0. The media loves a showdown

“….with Apple working on a larger tablet form factor, running on the iPhone OS, we believe Jeff Bezos and team will face significant competition”

With articles like this one popping up everywhere it’s no wonder everyone is pronouncing the Kindle dead on the rumored Tablet’s arrival.

I say hogwash! There are a few reasons why Kindle will still be a contender. In fact there is more reason to believe they would coexist peacefully…

1. Kindle’s battery life is phenomenal

That’s what happens when you’re running an electronic-ink display with a slow refresh rate. Mine last for weeks without a single charge. Great for long plane rides!

2. No heavy lifting

Unless Apple is packing some Wall-E style tech in their rumored tablet then we can expect a significantly heavier device. When reading a book for hours on end – it would make a huge difference.

3. Marketing 101

An Apple tablet would be in an entirely different market than the Kindle. How many people seriously think the Tablet will compete with Kindle on price? I just can’t see how a spanking new Apple tablet would go for anything less than $600 and that’s being conservative. Let’s not forget we don’t have AT&T in the back room subsidizing the device costs on this one. Let’s not also forget that an unlocked iPhone goes for approx. $600.

4. Amazon

Can we all give Amazon just a little street cred? They have an already enormous and rapidly growing selection of books and publishers on board. Amazon’s back end protects Kindle in a way that iTunes protects the iPod and iPhone. It’s the calvary you can depend on and if it’s one thing Amazon knows: it’s books.

5. There’s a Kindle app for that

Yeah I said it. Who would of thunk it!? You mean Amazon could develop a Kindle app on the Apple Tablet as it did for the iPhone? Yes, it could, and it could also take advantage of all that fancy new hardware. That’s what I’m waiting for.

So there you have it. The Kindle, Bezos, and Amazon may stand a chance after all.

Section 0: Startup Failure Anonymous?
Hi my name is Fred and I failed at a software startup. Is there a Startup Failure Anonymous group I should post this to..?

Section 1: In the Beginning

I currently work for a small company as a software engineer and have been with them for 5 years now. Let’s call them Company X. Company X sells a software product to doctors nationwide and pays me well so I have no complaints about that. My primary role there is development on their main product, a web service, and back-end web apps that help Company X manage everything from accounting to customer information and more.

About a year ago I endeavored to create a piece of software which would help manage Company X’s information (I can’t get into specifics about what the actual product was because of contractual reasons but I can say that it was a business tool aimed at small to medium sized businesses and it was a django/jquery web app with a twist: a feature that used speech recognition so that users could interact with the app using voice commands from a mobile device like an iPhone).

I had looked countless hours on the net looking for an existing solution for Company X’s need and just couldn’t find one that fit the bill. That’s when I got this idea. The idea was I would develop this piece of software, get it working for Company X, make sure it worked well, and then pull a 37signals move and release it under my newly created LLC.

So it began… My new nighttime startup was just me, an independent contractor coder, and of course: several credit cards…!

Section 2: Moving along

It took us roughly 8-10 months of sleepless nights from concept to design to implementation. The plan was to get some buzz going for my web app by first releasing an iPhone app. The goal of the iPhone app was really threefold: getting some of that aforementioned buzz, testing out the server-side speech recognition, and making some cash to alleviate debt.

I guess two out of three ain’t bad. The app met some initial success but we realized quickly it wasn’t going to pay the bills. We were better off giving it away to encourage downloads. That certainly did the trick. Our system was tested to its limits when we set the price to free. We were successfully processing 1000s of daily requests which is more than I had hoped for. So on that note we were good.

Section 3: Rewind just a little – I forgot to mention…

We continued our march onwards. Or did we..? Well that’s when things get a bit foggy. I almost left something out. It didn’t kill my startup directly.. but it definitely hurt it tremendously. You might call it an accomplice in my startup’s murder.

This thing I’m speaking of was a bug in the 2 monster servers I purchased to handle the speech rec for the iPhone app. Speech recognition for the uninitiated is fairly memory/processor intensive even with today’s hardware hence the reason we needed some powerful servers. We thought about renting some Quads with decent memory but it would have been too expensive.. so I purchased 2 servers for a bargain at newegg.com and colocated them for dirt cheap.

At any rate after we had gotten everything set up we started noticing that either server would randomly throw a machine check exception every now and again which brought that entire machine to screeching halt. You can imagine my horror at this. They were brand spankin new..! I was pissed.

For nearly 2 months we pulled our hair out trying to figure out what was causing this behaviour. You can imagine what we tried: operating system version changes, disabling RAID, swapping memory. You name it and we tried it. Checking logs was useless. The kernel was killed before it could even write out something useful. The machine check exception was useless because it was too general to pinpoint any one piece of faulty hardware.

The one thing we had going for us was that it happened on both machines. So finally.. yes finally we figured out that the bug in question was an issue in our blazing fast Harpertowns’ microcode. One quick update to the microcode and 5 minutes later the ghost in the machine was dead and we shot’em good..!

Section 4: Painful realization…

The unfortunate result of this wild goose chase was that my funds had dried up. I didn’t have enough credit or cash left to keep paying my contractor to finish the web app. The iPhone app was subsequently released (now that our servers were fully working) but as I stated above it didn’t generate a significant amount of cash from app sales.

So there I was – an iPhone app released and used by tens of thousands… but not a damned dime to finish the job..!! After all, I initially set out to create a solution, not a feature to that solution. The iPhone app was really just the beginning in my mind or so I thought. In the overall scheme it was going to be a buzz generator and beta test of my “killer” feature that would later be incorporated into the general solution. I couldn’t have been more wrong in my approach. I made a fundamental mistake which I’ll discuss later.

So anyway, when the funds ran out it obviously hit me that I had to shut it all down and I did. I pulled the app from the store, sold off the servers and continued on with my day job at Company X.

Section 5: Reflections…

I’ve had almost a year to think about where I went wrong.. Here are the main observations I made about my experience:

1. iPhone app development is not trivial. This took up a huge portion of my time.
2. In a self-funded startup you’re always one emergency away from going bust i.e. your servers randomly generate machine check exceptions =)
3. the iTunes app store and hype are misleading. Most apps need enormous volume priced at 99 cents to make significant money from app sales and those tend to be video games or iFart type apps.
4. Decent designers cost a shitload, are usually too busy, and really hard to locate.
5. It was the most chaotic up and down roller coaster year of my entire life.
6. Startups are really really hard to do alone. I would have loved to have had a cofounder but it just didn’t work out that way.

Section 6: Reflections part II…

After much thought and reflection I finally realized that integrating speech recognition into my solution and scaling it out web 2.0 style was ridiculous. This was a really tough thing to do even for large and well funded companies. How could I have hoped in my wildest dreams to implement something like that on such a large scale..?

I was so enchanted by this magical killer feature and the promise of speech recognition that I fell into a delusion. I made the entire solution about this one feature. Even though I thought it was a killer feature, one that would separate me from the competition. I failed to realize that this feature did not solve the original problem. Sure it was shiny and really freakin cool but people aren’t usually willing to pay for just ‘cool’. People are willing to pay for a solution to their problem. If you’re not solving someone’s problem then what are you doing..?? It wasn’t my original intent to implement this feature. It’s just something I stumbled upon during my research.

Section 7: The number one reason my startup failed…

So the number one reason my startup failed was: I was distracted by a cool and shiny feature that didn’t solve anyone’s problem. The shinier and more tempting features of any software program should be regarded with a high level of suspicion. There may be a reason some things are so shiny and alluring. Traps often have this quality. My advice to anyone creating a solution is to march straight towards your initial goal, as long as the goal really does address a true need then that’s what you should focus on.

Questions for the wise: Is the feature absolutely necessary for the solution to function..? If not will this feature take less than a day or two to implement…? In other words if the shiny feature you want to implement is not absolutely necessary for your solution and it will take more than a day or two to finish then move on.

That’s a wrap.. Love to hear your thoughts.

For all of those thinking of integrating speech recognition into their apps I have a word of advice for you: Don’t.

But you’re implementing the Star Trek computer you say..?
Well in that case it’s absolutely necessary to the core functionality of your solution! Starship software definitely needs damn good speech rec for its interface. How the hell else is it going to get your Earl Grey the right temperature..!? Well at least read this article before you embark on your journey so you have a better idea of where to start.

Just so we’re straight:
Speech rec discussed in this article is the kind that understands short phrases and/or commands with no training required. It’s not free flowing dictation like that found in Dragon software. That requires training and still has a long ways to go before being viable in a web 2.0 kind of way.

Engage:

Three main ways to integrate speech rec into a web app:

1. Telephony
2. Web Services
3. Embedded

1. Telephony & VoIP:

Why do we consider telephony..? Why not. There are more phones in the world than computers. They all have built in microphones and speakers and they all speak the same crappy language designed by the evil telcos years ago. This means that anyone anywhere who has access to a phone can interface with your app, international restrictions aside. All you need to do sign up for a DID. A DID stands for Direct Inward Dialing and can be any kind of phone number like 555-555-5555. When anyone picks up a phone and dials your DID they’ll be routed to your server where the call can then be managed by telephony software.

Asterisk & FreeSwitch are the two big players here. Technically they’re soft switches, software created to handle and direct calls either between two VoIP points like Skype or they can be used to accept and/or direct calls from/to the POTS network, otherwise known as the Plain Old Telephone Service.

Both are open source but FS is definitely more so. You could say Asterisk is like MySql and FS is like Postgres. The former has a massive ecosystem and lots of commercial support, books, and a giant user base. FreeSwitch, on the other hand, is supported and developed by a smaller more cohesive group of talented and dedicated devs. By extension FS has a smaller but more dedicated user base much in the same way Postgres does.

Performance and stability wise FS easily wins the battle. However, support and availability for 3rd party extensions, tools, and dev resources definitely favor Asterisk.

For my solution I stuck with Asterisk but not because I liked it better as you’ll see why later on in the article..

So in summary telephony is great because you can operate free of operating system quirks, platform differences, and having to support several different devices.. but the real question is: does it scale..? Well yes it does but not easily. There are per minute charges for the DIDs. It’s cheap, i.e. around 2 cents a minute, but imagine supporting 1000 simulateneous calls to your server.. Quite possible performance wise as long as you offload the speech rec to another server, it’s just that you’re paying per minute every time someone calls in to interact with your app. That could get expensive pretty quickly. There is one way to get around all of this headache and that leads us to the next section of course.

2. Web Services:
The web services setup is simple architecturally speaking: a voice sample is recorded either at a device, like an iPhone for example or from a computer mic and sent to the server as a file. The voice file can be compressed before it’s sent, most likely using Speex or GSM, and POSTed to the server RESTfully, uncompressed, and then decoded using your speech rec software. The server can then send back an interpretation to the client.

The nice thing about this solution is that it scales.! As long as you have some decent power server side you can easily decode thousands of requests a minute. A request being a spoken command or phrase no longer than 10-20 seconds in length. We’re talking voice commands here, not dictation, which is much much harder to do. It’s certainly possible but you’d need a lot more power.. This kind of tech just isn’t ready for prime time IMHO. If it were we might indeed have a star trek computer available. We’d still need to work out the AI though. Even if the dictation speech rec were 100% you’d need one behemoth of a program to analyze the meaning of it all.. Not yet available folks.

The one issue of course with going the web services route is that you have to implement a client side program for each device you want to work with. This particularly sucks in the mobile world since you’re dealing with so many device quirks and platforms.. If only working with devices was like working with browsers.. Never mind IE not supporting events the right way.. the iPod touch doesn’t even include a friggin mic..! Welcome to the world of mobile devices. And you thought browser quirks were bad…!

3. Embedded
Honestly, I just put this option up there to warn you. Embedded speech rec just makes all speech rec look bad. Don’t bother. Sure it will rec a few hundred names and/or song titles.. In general though serious speech rec should be done in the cloud b/c that’s where the power is and good speech rec requires a good deal of power.

Available Speech Rec solutions:

You didn’t seriously think you were going to implement this part did you..? =) Companies who deal with this tech often have several PhDs on board and there’s a good reason for that: Recognizing human language in a meaningful way is really hard. At least by today’s standards. With all the nuances, intonations, accents, and signal distortion i.e. wind, weak signal, that annoying guy on the cell phone etc.. it’s amazing it works at all.. A real credit to the science and researchers behind it all.

That said it’s so far away from what the stupidest human you’ve ever met can do it’s almost humiliating we’re not further along.

At any rate it’s not like you’re trying to build the next starship voice interface. That’s currently impossible anyway so don’t try it. What you can do is build some basic speech rec into your app much in the same way major banks, airlines, and mobile operators have: automated voice attendants that understand a constrained set of responses, lists of names or places, and/or strings of numbers.. Here are the viable 3rd party options for doing just that:

Commercially available:

1. Lumenvox (San Diego, CA)
2. Nuance (Burlington, MA)

Open Source:

1. Sphinx (Carnegie Mellon University)
2. Julius/Julian (Kyoto University, Japan)

The real deal:
I know there are others available like IBM, AT&T, Microsoft, Acapela, Loguendo etc… but they all kind of suck. Trust me. The suits at AT&T only care about BOA and AA contracts. IBM doesn’t even know it still has a speech rec department. Microsoft made some valiant efforts in the field but I’m not a windows dev and Loquendo/Acapela are in Europe so perhaps that’s why they were hard to get a hold of. Speaking French fluently I couldn’t get these guys to return my calls or emails. They did put me on their mailing list though. =)

Also it’s not like any of them are superior to what the other guys have or else we’d all know. Everyone is basically using the same kind of tech at their core. There is no one company with superior proprietary speech recognition. At least not yet. Maybe Google will be that company at some point but for now it doesn’t exist.

So your best bet is Lumenvox or Nuance. In particular Lumenvox is your best bet because they are the most developer friendly and the nicest to work with. Nuance is alright but it’s a windows shop and they are a lot more pricey.. They also have a ton of products, some of which may even compete with what you’re trying to do..! It’s easy to get lost on their site.

Open source dreams:
Accurate open source speech recognition is still but a dream unfortunately. I have the utmost respect and admiration for both the Sphinx and Julius teams. I mean holy shit.. They’re literally giving away speech recognition tech for free so all of us can tinker with it. The only real differences between the open source and commercially available solutions lie in what’s called their Acoustic Models. AMs for speech rec are like gold. A good AM is produced from several thousand hours of good audio samples. It’s what gives speech recognition its ability to recognize. Think stats: weights, averages, means, standard deviations.. etc.. that kind of thing…

The commercial products do indeed spend most of their time building up good AMs by enlisting large groups of people to help ‘train’ the system. The open source guys just can’t afford to do this for obvious reasons. In fact Lumenvox is based in no small part on the Sphinx project. So you might say that Lumenvox is Sphinx with a really good AM and some polish. Some well intentioned efforts are being made over at Voxforge.org to provide better AMs for Sphix and Julius but they still have a ways to go.

Wrapping Up:

Stick with Asterisk for now if you go the telephony route:
The primary reason I stuck with Asterisk was because FS dropped Lumenvox support. Understandably so.. Lumenvox attempted to charge them for dev licenses. I’m not sure that was a wise move on Lumen’s part but that’s politics I guess. FS is really becoming quite a contender in the world of Telephony & VoIP so I hope they work it out. For me it was a deal breaker.

Eventually though I went the web services route. It made sense because using this approach we were able to scale out the solution web 2.0 style. Telephony becomes too expensive cost and performance wise. You can still get good performance from the telephony route, just not nearly what you can attain using web services.

Anyway, I should have just listened to the advice at the beginning of this article in the first place: forget about speech rec unless it’s absolutely central to your solution. I learned the hard way and I’m writing this so hopefully you won’t have to.

I may write some more on the subject later on. It really was an enlightening experience to submerge myself in this whole other universe.

At any rate this article should have at least moved you a little closer to building your very own Star Trek computer. If you want to hear more on the subject or have questions just submit a comment and I’ll do my best to answer.

That’s a wrap

GPush, a subtle game changer..?

Every once in a while a piece of software comes along that very subtly changes the lives of millions in the course of a few short months. While Cambridge based Tiverias might not be that far along yet, one can safely say they are within reach. Close to a thousand reviews in the App store qualifies the previous statement. At any rate, about 3 weeks ago I downloaded GPush to my iPhone and haven’t looked back.

I now see what the Blackberry guys have been talking about all these years and I’m fairly disappointed that Google and Apple didn’t work this out on their own but all the more opportunity for an upstart like Tiverias and kudos to them on an excellent app.

Target Market

Who am I..? I’m the target market for an app like GPush, a self proclaimed geek who loves Gmail, isn’t chained to an Exchange server, is disenchanted by MobileMe, and has a definite need for fast and easy push email.

Why did I choose GPush even though there are a few others in this space? Simple, their marketing grabbed me from the web. I forget where I heard about them but I no longer peruse the App store for new apps. I find iTunes to be useless for finding useful software, unless I’m looking for the Family Guy or Frogger apps. That’s another article for another time.

I must admit, the first couple of weeks I was very distrustful of GPush. Being a self proclaimed email junkie I would stare at my sleeping iPhone screen and think “What do you mean I haven’t any email yet..!!!”

I have also noticed that my brain is slowly modifying a behavior developed over years. I always hated launching my retardedly slow Mail app or Safari and waiting for my nonexistent email to download – envious of my Blackberry equipped peers. I’m happy to report however that the app works as advertised, at least for me. It’s super fast too..! Now precious seconds of my life will be saved and I can spend more time doing things I love..!

Love that dirty water

I’m a Boston native. Cambridge was like a second home to me for several years of my life and it always makes me proud to see that there are several upstarts that haven’t given up on the idea of doing web tech in the Boston area. As it turns out Tiverias also raised some capital from a Cambridge based VC firm.

I would really love to hear from or about any other startups, Boston based or not, that are in this field and haven’t decided to move to the Valley. Yet..!! With all the peer pressure it’s a little hard not to follow the Sirens’ call.

p.s. If you haven’t done so yet I highly recommend downloading GPush. Thanks Tiverias for keeping it real.

What’s its value to mankind?

I’ve seen a lot of discussion on Hacker News recently about the differences between startups like the recently acquired Mint (just sold for $170 million) and startups like Facebook or Twitter, both now valued in the billions.

So it’s clear what problem services like Mint are solving but just what problem or issue do services like Facebook and Twitter solve..? The answer is they aren’t solving any real problem of course. They’re meeting a basic human need. Take a look at Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid:

The 3 basic needs

So it seems that web startups are really only meeting 3 basic human needs in Mazlow’s pyramid, at least in their current iteration. Here they are with 3 examples each:

1. Safety/Profession/Finances/Resources

1. Mint: Helps people manage their personal finances
2. 37Signals: Helps small to medium sized businesses manage tasks, contacts, events, and more
3. Google: provides users with elegant solutions to common problems (finding information online, email, maps & directions etc…)

2. Social Needs/Love/Belonging

1. Facebook: Helps people keep in touch with loved ones, provide status updates on where they are and what they’re doing
2. Twitter: Real time status updates of what on eveyone’s mind. Precursor to the Borg which may put this in another need category eventually
3. Loopt: Real-time tracking of friends’ physical location using GPS enabled mobile devices

3. Esteem

1. Youtube: Helps users broadcast themselves and favorite snippets of whatever they want
2. Digg/Reddit: User submitted articles and stories
3. WordPress.com: Currently hosting over 200,000 blogs helping people to express themselves

Revenue Models

It seems that although the first need can favor both a direct revenue model, user directly pays the service provider, or an indirect one, i.e. eyeballs, the second and third needs seem to favor eyeballs in the majority of cases. I can’t think of a single successful startup meeting the second/third need that directly charges users for the main service provided. I’d be glad to hear of one however so feel free to comment on it.

Implications of being in one category or the other

It also goes without saying that Facebook will never be viewed as Google and vice versa even though both companies have tried to cross into the other one’s need level. FB has said it believes it will dominate search eventually and Google has made inroads with services like Orkut but it does seem the user’s mind is made up about which need each company meets.

Market size

It’s interesting to note that the first need, safety/profession/finances, is a more basic human need than love/belonging and esteem according to Mazlow. Logically speaking that should also mean the market for web startups at this level is larger, although I’m not aware of any research that has been done to verify that. At any rate, it certainly seems that way common sense wise.

Wrap up

I do think there exists a general bias in certain schools or tech communities towards one need or the other. It does seem that you find more open mindedness in Silicon Valley towards the second and third needs than you find in Boston for example but there are always exceptions..

That’s a wrap..

Convenience was my motivation:
So what is the big deal with Kindle you might ask..? If you’re anything like me and you travel a bit or are somewhat indecisive then the Kindle is PERFECT for you. My problem with physical books was this: I could never really quite make up my mind which book I wanted to read when going to the coffee shop or traveling to another city. I would just bring several books with me since I couldn’t make up my damn mind. Unfortunately my back paid the price as I tugged 2 or 3 good size books along with all my other stuff to where ever I was going. So the Kindle was and is a perfect solution. Nearly perfect anyway. I bought the second generation just over a month ago and must say that my back is doing much better now. Now when I travel I don’t have to decide which book or books to take. I can take them all..!! It’s just a relief for me I can’t even describe it. Kindle 2 is almost small enough to fit in an over sized pocket. It’s about as slimmer than the iPhone as far as I can tell and it’s about as light as a 400 page paperback.

You can see Amazon’s Kindle 2 here:

The reading experience..?
I have to say I find it very comfortable for the eyes even on the beach on a really sunny day. It’s just like reading a real book. For reference material it falls a little short if only b/c with reference books I like to flip around from page to page. You can’t really do that on the Kindle, not like with a real book anyway. No matter, it’s a fair trade for the convenience of it all. I’ve already read about 5 books and counting on it. It feels a fairly solid in the hands but I wouldn’t want to drop it. I’m not sure it can take the same beatings my iPhone has.

Kindle is free..?
I also might add that the books you buy from Amazon through Kindle are usually 30% or more discounted. Everybody wins b/c Amazon doesn’t have to print it and ship it or physically store it. That translates into a cost savings for them which in turn they pass onto you. So I know this thing will eventually pay for itself in savings alone. So in other words: Kindle is basically FREE..! Yeah that’s right.. I order books on a regular basis from Amazon. Usually at 20-30 dollar price tags. On Kindle the drop down to 10-15 dollar price tags. Over time that saves me mucho deniro..! Ohhh and they’re instantly delivered to my device in under a minute.. How’s the for convenience.

The UI and Interface..?
It has a little ways to go but I don’t care. It’s perfectly suitable for my needs. It’s replacing my paper books not my iPhone or TV. It’s simple and easy to navigate and pretty intuitive. Kindle just knows how to stay out of your way when reading a book. Did I mention you need a night light to read it in the dark..? Yes unfortunately you do.. but this is what I would need for a regular book anyways so it’s not a deal breaker for me. I’m sure future versions of Kindle will have a built in light.

Battery Life:
It just keeps going and going and going…. I usually turn off the 3G connection when I’m not looking for new books on Amazon’s store browser. I can go for about 2-3 weeks without a single charge. I actually have yet to drain the battery completely and this thing has gotten lots of use..