Geeky Peek

Hi, I’m Nick, one of the Geekypeeks.

My job at Peek is in the realm of that most eloquent acronym “OSS/BSS” (I’ve chosen for myself the title of “OSS BOSS”). This term has always been somewhat cloudy to me, as its definition can be expanded or shrunk so as to include anything, or nothing. While the term arose in a telecom context around billing, rate plans, and so on, it’s sturdy enough to absorb a bigger definition. What Dan always tells me is that it means I have dominion over “the systems that support the business”. Our “business” is our email/texting service and hardware, aka the Peek. The system that bills customers, manages inventory and SIM cards, serves up data to the finance team, tracks customer lifecycle, and so on, those are things that constitute a “support” role in the grander scheme of things. That’s me.

I haven’t been doing OSS/BSS for long, and am certainly not an expert in it, but the primary challenges of my job are not pure OSS/BSS problems. I do not often get to dwell in the rarefied air of enterprise product catalogs and real-time IP packet rating. Fledgling startups are a swamp of pragmatic concerns — making sure deadlines and budgets are met, managing expectations, communicating occasionally confusing operational procedures to other staff, firefighting, laborious integration projects with elephant-slow vendors, and so on. Thus, the challenge of startup OSS/BSS is to manage oneself in order to support others.

As a result I deal directly with almost everyone in the company. My role is to enable their individual mandates technologically, whatever it may be. In that sense I am a requirements bucket for the company, and my role in some ways resembles a kind of technical caregiver. By this standard, the only benchmark worth a damn is coworker satisfaction. Help me help you.

A setup like this could lead to intra-departmental conflicts and territorial behaviour over limited resources. The basis for business decisions are often built on shifting soil, and it is difficult for organizations to avoid this problem, especially the “flat” organizational structures that startups tend to favour. As Dávila said, “Every non-hierarchical society is divided in two.”

But it turns out that Peek has a fantastic office culture, the best I’ve ever worked in by a country mile, and as a result of everyone’s shared understanding of company goals and general respect level for each other, this has not ended up a problem at all. It’s rather creepy, actually. Could it be that coworker chemistry matters? There’s something to it, anyway.

Anyway, I’ve read Dan’s unhinged screeds with some interest over the past year and I hope to use this space to flesh out some of my loftier ideas, not only about OSS/BSS but about tech, engineering, and life.

In my spare time I am a soccer goalie, a co-ed, rec league superstar Goaltending is an exceptionally tough sport mentally. There is no such thing as a goal that wasn’t your fault. Every goal is a failure. Goalies have to accept failure and being beaten as a fact of life. Growing up, acceptance of failure is generally not part of how we are taught life. “if you study hard you will get an A+”, “practice makes perfect”, “set goals and achieve them”, and all the other optimism/success oriented values of our society do not apply to goaltenders. The philosophy of goaltending has to be one of managing failure. I think strikers have to have the exact opposite philosophy…. they have to succeed and are constantly trying to optimize success.

To me, this is also the exact attitude of software development. There is no such thing as a bug that isn’t your fault. And you will have bugs, sometimes embarrassing ones that cause big outages. Much like the goaltender, us poor techies are often the ‘last man’. So ultimately we are accountable, we are the ones who make the mistakes and have to fess up.

And I think this is why there is a huge dropout rate in computer science and shortly thereafter. Is a 21 year old mentally mature enough to deal with constant failure in his life? Or will they blame the requirements, the due date, the money, the hours, the lack of sleep, the constant changing priorities, their boss, the dev’t env’t, the production env’t, the build process, etc. There are few things worse in soccer than a goalie who can’t accept failure, the maniac screaming at his defense on every goal. Similar for the developer – “it works perfectly on my machine” is an attitude that simply won’t work.

And I think thats why project mgmt styles like ‘agile’, ‘tdd’, ‘extreme’, etc have exploded and done so well. They manage failure & risk along the way (and maybe CMM, waterfall, etc are in the optimize success bucket?).

So for all of you who are looking to ’succeed’ in life – don’t become a goalie or a programmer (or a salesman or somebody trying to raise money or a whole litany of other jobs).

I recently came across this gem of an essay from Bertrand Russel – http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

I am sure many of you have read this previously, I hadn’t.

If you have investors and a competitive, fast-moving market… annoyingly a startup is not a place where a 4 hour work day can happen. Early on at Peek, my average day was:

1. 7am – rise and talk to lads in China doing manufacturing, etc.
2. 9am – At office
3. 6:30-7pm – Leave office
4. 10pm – talk to lads in China again

It was not a well-balanced life! On top of that we were flying to China every 3-4 weeks (btw Beijing is one of my favourite cities).

The article made me reflect, could I have done all the tasks that needed to be done in a 4 hour workday. The answer is surprisingly undoubtedly ‘yes’. From a pure productivity perspective, yes, it is possible for me to do all my ‘tasks’ in a 4 hour period on any given day.

The problem that everybody is familiar with is ‘meetings’. Many demonize meetings as a waste of time, especially the anti-corporate culture startup scene. I, on the other hand, like meetings. In a startup you typically have a bunch of new folks working together on a project for the first time, meetings are crucial in forcing collaboration and group problem solving. People under-appreciate a team that can make decisions together, cohesively. Good meetings are the cornerstone for good group problem solving and collaboration. They are so unbelievably important… but yet so many people have ineffective, crappy, time-wasting meetings (which I’ll address with my handy list of dan-approved meeting tips).

So, while 4 hours of pure ‘work’ per day is quite possible when you toss in the overhead of communications and spending time developing relationships & teamwork skills with your peers, I’m not sure you can get under a 8-10 hour day. And then toss on personal development, side experimental projects, etc and next thing you know you’re hitting 10-12 hours per day. Gulp.

And thats also why I hate the book the 4 hour work week. It assumes that the best practice in life is to be a reclusive asshole who just makes decisions for people. The book smells of narcissism and tramples on the communication skills needed for humans to work together effectively.

My tips for making meetings effective:
1. Always have an agenda.
2. Always have a supporting document (helps crystalize your thoughts in advance, gives pre-reading). But most often don’t use the document (nothing worse than a group staring at powerpoints).
3. Tell jokes.. laugh often.
4. Do not be the hardass annoying time cop who makes the meeting stressful. Make sure your agenda is unambitious off the top in terms of time needs so you don’t have to make the meeting stressful. “Productive meetings” are sucky and stressful, “team building” is important.
5. Be very diligent in making sure everybody participates. Especially the angry sys admin in the corner typing away on his terminal…
6. Let tangents happen, don’t be in such a rush to say “lets take that offline”
7. Remember that generally team building is in fact the goal of many meetings
8. Go to the bar, park, a new office room, couches, anywhere interesting to change things up

I have been following Pixel Qi for a bit, and they came out pretty large in CES annoucing the screens were now shipping in products.

I think what Pixel Qi is doing will turn EInk into old technology… the Nintendo 64 of displays. LCDs with refresh rates at the same level as EInk, with crazy low power consumption, and with colour! Whoa. Thinking about this kind of display in a Peek makes me giddy. More so the fact they are producing a DIY kit for hobbyists appeals to my hacky side.

I also recommend reading up on the founder, Mary Lou Jepsen. She was the CTO of the One Child One Laptop project and keeps a blog here.

Who Buys Peeks?

We’re now one year and 3 months into our venture here at Peek. As you can imagine we have learned a lot since September 14th of 2008, especially about our customers.

Initially our main theory was that consumers would drive adoption of Peek. Amongst consumers we thought mom’s would lead the way. We had an adorable character painted out called Jill. Jill was a mom with two kids, she worked from home, shopped at Target… very Mrs. Cleaver-like.

Jill has definitely showed up, we see Jill, she is there as a customer.

The surprise is that businesses have also arrived, in droves. Especially small businesses. From painting companies to lawyers we have a lot of small business owners who buy Peeks.

Why do they buy Peek? Price/frugality. Lets face it, small businesses operate on tight margins… every dollar counts. They can’t be doling out iPhones and BlackBerrys on a whim. They need a practical, no-nonsense product that is affordable.

Even more interesting though is that it changes the lens on the competition. When buying an email device like ours, the biggest competition is not other smart phones. The biggest competition is laptops! The decision is often one of these two:

“I, or my employees, have a desktop. I want to check email on the go. Should I get a laptop, or should I get a mobile email device?”

“I, or my employees, have laptops. Its such a frickin’ pain to pull out my laptop when I’m in the airport, coffee shop, car, etc. Should I get a mobile email device, or should I continue to live with the pain in the ass nature of whipping-out-the-laptop?”

I’d love to hear back from some of you on your thoughts on what would make Peek an even better small business device. Note that I didn’t say ‘business/enterprise’ device… we don’t want to be BlackBerry. Small business folks, let me know.

Quick personal update – I just moved back to Toronto, hence my relative quietness on this blog for a few weeks. I’m still working at Peek, don’t you worry everybody. Its just that my wife and I are expecting our first born in the next few weeks.

Also, another geekypeek is going to start writing. Nick Taylor will be contributing the occasional post. Since Nick did a minor in english with his computer science major, you can expect much better grammar, more sensical articles and all that good stuff.

Ok – so since I am now working remotely, I wanted an affordable phone solution. I decided to go with a MagicJack and ditch my Vonage account. At $20/year, you really can’t beat the MagicJack pricing, and they also have Canadian numbers available.

I got my MagicJack. Annoyingly it wouldn’t work on my Windows XP laptop. So I had to phone tech support. They sent me a bunch of stuff to get it working and about 30 minutes later I was good to go. Great customer service I must say.

Well, funny enough, my first call was to the usual free conference bridge service we use at Peek – 218-844-3366. I dialed it up from my new MagicJack line and surprise, surprise it was re-routed to magicjack’s conferencing service! Crafty, crafty I must say.

Generally I like the MagicJack though. Its a product in the same vein of Peek – affordable, easy to use, and hated by Apple fanboyz on slashgear. And I like saving money.

I’ve been twice to Haiti, both times for a few weeks. I thought I’d share a randomn collection of thoughts & stories on Haiti to help some of you better visualize life there.

Honestly, I think the people of Haiti are better equipped than most others for tragedy. Despite the brutality of this earthquake I think the people will persevere, especially with the helping hand of the international community. Haitians have a long history of achievement and overcoming horrible tragedy. All of you should reach the history of Touissant L’Ouverture & Haiti’s independence. Their story of independence is one of the most enthralling stories of an underdog overcoming incredible odds and achieving independence. Honestly, it is even more incredible than the US War of Independence, google it ( I can’t believe a Hollywood movie hasn’t been done on Touissant L’Ouverture).

In one of my past-lives I worked for Digicel. In the Caribbean, historically nobody had cellphones except the rich. Local governments had granted long monopolies to foreign companies, the classic example being Cable & Wireless. These foreign companies kept prices extremely high prohibiting average citizens from having affordable communications. Along came Digicel, from island to island they busted up monopolies and hammered prices downwards. It started in Jamaica (where Digicel is headquartered) and then spread across the entire Caribbean. The story was remarkable before they went into Haiti.

Then they entered Haiti. Haiti has a population of 10M people. Prior to Digicel the penetration of telephony was abysmal – under 1%. To get a cell phone you had to buy a phone at a few hundred dollars and then pay something like $80 to sign up, and then pay some godawful rate to make a call locally. Digicel came in with these amazing $20 phones from Nokia and Alcatel with an insane prepaid rate of 8 cents per minute (I think that’d be near the cheapest prepaid rate in the US today). When Digicel launched there was an impromptu parade in front of the Digicel office. We signed up 100,000 subscribers in 3 days!!! Last I heard Digicel was sitting at 3-4M subscribers in Haiti.

I spent my time driving around Haiti drive testing BlackBerry’s. I ran Digicel’s corporate product line across the Caribbean (i.e. products they sold to businesses). Annoyingly we were incredibly short on engineers in Haiti (recruiting is a nightmare), so I spent my days and nights drive-testing the entire island of Haiti making sure phones worked. It was a pretty cool break from my usual job of powerpoints and spreadsheets.

The country-side of Haiti is dusty. There is a lot of limestone mining and very little vegetation. The lack of vegetation is due to an annoying perfect storm of problems in Haiti:

1. Geographically, there are mountains that sit between Dominican Republic and Haiti. Most of the water flows into the Dominican Republic. In Dom Rep there is some of the most fertile land in the world. In Haiti there is some of the least. So vegetation has a hard time growing.

2. Politically, many years ago the French stabbed Haiti in the back and basically looted their treasury when they were given independence (by levying a $10M fee… $10M in the early 1800s). Haiti started overfarming their land in order to survive. That pattern continued as economic times got tougher.

3. Socially, the country is overpopulated. There are 10M people in a very small piece of land. This means they lean on the little vegetation & resources heavily

4. Geographically, its part of both the hurricane alley and on a fault line. The mountains also make flooding terrible after hurricanes hit.

So due to all these conditions, the country is now fairly barren and dusty.

But the people are something special. In Jamaica I had a hard time being in public. I’d get yelled at often with blatant racism and/or people asking for money. Haiti was different. I’d get out and investigate a tower and the children would swarm us and come and chit chat away (I can speak French somewhat). The whole country felt much warmer than better off countries I visited in the Caribbean.

If you want to do business in Haiti, its a whole world of planning that you probably haven’t thought of. Here are some of the things Digicel had to plan for…

Security
Their data center is armed with turrets with machine guns, filled with uzi-armed soldiers. You “security-experts” here in the US dealing with viruses and biometric access haven’t seen true security threats. And apparently those weapons have been used.

Recovery and resiliency
Power is lost constantly throughout the country. Every cell tower had three generators. Not only is there priority fueling arrangements from the US, but there is a local team of donkeys to get the fuel to the towers in case of washed out/earthquake-destroyed roads (same in Jamaica as well – donkeys + machetes are fantastic backup if you lose roads).

People & Recruiting
You need experienced professionals who have worked in tough environments and speak French. Digicel was clever, they recruited the management team from Lebanon. The original launch CEO was a lady who had overseen network deployments in the Beirut war and the first Gulf war.

Landing in Haiti was an absolute shock. Realize I was living in Kingston, Jamaica at the time – a very poor and very violent city (murder capital of the world the year I lived there!), so I wasn’t coming from a big, safe city in the first place. But Haiti was a whole new ball game. In Jamaica I could drive around on my own. In Haiti I got picked up in an armoured car by Digicel’s private security force of ex-French Legionnaires, Navy SEALs, etc. We drove in convoy!

Port au Prince and surrounding area is something else. I couldn’t imagine a worse place to get hit by an earthquake. They have had a string of bad luck with hurricanes and riots that had basically caused all infrastructure to be completely destroyed. Port Au Prince is a cascade of half-built/half-destroyed properties. You see tons of roofless buildings with rods sticking out. An earthquake would have been savage (as it was).

My wife was with me in Haiti, filming for a news network. The coverage is pretty unbelievable. She has the video somewhere, I will post it when I find it.

Lastly though, the culture is amazing. They have their own amazing language, the art is absolutely amazing and incredibly unique with a crazy history of metalworking, and there are even some really good French/Creole restaurants. Don’t forget the music & dancing/stilt-walking… and of course that whole Voodoo thing. In the 1920s-1940s I have read that Haiti was what Thailand is now (cool experience/culture + sex). If only the political instability could be sorted, the country has so much to offer culturally.

Anyways, I hope my ramblings are interesting. I encourage all of you to donate wherever possible.

I have lots to say but unfortunately I am going on holidays for two weeks. See yawl in a while.

I’ve also left you with a new look to get used to.

Benjamin Landau, a member of the Peek team here, figured out how to use Google Voice from your Peek. Here’s an explanation of how:

****************************************************
I recently got invited to Google Voice and have been playing around with the SMS and my Peek. So far, I have been able to hand out one number to friends and family to text me. I don’t have to text them first and I’m not limited to 25 people.

Let me give you an overview of how the texting system works with Peek.

When a text is sent out with the Peek, it is processed in the Peek systems, then sent to 3Jam, then sent to the carrier & cell phone. When the text is coming from the cell phone, it follows this line in reverse. As you may or may not know, each Peek is provided with 25 virtual numbers. As you text a number, one of these virtual numbers is attached to that mobile number.

Example:
Peek Text to 2125557000
Text sent to 3Jam
3Jam assigns number 4243541000 to 2125557000
Message on the receiving end shows it came from 4243547000

If you text under 25 people then, there is nothing to worry about. Each person you text can add the phone number assigned to them to their address book to text you. If you text over 25, the number starts to revolve. You are limited to these 25 different numbers and you have to text them first. Also, the people that you text cannot share the virtual number they see amongst themselves – it is assigned to that person and that person only. You also cannot text Peek-to-Peek.

Google Voice

Google Voice changes this. It changes this to ONE number, your friends/family can share this number, and you can text Peek-to-Peek. The only limitation is that they have to text your Google Voice number first.

To get started using Google Voice, you’ll need to wait for an invitation. You can sign up for and invitation here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googlevoiceinvite/

Once you receive your invite, please follow the setup wizard on the site to get started. You do have to enter an existing phone that you use. If you want this for your Peek only, you can choose not forward message to your phone by going to Settings > Phones, and uncheck the phone. Also, go to Settings > Voicemail & SMS, make sure SMS Forwarding is selected to forward SMS messages to your email address.

Great! You’re almost ready. Next you’ll need to send a text from your Peek to your Google Voice. 3Jam will assign a number to Google Voice. You will see this number come up in Google Voice once the text is received.

Next, have people text your Google Voice number. You only need to give them your Google Voice number. When Google Voice receives the text, it will forward it to your email address. Pay attention to the From field.

In the From field you will see an email address in this format: 12125551234.14243541000.tyldksal1@txt.voice.google.com

Here’s the break down:
12125551234 – your Google Voice Number
14243541000 – number the message was sent from. If from a Peek, this number is a number from 3Jam
tyldksal1 – unique ID Google Voice assigned to the number the message came from. Works similar to how 3Jam works for Peek. Only you’re not limit to 25 but people, but they have to text your Google Voice first.

Now, to send a reply to them on your Peek you have to type in that entire email address: 12125551234.14243541000.tyldksal1@txt.voice.google.com

Messy right? Thank goodness for an address book.

When you send a message from your Peek in the above manner, the same text-message traveling routine written above applies, however, now after leaving (from Peek device) or before hitting (to Peek device) 3Jam it goes to Google Voice. Google Voice parses that To field apart: Your number, Text number to send SMS too, Google Voice Id assigned to the Text number. The message gets routed to your account (your number), then Google Voice sends the text message out from your account as a text message to the Text number. You can see texts you send from your Peek on Google Voice because of this.

The texting Peek-to-Peek is capable because Google Voice routes the text as a text to the number you specified (along with its ID). On the Peek it will show as a text. When you or the other Peekster receive a text from another Peekster, the text category of the message stops at Google Voice, and then forwards the text to your or the other Peekster’s email account as an email message, if they use your Google Voice number only. If they send a text message from their Peek in that messy format, [your google voice number].[your number 3Jam assigned to your voice number].[google voice id assigned to your 3Jam number]@txt.voice.google.com, the message will go to from Device > Peek > 3Jam > Google Voice > 3Jam > Peek > Device (sent as text the whole way). It’s a lot of hoops to go through but Peek-to-Peek texting works using Google Voice.

To summarize:
After setting up Google Voice, go to Settings > Phones, uncheck phone
Next go to Settings > Voicemail & SMS, SMS forwarding – make sure your email address is used for forwarding
This email address should be on your Peek

Text your Google voice number from your Peek – 3Jam will assign a number to this number, Google Voice will assign an Id to this 3Jam number

If you want texts to be sent to your Peek as a text, not through your email box, then people will have to text to your full Google Voice SMS number: [your google voice number].[your number 3Jam assigned].[google voice id assigned to your 3Jam number]@txt.voice.google.com

Give your Google Voice number to people to text to – they have to text you first before you can respond

Reply back to their text on your Peek in this format: [your google voice number].[their number].[google voice id assigned to their number]@txt.voice.google.com – message goes through as text, works for Peek-to-Peek texting

And that’s basically it! Last time I checked, Google Voice does not support short numbers (55555). When they do, you to can vote for your favorite American Idol from your Peek!

Enjoy texting on the Peek with Google Voice!

Trend #1 – Amazon AWS has absolutely exploded. Even my wife uses AWS for some film stuff. With Amazon AWS awesome operational infrastructure vendors like RightScale have come along. And Google Apps Engine has come along with cool features like integrated mail & jabber servers!

Peek is a big chunk of this traffic

Trend #2 – Hardware is getting cheaper and cheaper, so why pay 2-10x more to use Amazon AWS. Check out this article, petabytes on a budget. Frankly all this infrastructure as a service is built for the rawest of start-ups who need to pay as they go. Buying your own is sooooo much cheaper, as soon as you have any revenue you should do it.

Trend 3 – Everything has an API. When we started Peek in early 2008 here was the landscape:
-Hotmail was closed off, no POP
-Yahoo was closed off, no POP
-Facebook was closed off
-AOL was not open for mobile access

Now, everything has an API. Facebook streams, Twitter, Hotmail opened POP, Google made love to Jabber, and so on. And we can go get it all!

Trend 4 – The cloud pwns data. Everything that used to be hidden behind a firewall or stuck on a PC is now stored on the Internet. Apps for people like to-do lists, calendars, mint for finances, etc to B2B apps like Basecamp for project mgmt, freshbooks for finance, zendesk for customer care.

Trend 5 – Nobody cares about privacy of their data??? Everybody posts everything everywhere. Companies like Mint have people’s most sensitive financial data and credit card numbers stored somewhere, and frankly nobody cares.

Mint Knows You Better Than Your Own Mom!