Category Archives: Technology

Technology

Bieber Labs Servers circa 2001

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BieberLabs Servers

Photo by rbieber

circa 2001-2002

‘Elmo’ and ‘Bert’. My machine is on my desk to the right of these (named ‘Grover’). I went through a phase where all machines were named after Sesame Street characters. I stopped just before having to use Snuffleupagus.

Going through old pictures I found this one of the old ‘labs’ back when we lived in a house that had no space for a lab.

Ahhh the good ol’ pre-DSL days. These are two linux boxes, one of which was on a 56K modem that autodialed my mindspring account if someone on the network requested something outside the network.

Gillmor Gang – User Driven Innovation

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The latest Gillmor Gang podcast talks about a concept called “User Driven Innovation” using Google and other vendors who have opened up their API’s as an example of this concept. The main subject of the podcast is disruption, of which this is just a part.

User Driven Innovation is the opening of service API’s to allow users to create applications based on a conglomeration of different service providers. You might remember reading something about this in articles on this site, including the ones here and here.

I have to say, I like the term “User Driven Innovation” much better than “Application Level Reuse”. Whatever you call it, it was validating for me to hear this on the way home last night.

Software based IP PBX System – Sphere Communications

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Yesterday I saw a presentation by Sphere Communications showing their product Sphericall, a service oriented PBX system.

The ideas in this software were really cool. The product is a software based IP PBX system which includes a SOAP based interface into the system, allowing you to completely integrate your VoIP network with your business applications.

The ideas presented in the presentation were pretty interesting. The product integrates phone, IM, and presence capabilities into its main desktop product, and also allows integration via web services to your business applications, allowing you to integrate your phone system into any application via a standards based interface.

Imagine being able to pop up customer information as soon as they dial in and being able to greet them by name and have their full history available to you right away via your CRM application. Imagine being able to put together conference calls by dragging and dropping people into your conference bridge when they call your office number. Now, image having IM like presence capabilities built into your phone system, so that you know whether someone is on the phone without having to call and be dumped into phone mail. These scenarios and many others were some of the things that Todd talked about during this presentation.

I thought the product looked extremely cool and shows a vision of corporate communication systems that is very compelling and exciting. The company has a whitepaper available on their web site (registration required).