartoo. It seems to make visual maps of concepts on the web. I found it quite amazing.

I use it to get my creative juices flowing, and to start thinking laterally.

What do you think about this interface? Please add your about this interface to my blog! (use the comment feature below.)

Is there a trend towards micropayments for content or services?

I have been thinking a lot lately about how anybody will make money on the web in the future. It seems that web advertising has become less effective every year. "Pop-ups", "Pop-unders" and other annoying tactics have made most web users hostile to web ads, and more and more lawsuits are taking place. (See this article about the Gator situation, where a piece of spyware was swapping ads in web pages.)

Many sites are now using a "pay-to-not-see-ads" policy, and in many cases it seems to be successful. Users get to have a much better experience using the site, and the site gets the funding it needs to operate directly from the information consumer. Some shareware products, like Eudora, use the same technique to make users pay for using an application.

Some sites, like the New York Times, are free, but charge to see old articles. This model makes sense to me for many reasons. The evolution of business models in the world of publishing did not lead to a dead end. I think that paying for good content through micropayment subscriptions will be the next wave for content sites. The only new wrinkle is that subscriptions will be dynamic and of much finer granularity. (For example, subscribing to the "Science" section of the newspaper for the next 3 weeks.)

One very interesting company that I have been meeting with that has developed solutions for content providers who want to begin charging for content is Javien. They have built a service that is easily branded by the customer with their own logo and interface, and that allows sites to charge on a pay-per-view basis, a subscription basis, or both. Some of their customers sell access to archives, others sell monthly reports. In the future, they hope to integrate with other systems and enable music and movies to sold through their system as well.

The key to their technology is the ability to securely protect content to be sold. All the content is kept in a secure proxy server, and only released to the user once the payment has been made.

I think that this kind of solution will be the only way that most web-based content businesses will survive. But before this is truly viable a universal system, perhaps based on Federate Identity (MS Passport, Liberty, etc) that will make this type of transaction effortless to the user.

Video Streaming Project to Prevent War in Iraq

An old friend of mine by the name of Klaas Glenewinkel is orchestrating a video stream-in to try to prevent a war in Iraq (aka the "no war media marathon"). I like this idea: it is like blogging, but uses personal video feeds instead of text and pictures. This would be great for mobile video streams from gargoyles! See more here: Remote TV.

I have started a Blog.

After a long delay, I have started a blog.... I installed the software this morning on my web server, and in about 10 minutes, I was publishing my first entry. I have to thank Joi Ito for pushing and prodding me. I couldn't/wouldn't have done it without his input.

Of course, there is a bit of "blog jealously" involved as well. Since Joi and other friends have such great blogs, the pressure to "keep up with the Jones" is there. So far, I think the blogging infrastructure is well-enough developed to be less frustration prone than previous technologies. I may rue these words.

New Ideas: Oddpost

While on the road this month, I got a chance to use a exciting new
service called Oddpost. An long-time friend of mine, Iain Lamb, is
one of the co-founders of Oddpost, and he gave me a free account
while it was in the beta testing stage. It was opened to the
general public last month, and has got a strong response from
paying users. For $30 a year, a customer has a ad-free web-email
service that unlike Hotmail and its ilk, ACTUALLY WORKS LIKE A
REAL E-MAIL PROGRAM! (Sorry about the caps. I am a believer now!)
Iain and his team have built an Outlook work-alike out of DHTML,
meaning that the mail program is built into the web page. Once you
download the 50k page, you begin to see the true power of a
lightweight portable mail client. Drag-and-Drop, column sorting,
subject filtering, separate message composition windows, it is all
there! It works best with IE 5.5 and 6.0, and it supports remote
POP mailboxes, so you can use it with your current mail
accounts. For a list of all the features, check out the web site,
and if you are tired of slow, user-unfriendly web e-mail, give the
free 30 day trial a shot. You won't be disappointed. (Note to
Japanese language users: there are some minor problems with the
Japanese mail support right now, but they will all be fixed very
soon.) (It was fixed in late 2002 )

SendWordNow

The events of last September have left a permanent mark on the hearts
and minds of New Yorkers and all Americans. And from the all hardship
And loss can come inspiration. One entrepreneur that I have become
acquainted with here in New York decided that there was a niche that
was as yet undeveloped in emergency communications. Sanford Cohen, the
inventor of SendWordNow, considered himself a very wired/wireless individual,
with a cell-phones, voice-mail and text-messaging making him very easy
to contact, and very able to communicate. When the telecommunications
infrastructure of New York City failed during the terrorist attacks,
he was frustrated that he could not tell any of his family or loved
ones that he was safe. Since he had much entrepreneurial exprience
with e-mail/communication systems in the past, he decided to try to
quickly invent a new combination of exsisting technologies that would
meet the needs of people who need to notify a lot of people in a hurry
during an emergency.

SendWordNow assigned you with a ID number and paper cards that you can
distribute to people who need to reach you and your family in a hurry.
Then one toll-free call or web-based message is all that is needed to
get the message out. For each person to contact, you must provide at
least one email address, or at least one phone number. Once this is
set up, the benefits become clear. If you have a parent who is
susceptible to stroke, and you give your ID number cards to the
neighbors and care workers, in the event that something happens to
your parent, anybody who knows how to use a phone can leave a message
at SendWordNow. That message is them transcribed into text and sent
out as e-mail (mobile or not) as well as outgoing calls to the family
at work and at home. The technology to do this may seem simple at
first glance, but a scalable, robust system that connects e-mail,
telephone and other networks turns out to be far from trivial to
make. All this complexity is hidden from the customer. The appeal I
see for this technology is ***increased peace of mind*** for the many
families today that are distributed over large distances and need to react
quickly in emergencies.

I think that this idea has a lot of potential applications beyond the
obvious family-usage scenario. For example: It could be a
cost-effective way for a school could contact all parents/caregivers
in the case that school was interrupted for any reason and ask them to
come get their children. For companies that run plants (like the
uranium processing plant at Tokai-Mura in Japan that had a recent
critical event), it could be a tool to quickly notify area residents.
(The service does not yet support international phone contacts, but
will likely expand to cover other nations in the future. E-mail/mobile
phone e-mail works in any country, of course)

This kind of original idea will most definitely have an impact on the
future of people's experience with technology in the near future, and
hopefully save many people from having a lot of avoidable emotional stress.

{If you are interested in trying out the service, SendWord now has
given me a Special Code Please contact me for it.)

The Web is no longer fun?: Pulsators!

As many have noted, the New York Times declared the fun days of the
web to be over in a recent column.

I think that if you look hard enough, there is still fun to be had out
there. A digital artist and good friend of mine here in New York named
BigTwin has been working for a few years to perfect an interactive
visual tool/game/design tool called Pulsators.

http://www.technopeace.com/ (Uses Shockwave Plug-in)

To try it out, the interface is refreshingly non-intuitive. My advice:
make sguiggles with your mouse, and click on one of the control
settings, and them make some more squiggles to see what is different.

Internet Governance?

I attended a panel discussion this month sponsored by Business 2.0 and
moderated by the editor-in-chief and friend Ned Desmond. The main
topic was "How to Succeed at E-Business (Without Going Insane)", and
the topic seemed to resonate with the audience of corporate IT
managers. One of the panelists that night was John Patrick, former
head of Internet Technology at IBM. He had some interesting opinions
about the future of e-business, and the amount of work left to be
done. I agreed with his feeling that customers and companies have just
covered the tip of the iceberg. He also asked the assembled to look at
the behavior of teenagers and how they interact with technology to get
a better idea of their own future customers. Having noticed myself how
quickly Japanese teens adopted cell-phone e-mail and other wireless
technology, I felt that he was on the right track (My question: Will
American companies really look hard at teen needs today? Hard to say.)

At the end of the session, I was able to ask the panel a question, and
the one I asked (in a nutshell) was: will the problems of Internet
Governance become a factor in the future success of E-businesses? John
Patrick, who has been intamately involved with this issue, gave a
generally optimistic answer. He did admit that there are also a
mountain of problems left to be solved in this area.

My perspective is shaped by working on the 'Net in Japan for the last
8 years. Having seen how global initiatives failed to help the
Internet in Japan, and how the Japanese Internet took its own course
has led me to believe that the influence of the ICANN has not been
great.

As you can read in their own recent report [1], the ICANN's own head
wants to reform it, but as the New York Times wrote today [2], many
people, including me, doubt that the ideas presented will really solve
the problems of the ICANN.

Companies like New.Net are jumping into the fray, and trying to fill a
void left by the lack of vision at ICANN [3]. And with elections in
the works, I don't know who to vote for! [4]

I don't think that there is a magic bullet to solve these complex
issues, but unless something is done soon, there will be troubles with
consequences for every entity (corporate, NGO, NPO, or individual) on
the 'Net today.

MarketBoy

Innovation is alive at MarketBoy.
I recently met with the people who founded MarketBoy, a new type of
commerce site, and was given new hope. Their office is located in the
newly reasonable Tribeca area of Manhattan, and are still in the
post-site-launch phase of their business. I think they have a
fascinating idea for a new kind of intermediary business. They have
taken the long tested ideas used in electronic financial markets and
applied them to consumer commerce on the web. Customers make bids on
products, but unlike at an auction site, there are many sellers
competing for one buyer, not just one. Also, all the products are new,
not used. There is transparency to the market, and the laws of supply
and demand should get the best price on a DVD player for both the
buyer and the seller (as you would for a stock on a stock
market). There have been many attempts to succeed at being a B2B
marketplace, and most have not flourished, but as web-consumers enter
the next phase of their education, they may want to go beyond
price-comparison shopping robots, and actually use an efficient
marketplace like MarketBoy's. I have used the site, and find it very
addictive. If you are interested in new types of e-commerce, take a
look at this site, and see what you think.

News Analysis: Is Silicon Alley Dead?

It has been exactly one year since I moved to New York after
living for 7 years in Tokyo, and I have gained a new
perspective on the world after seeing Japan from the outside,
and seeing New York as a returning expatriate. I arrived in
New York as the bubble finally burst, and observed the
shrinking Internet economy of 2001 firsthand. I asked myself:
is this the end of Silicon Alley, the convergence of finance,
media and advertising that was born in New York in the mid
nineties? I saw a broad shrinkage, hurting companies that were
doing fine, as well as those who were not managed well. Many
thousands of skilled workers became unemployed (and perhaps
unemployable), and many buildings are still vacant. It is
somewhat ironic that much of the office space left empty by
closed web companies was taken over temporarily by financial
companies after the World Trade Center attacks. That has now
ended, as many financial companies move to permanent offices
in neighboring New Jersey and Westchester, giving some parts
of Silicon Alley the feeling of a ghost town. To get closer
to the action, I recently moved to a small office in a
building called 55 Broad St, right across the street from the
New York Stock Exchange, and every day I sense the loss of
vitality in the street. Greenspan may think that 2002 will be
the year for the US to recover from this recession, but
downtown New York and Silicon Alley are still hurting. The
problem? My feeling is that it is the business mood. The mood
in most corporations these days is one of cautiousness. Enron,
9/11 and the recession have built fear in the minds of
American businesspeople. Everyone is thinking "Let's do a
reality check. Do all our activities still make sense? What
can we cut?" This mood hurts many providers of goods and
services, but those companies that can adapt to the demand
will survive. A good example of adaption is the wireless
industry, where some companies have moved quickly into urgent
messaging (for when you need to tell many people that you are
alive in a hurry.) The appeal of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and
Doubt) as a marketing tool has increased lately. Israeli
security technology companies may do very well in the near
future in the USA. Another problem is the blockage of capital
earmarked for new ventures. With so much negative feeling
towards dot-com flops, and no IPOs to speak of, it has become
very hard for some entrepreneurs to find funding. This will
slow the pace of innovation for the short term, but for
companies that were funded in 2000, or companies that do not
require large amounts of capital, there is still room to grow.

The only transactions that seem to be happening with any
frequency in Silicon Alley these days are purchasing of
distressed assets and other types of buy-outs. Many companies
that developed great software, finished up their capital and
had to shut down are now trying to sell their intellectual
property as a way to recoup what they can. This is not an very
visible market, but there seems to be still some activity
there. (See links in references below)

With so much attention spent on the problems in America, there
is little time left over for US companies to think about doing
business with Japan. The news media are mostly reporting
impending implosions, and there is not much chance of that
changing in the near future. I was only able to travel to
Japan twice in 2001, but I got the sense both times that
beneath the surface, a lot of changes are taking place in the
psychology of the Japanese people. Perhaps it is a true
"reality check". I see a lot of pain for Japan in the future,
but I see Japan emerging from the current deflated situation
in 2 or 3 years. In the meantime, only the fittest will
survive.

References:
KPE

Razorfish