Mike Blonder: Thoughts on Technology, and the Web

An increasing set of affordable devices offer consumers a very rich set of data collection and logging capabilities. These capabilities can produce a wealth of practical information that can be extraordinarily useful, on a practical level, if the information can be accessed from the Internet.

For example, A manufacturer based in the United States, Nielsen-Kellerman of Boothwyn, PA, offers a line of these affordable devices, specifically, hand-held weather meters that also happen to be waterproof. The 4000 series Nielsen-Kellerman, also known as "Kestrel 4000", handheld meter ($249.95) is available with a computer interface and software that collects and organizes data about local atmospheric conditions, including temperature, windspeed, wind chill, barometric pressure etc. This device is also available with an option outdoor portable vane mount.

Connect the interface cable for the Kestrel to a serial Ethernet bridge (rather than a home computer), such as Aboundi's ARS1200 ($198.00) which, in turn you can connect to a home Ethernet router; mount the Kestrel 4000 outdoors where it can collect meaningful data and you have a low cost local weather sensor that you can access from anywhere across the Internet. If you are in the construction business and need to know remote weather conditions prior to traveling for a job, you can save yourself a bundle. Run Kestrel's data collection software on your laptop; hook up to the Internet and connect to the IP address assigned to the Aboundi unit via Aboundi's Serial Comm Virtual Comport software and you can get all the information you need to intelligently decide whether or not it makes sense to take your trip.

There are a wealth of additional useful scenarios for such a product: Skiers who would otherwise travel hundreds of miles for a weekend skiing can check actual weather conditions and make the right travel decision. Yachtsmen can do just the same.

IMB Enterprises, Inc. provides online marketing services to the Red Oak Trading folks who run Altimeters.net. You can find many other comparable devices on their website. Please do visit and, most of all, Enjoy.

A company by the name of M2M Solution, out of Valbonne, France has announced the availability of an intelligent hardware device called "Homebox." This "Homebox" product incorporates an OMAP3503 processor from Texas Instruments. "Homebox" is targeted to the market for remote monitoring of private homes. But is this anything revolutionary, or even new? What about HTI?

HTI, or Home Technology Integration has been around for at least ten years. HTI is a technology built around the concept of a "smart" home, meaning a residence filled with intelligent devices: smart HVAC, smart Plumbing, distributed Home Theater, distributed Home Audio, distributed Home Computing and, of course, remote control from any location on the Internet. I venture to say that there are many comparable products to the M2M Solution "Homebox" to be found in the hardware category of HTI residence controllers. I can speak to this topic as I, myself, contributed to the architecture of a Technical College Curriculum on HTI about 3 years ago and wrote one of the sections of the curriculum itself, on Access Control. In sum, I see little that is new in the product.

I am also at a loss to see what is inherently "M2M' about such a product (I hate to say it, but this acronym sounds like the candy M and M, but doesn't pack the chocolate rush when you digest it). Rather, it appears that the proponents of M2M have shaped rather ambiguous borders for this technology, borders that permit spill over into RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) as well as into HTI, as already noted. I prefer to stick with M2M as another name for Telemetry. Telemetry is very old technology and, certainly, one can argue convincingly that telemetry is included in HTI. As well, one can argue convincingly that telemetry is a definite application for RFID. But one should NOT try to portray these associations neither as "new" nor "revolutionary."

Most of the hardware that we sell on our Industrial Strength Ethernet website can be used to fabricate a solution with some comparable performance to a device such as the M2M Solution "Homebox," and this hardware is available RIGHT NOW.

We have a customer who has purchased a number of COM1000 M2M devices from us. The customer faces some hurdles with his application (a telemetry project incorporating utility meters; the COM1000 as a data collection device; and a remote FTP server where the data is stored for application processing). We are working with him on clearing the hurdles; however, until recently, our customer had not approached the task from the right angle; rather, the customer did not pay any attention to information to be found in the COM1000 system log. The customer simply drew conclusions based upon conditions at his FTP server and assumed failures on the part of the COM1000.

Yes, the COM1000 incorporates a system log. A system log review is a critical component of any effort to clear hurdles for an application that incorporates such a device. Seems like a no brainer, right? Any/all devices that contribute to the application process should be reviewed. So why would our customer neglect such a review of one of the two key components of his application?

The answer is that each of the COM1000s are deployed in the field. Even though these devices are connected to the Internet via Ethernet networks, the customer lacked the knowledge and tools to remotely query the devices to obtain the system logs. The vendor was remiss in that the vendor did not provide a readily available methodology (meaning an application that can be launched from a web browser) to obtain the system log.

The vendor was also remiss in providing a logging capability with minimal memory for storage. Our customer's application ends up taking a substantial amount of memory for storage. In fact, the system log storage available will be overwritten once every hour to an hour and a half. Therefore, it becomes critically important to query each of the deployed devices on a schedule that ensures collection of a complete log for a time interval that falls safely within the hour to an hour and a half interval.

When we did review the system log we noted where the COM1000 experienced a problem writing a file to the FTP server. The fact has turned out to be that the two applications (Application 1: the communication from the COM1000 to the FTP Server, and Application 2:the customer's application that reads the data received into a database) occasionally collide. When these collisions happen, the system breaks down for several hours until the COM1000 eventually resets itself and "moves on" to send the next set of meter readings to the FTP Server.

I am writing an M2M application with a tool by the name of Expect to regularly connect to each device and obtain the system log.

The moral of this story is that, just because a device can hang off an Ethernet Network and talk to the Internet does NOT mean that it will be easy for the average user to connect to the device. The process of "dumbing down" is such that EVERYONE is looking for a browser to do something on the Internet. Command line is a place where that average user fears to tread. It's up to folks like me to write tools so that average users can derive value from their devices.

M2M is not simple.

©IMB Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), in theory, were created to make life easier for web designers. But, I've found that CSS has made design MUCH harder. Here's why:

There really is little, if any, uniformity in the type of response that different browsers will give to Style Properties. For example, if I try to lump together the current versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Apple Safari, and absolutely position a box nested within another box (for an example of this type of positioning, take a look at my website, Industrial Strength Ethernet and, specifically, the product box for Aboundi's Electric Connect® product) I will fail. Chrome and Firefox on Windows XP Pro work fine, but Firefox on Apple MAC and Safari on Apple MAC will not work fine. Opera does not work fine, neither on Windows XP Pro, nor on Apple MAC. In each of these cases, the product box is too high and crowds the bottom line separator.

I've agonized over this discrepancy for hours. I have finally, and painfully, come to the conclusion that the only solution is to serve a different style sheet for each browser.

Microsoft has a neat solution for their various Internet Explorer browsers to accomplish this task. Simply embed a conditional statement within the <head> tag section of your web page for each different Microsoft browser that you care to serve with your page:

<!--[if lte IE6]>

<link rel="stylesheet" href="ie6_main.css" type="text/css" />

<![endif]-->

and the connecting computer will find the right style sheet (in the case of my page, "ie6_main.css") and serve the page with some uniformity with other browsers. In the above example, the "lte" of the conditional statement means "later than or equal to" Internet Explorer 6.0.

But this solution is nothing more than a hack, is it not?

This conditional syntax, this hack, unfortunately, does not work with other browsers. The bottom line is that I plan on implementing a server side script (written in the PHP language) to serve each browser the correct page.

I am using these Microsoft conditional phrases on each of my other websites, Best Plain Web Pages and IMB Enterprises with, presumably, success. I am not positive as I have only had associates verify the correct appearance of each page, or tested myself in my office lab.

Admittedly, only CSS 1.00 has been ratified by all browser manufacturers. I would hope that 2.0 be ratified by all browser manufacturers right away as resolving discrepancies as I have noted takes lots and lots of time.

©IMB Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved

IMB Enterprises, Inc. actively pursues opportunities for non-IT computing solutions, including test and measurement. We maintain a web site dedicated to these solutions, Industrial Strength Ethernet.

One of our customers is working on a solution for remote meter reading. Our customer provides management services for utility usage to large industrial clients. As part of his service he publishes electrical usage information every 5 minutes to his customers via his own interactive website. He is collecting information using two devices that he purchased from IMB Enterprises, Inc.:

• 
  SimpleComTools COM1000 Internet Appliance
  and the


• Raven XT Cellular Data Modem from Sierra Wireless

We found him an alternative solution: Drop the need for cellular data communications by implementing point to point, or point to multi point serial radios from Digi Maxstream. We have successfully communicated, bi-directionally with the COM1000 from a PC via these radios.

To solve the need for a custom application to:

1) Query the remote locations/radios as required and
2) Collect the data and save it in a useful format for the customer's application (in this case common spreadsheet software)

we are recommending an "erector set" piece of software, Collect from Labtronics. Collect is an "erector set" in that application-unique steps can be added to Collect in the form of VBA macros; thus, the application is useful for a range of applications. We feel that the acquisition cost for Collect ($500.00 US Dollars at the time of this writing) pales when compared to the hourly cost of custom programming and revision.

Please contact us at (802) 457-2929 if you would like to hear further about this solution.

Please visit Industrial Strength Ethernet for further information on the devices used in this solution.

Copyright © October 9, 2008, IMB Enterprises, Inc., all rights reserved

Today's New York Times Online Edition ran an article on Google and it's search algorithm: "Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine" by Saul Hansell. I read the article and was at a loss to find a lot new, despite Mr. Hansell's claim that his day at Google's headquarters afforded key engineers an opportunity to "[explain] more than they ever have before in the news media about how their search system works."

What was new for me was the apparent reality (implicit to what Mr. Hansell has to say, but not explicitly said) that Page Rank is merely a contributor to the order of results served up by Google's systems in response to queries. I got to this point from Mr. Hansell"s statement that "Mr. Singhal has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages. . . " If he has, in fact, gone beyond Page Rank, then I am not as concerned for clients with slipping Page Rank as I would otherwise be.

But Page Rank is not the point of this entry. The point is that, from my perch, Mr. Hansell's suggestion that Google has substantially improved the responses it serves up to queries, is (1) not the case, or (2) fine, but we still have lots and lots and lots of improvements to make. If either (1) or (2) are correct, there are plentiful opportunities in this online search arena.

Consider this query:

what does "sourceid=navclient" mean

What I am looking for is a definition of the phrase "sourceid=navclient." This phrase appears frequently in access logs that I review.

Google's systems never came close to serve a result at all pertinent to the query. The first result, Sacramento Blogs | SacStarts merely includes the exact phrase because the blog is now findable with Google.

So the vaunted algorithm can't do much with the term what; or with the phrase what does; or with the "distributed" phrase what does <> mean
(with a specific "word", "sourceid=navclient" plugged in the middle, within the opposite angle brackets)

In fact, the big picture is that Google does not serve results accurately to human language queries and, in fact, tries to fight the process by prodding posters not to include natural phraseology. For example, if you include the words "a, the, to", etc, within your query phrase to post in conformance with natural sentence structure, the systems' response will tell you that you needn't bother with the words since they are already included. This response is, on the one hand, smug and, on the other highly negative as human beings tend to communicate in sentences. In the case of my query, an inclusion of a question mark at the end did not help. Google's systems still did not "get it". The fact that the query syntax conformed to the syntax of a question was completely ignored by the lexical program.

In sum, unfortunately Mr. Hansell sees a big deal in some stuff that is still far short of the big deal that we all need to improve our searching online.

The flip side is that there is still tons of room for some entrepeneurs who may want to step up to the plate and duke it out with Godzilla.

©, 2007, Mike Blonder. All Rights Reserved. No Reprint without Prior Permission.

If the state of Vermont is a useful example of present-day rural USA, The disparity in the availability of data services to rural and urban markets is exploding. Consider that a very large chunk of Web 2.0 is entirely unavailable to Vermonters who live outside of the center of any of the country towns that fill the state, or the 5 cities: Burlington, Rutland, Brattleboro, Montpelier, St. Albans. Network connections are either too slow to support video, or, ominously, bandwidth is metered. The latter situation is the case for folks who try to get the necessary bandwidth from a Satellite "broadband" data services provider such as HughesNet. We use HughesNet and recently suffered a 24 hr "throttle down" as the result of exceeding a daily limit of 375 MBs of data. Anyone who knows video, or for that matter, MP3 audio, knows that 375 MBs of data is "nothing," hence my assertion that Web 2.0 does not play in this state very well.

Consider also that mobile telephony cannot be characterized, in any way, as ubiquitous in the rural areas of the state, which I ought to note, also comprise in excess of 50% of the geographical area. Vermonters don't like the look of towers on hills (don't ask me, I had nothing to do with it), therefore, service is non existent hereabouts. Non existent mobile telephony translates into no value from internet banking over a mobile telephone, mobile telephone cameras, etc.

The worst to be hit by all of this are the young folks in the rural public school systems. They are growing up in a world where they cannot develop familiarity with services that are easy to find anywhere else . If the job market treats video over mobile as a no-brainer, a young geek from Vermont is not going to make the cut when a content provider fills some high paying slots in its developer roster.

The point of this article is to describe the situation with the hope that influencers (government, private industry, etc) will hear the alarm and move forward, aggressively to get real broadband to these areas right away, not ten years from now.

© 2007, Mike Blonder, All Rights Reserved, No Reprints Without Prior Permission

Lee Gomes writes for the "Portals" column, which runs in the "Marketplace" section of the Wall Street Journal®. Read his article, "PlentyOfFish Owner Has the Perfect Bait for a Huge Success" if you can. The article was published in the Wednesday, May 23, 2007 issue of The Journal.

This "PlentyOfFish" story is the kind of tale that we all want to hear. Markus Frind, a 28 year old online marketer located where he wants to be, in Vancouver, British Columbia, is making lots of dough online and all by himself. His site, PlentyOfFishruns just about all by itself. His staff amounts to one individual, himself. How much revenue? According to Gomes, "the site brings in between $5 million and $10 million a year."

Gomes looks further and notes more of what I want to hear: "How does he do it? In large part, by keeping things simple." Music to my ears. Check out Best Plain Web Pages for a look at how I see simplicity working for successful online sites.

So I went and visited the site myself and noted a couple of things: 1) Mr. Frind makes good use of CSS: The simple ad list that takes up most of every page is controlled by CSS and table tags (which do not want to go away) 2) Mr. Frind uses scripts when he needs to: for example to quickly capture page view information via Javascript (AJAX) and .asp for membership and 3) Page addresses are simple URLS without funny characters.

On the marketing side, his objective is clearly the best monetization that he can get from his site. The theme is very popular, dating, with a very, very large market. The revenue generator is advertising. The strategy is twofold: 1) as Mr. Gomes notes, "via Google's small text ads," and through 'affiliate marketing.'

The last bit, affiliate marketing, is of interest to me as I recently dipped my toe into the water of an online marketing approach, StomperNet that preaches affiliate marketing all day. I have mixed feelings about affiliate marketing; however, if you want to make money online, it would seem from Mr. Frind's achievement that the combination of a big, popular and pressing market (theme), together with affiliate marketing will make for lots of money.

Go get 'em

©Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved. No Reprint Without Prior Approval

On Monday of this week (April 30th), the print edition of the Wall Street Journal® ran an article in its Small Business section on Search Engine Marketing, "In Search of Traffic" by Kelly R. Spors. This article was, in fact, the feature article of the entire section of the paper. Most of the "news" detailed by the article is, however, rather old and stale. "To be successful online, [small companies] must learn to harness one of the Web's most powerful tools: search engines." Duh. This has not been news since, let's conservatively say 1999, 8 years ago.

As well, Kelly R. Spors, suggests a strong ambivalence towards consultants (like me) who work with small companies to improve their rankings with search engines: Spors writes that "[e]ven worse, big competitors can afford to pour lots of resources into [search engine marketing] -- putting small companies at a bigger disadavantage" which is to say that the investment often pays off. In other words the big competitors are making the right move working with SEO types. But later in the same article Spors cautions: "businesses should be careful when hiring an SEO, because not every company offers the same expertise, says Ryan Allis, chief executive of Virante, a Durham, N.C., search-marketing consulting firm." This ambivalence reappears a bit later when Spors notes that "[t]hen there are fees. The prices for SEOs can be bewildering to many small business owners,. Costs can range from $500 a month to several thousand-for what often seem to be almost identical services".

Kelly Spors, I would suggest to you that successful search engine marketing is not the simple process that you suggest when you prescribe the following medicine: "Add lots of relevant descriptions to the site's text, including the search phrases for which you want a high ranking. Have other sites link to it. Offer a blog or other informational content for customers." As I have noted elsewhere in this blog, your prescription, for most sites, will end up a big goose egg (meaning a zero).

Bottom line, SEO expertise keeps pace with search engine technology and, therefore is a constantly moving target. What worked yesterday will not work today, etc. Never forget that you get what you pay for. If a business expects to sell a $1,000,000 or more, online, then, I think, an SEO budget of 5% ($50,000) per year makes sense.

On another note, I was surprised that the writer was not familiar with the "long tail" search notion, referring, instead, to a strategy of using outlying keywords, sufficiently off the track and down the list of keywords for a type of business, but specific enough to attract qualified clicks. If you are going to write for a general audience, then you ought to do them a favor and look into the concept and deliver the "skinny" in a form that the audience can run with. Kind of a drag.

The Journal has done this before, meaning the paper has written on online marketing topics from a very general standpoint. I deal with this stuff day-to-day via my business, best plain web pages and can say that the long tail search stuff does work. I've reviewed logs and have noted highly specific searches for a customer of mine that has a low Page Rank, but is nonetheless booking business.

Picking out of pocket keywords that are somehow quite specific is a valuable tool for smaller businesses to come to the table with some revenue fairly quickly after the launch of an online business. Double surprising is the fact that the title meta tag, together with the file name (whatever.htm or html) itself are heavily weighted; therefore put the specifics of your keywords right there and see what happens.

©Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved, No Reprints Without Express Written Permission by the Writer

Life is getting tough for open source. I purchased two bare-bones Intel motherboards complete with Core Duo chips and had the worst time getting the SuSE Linux Distribution (first 10.0 and then 10.2) to run on the platforms. The problem is that the new hardware had some radically different features, specifically a controller located off the motherboard, not supported by the Linux kernel included with SuSE Linux 10.0.

"Not supported" is decidedly bad news for open source. Intel is the largest chip manufacturer and, possibly, the largest manufacturer of motherboards for personal computers. The kind of headache that I experienced trying to install the distribution on the platforms is certainly not the kind of headache that the average user will tolerate.

My initial attempts were met by dark monitors, and repeated failed installations that bounced me back to manual installation screens. Error messages were weird: "Image Not Found" despite the fact that the factory disks were loaded in the Sony DVD/CD Reader Writer that I purchased with each of the systems. My calls to support did not produce a fix. I was pleased, however, to see that the typical brush off from SuSE technical support for folks with older copies of the operating system was not the order of the day. Support was willing to work the problem(s) through, but was at a loss to offer a working remedy.

When I loaded the DVD into our Mac Mini and FTP'd over to the Mac I was able to install the operating system on both of our systems. But, as of yet, I have not gotten the faster of the two boxes (2.4 Ghz processor, 2GBs memory, etc) to work with the Sony Drive and the Operating System.