MBET Blog
Vocera Communications Products
Alright, I wanted to not blog over the holidays but finding this was just too much.
The other day I was thinking about products built on top of the WiFi infrastructure that's sprouting up like a weed everywhere you go. I was wondering if you could start integrating essentially passive 802.11b chips into things to track their location via the various location tracking technologies out there like
Newbury Networks or
Ekahau.
Well, then I find a link to Vocera and their wireless, voice-controlled, VOIP communication product... wow. This is Star Trek stuff. Amazing.
Happy Holidays everyone. See you next year!
Social Networking Apps
So,
Friendster is huge. Or something. As
some call it, "
poonster".
Social network apps have kind of regressed... first there was (to my knowledge)
SixDegrees. Which is now dead. Then there was
ThreeDegrees, the MS research project social-interaction web-app. They don't fess up to being a Microsoft research project on the site, but they require XP for most of the cool features to work and the domain is owned by the Microsoft domain registration contact. (Imagine handling domain registrations for a full time job.
And then forgetting to renew one.) And there's all sorts of new ones, like
Friendster,
Huminity and so on. It looks like the biggest issue they face is the lack of non-stupid domain names.
But these web sites have gone from pretty rich collaborative filtering apps, which is interesting and actually requires some technology, to dating services, which are pretty simplistic. I suppose it just goes to show what actually sells on the internet - sex. Whether it's porn, dating or
exhibitionists, that seems to be about it.
It's kind of sad, but I guess it shows a couple of things: that collaborative filtering as some sort of standalone application isn't viable. Amazon has it, Netflix has it, but just setting up some sort of big collaborative tastes site isn't really going to fly. Second, it proves my (crackpot) theory that all new media forms are adopted first by porn which is what propels them into the mainstream. With the exception of the printing press, I suppose, and I could make the argument that society has changed a bit since then. But anything in the 20th century - home movie projectors, VCRs, DVDs, the Internet - the killer app has been porn and all the other stuff that people claim they're looking at.
At the Communitech "Chapter I" eventI met someone who is starting up yet another social networking app, but this time focussed on mobile phones. A cool idea. I wonder is there's any use to it beyond single people looking for a free booty call. Mobile group chat? Who knows. One thing I do know is that they guy will get funding. The space is hot. It's got all the right buzwords - mobile, social, wireless. But for everyone over 25, will it be good for anything?
Fall Finals
So, the good thing about having 10 courses running all at once is that you only have a few lectures in each, making the exams relatively easy. "Relatively" is the key word here. The first term we only have exams in Tax and Accounting. Between these two though I never want to see money again.
I don't know if we'll have exams for the other courses in the winter or spring terms... I expect we'll have more accounting exams though. Ugh.
The cult of the NDA
Excellent piece on why NDAs are a waste of time. Several VCs have come to class and said they won't sign them. Want the money? NDA? Too bad.
The Pitch
So I just finished making a pitch for $200,000 to an angel and a VC. Now, it wasn't for a real company, it was part of the integrated case, but... it's still pretty cool. This is pretty unique - you're not likely to get this kind of experience at traditional Canadian biz schools. They asked a lot of questions, didn't worry about what we were doing, they just threw questions at us whenever something crossed their minds. Pretty hands-on stuff. I wonder how we did?
Integration
So the Integrated Case is almost all over... the Integrated Case is where we take everything we've learned in the first term and use it to develop a business plan. It's a case-based group project, probably like a lot of other business schools have. But future MBET students who are from engineering background may not be familiar with the format. There's a case decribing a new product, we do a business plan along with a presentation in which we pitch the business to investors.
What I found interesting was not so much the report we produced (though it was a good report) but the process of putting it together. I can't find the exact quote but the one that springs to mind is "The purpose of work is not what we make, but what we become." I saw how I work with othe rpeople in a new light - nothing new in some ways, but maybe I see myself make the same mistakes enough times I can stop doing it eventually.
Anyway, future MBET students - don't wait to get going on the Integrated Case. Ugh. I never want to see 4 AM again.
