I believe Google Voice (GV) has begun to be hugely disruptive and the FCC’s recent inquiry into GV apps on the iPhone is just the beginning. GV brings a wealth of features and power to “joe user” and once number portability becomes widely available I believe Google will see huge numbers of people yearning for the service as they did for GMail invites perhaps even more so. The interesting thing is that if you put most of the cool features of GV aside it might turn out that free SMS is it’s most compelling feature. According to this Wikipedia article on SMS 74% of all mobile phone subscribers use SMS making it a $81 Billion market (and that was in 2006)! Clearly, the loss of revenue on a 90% profit margin business would cause serious issues throughout the phone industry though I’m sure it’s only one of a myriad of reasons GV apps have been removed or denied from the App Store.

I see GV playing right into Google’s core ad business with such a huge potential audience it dramatically increases the knowledge it already has about it’s search customers which drives ad effectiveness. While it’s not without issues the feature set may well be too enticing for people to ignore though I’d guess most users will skip reading the fine print in the privacy terms.

Recently, I’ve been looking at SMS/text plans from Verizon, our provider, and since I don’t text I’m struggling to understand how the industry has been able to maintain such high profit margins but given the Senate’s recent move to ban it while driving texting must be an addictive technology like mobile phones themselves which explains a lot. On a related note, given the SMS numbers above it’s not surprising short text services like Twitter are growing so quickly. I suppose we’ll eventually see Twitter for SMS where you can text everyone in your contact list at once and with GPS technology appearing in most mobile devices the ability to text everyone in your immediate vicinity? Will we actually reach the point where the devices in our pockets will function as a real time, broadcasting mood ring?

I’m not really sure about where all this tiny text fragment communication is leading us but it’s certainly not going away any time soon.

Last Thursday, I received an invite to Google Voice (a.k.a. GrandCentral) after signing up for the beta months ago, a detail I’d practically forgotten. Google Voice is:

…a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more.

In other words it’s sort of like having a personal PBX. The feature set (see below) is rich not to mention free, at least for now:

• About voicemail transcriptions
• About ListenIn
• Call screening vs. Call presentation
• Changing screened name
• Switching phones during an incoming call
• Recording phone calls
• Temporary call forwarding
• Sending all calls to voicemail
• About the Call button
• About the SMS button
• Recording outbound calls
• Conference calling on the fly
• About call widgets
• Goog411 integration
• Compatibility with SIP services
• Adding a Gizmo number
• Taking calls from Gizmo

I could easily see Google extending this for small businesses much like Google Apps for Domains which could be an interesting play in that space particularly given my company’s need for a phone system.

When you sign up for Google Voice you get to select your phone number with an option to choose from within a specific area or zip code. My area code (831) was available and within that area code I could choose a Santa Cruz prefix (among other surrounding cities/towns) and I paired that with a memorable last 4 digits.

Another feature of Google Voice optional transcription of calls though in a few test calls I’ve found it might convey the “gist” of the call but can get quite mangled. For example, you can see above a test call where I said “This is a test call using Google Voice trying to call my cell phone from my home phone in Scotts Valley California.” and you can see the result. Nonetheless, it’s a cool feature I’m sure will improve over time.

Here’s the GMail-like web UI (running in Prism):

One minor detail: The Privacy Policy

This is all very cool although the biggest hurdle for me is the Privacy Policy which details the kind of information Google collects through this service. While it’s not really unusual nor unexpected it details how your information will be collected and used including:

When you use Google Voice, Google’s servers automatically record certain information about your use of Google Voice. Similar to other web services, Google Voice records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL). Google’s servers also automatically collect telephony log information (including calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information, and types of calls).

There’s also a bit about transcription:

Voicemail Transcription - if you use Google Voice’s voicemail transcription service, Google may transcribe voicemail messages into text and email and/or SMS the resulting text to the email account or phone number(s) designated in your user settings. Google’s computers process the information in your messages for various purposes, including formatting and displaying the information to you, delivering related links, backing up your messages, and other purposes relating to offering you Google Voice.

Clearly, Google mines your data like it does for everything it offers though this service IMO goes further in that you’re more or less accepting the Privacy Policy on behalf of anyone calling you especially considering there’s no way for a caller to know you’re using Google Voice as it’s transparent.

I’ll experiment Google Voice for awhile but I’m not sure I’m ready to turn this amount of information over to Google regardless of Don’t be Evil.

Sample Call

One of the features of Google Voice is the ability to embed calls on a web page. Below you can listen to the test call I made.

Are you using Google Voice?

Now this is really cool! Using ElasticFox, Amazon’s Open Source tool for managing machine instances on their EC2 service you can easily boot a Windows 2003 server instance.

1. Select an AMI (a machine configuration)...

2. Select hardware configuration, security options then boot the machine...

3. Wait a minute or two for the instance to boot then grab the Admin password and login via Remote Desktop:

Now, what to do next hmmm....  :-)

Btw, once you have an instance up and running you might as well keep it around for at least an hour since that’s how it’s billed. In this case a "small" instance without Authentication Services runs $0.125/hour.

[UPDATE Oct. 26 2008] Btw, here is your Getting Started Guide & Setting up an Account to EC2

Check out Falafel Software's training calendar to sign up for online training! In fact, it's all explained in this video.

I joined Falafel Software a little over a year ago now and in that time I’ve done a lot of online training for TestComplete. For those Delphi fans TC is written in Delphi a fact I usually slip into the training sessions. Online training is, or perhaps more accurately was a new business (it’s no longer new) for Falafel that I was able to pioneer. One thing I looked forward to when I changed jobs was the ability to try and do different things and online training is certainly different! I’d been straight-up programming for nearly a decade at Borland/CodeGear and at Falafel I’ve had the opportunity to be involved and have influence in many different parts of the business which has been a lot of fun.

Presenter’s view of online training

When I sit back and think about all the technology used during TestComplete online training I’m really amazed. We use a multitude of software to present all of the different testing functionality TC supports including:

• TestComplete (of course, that’s obvious right)
• Microsoft’s PowerPoint
• GotoMeeting the software that powers desktop sharing
• AutomatedQA’s Remote Agent for Distributed HTTP Load Testing
• Virtual PC to demonstrate Distributed testing support
• NUnit to demonstrate TC’s integrated unit testing
• VS.NET 2008 to demo support for:
  • Web Services
  • Web Site Application testing (ASP.NET)
  • Testing of Open Applications
• Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005 to demonstrate Data Driven Testing (DDT)
• Visual Studio Team Foundation Server to demonstrate TC’s integrated support
• Automated Build Studio if/when the discussion leads to Continuous Integration
• Acrobat reader for the TestComplete Made Easy courseware (which I helped author) and that you can print for yourself from Lulu.

Out of all of this GotoMeeting is the software that facilitates online training and is very cool. It allows for sharing of one’s desktop to multiple PC’s at the same time in different locations. Connecting to GotoMeeting is very straight forward and I’ve yet to run into any problems setting it up which is saying a lot. Additionally, you can turn control over to an attendee as well as display an attendees desktop. In fact, I’ve conducted a number of classes with people scattered around the country which is interesting in and of itself. (Note to attendees, when you ask to share your desktop be sure you haven’t been chatting something in the GotoMeeting chat window you wouldn’t want others in the class to see :-) ) Here is a screenshot of what things look like on the presenter’s end of things:

As you can see there’s quite a bit running not including any of the sample applications used to illustrate features.

Along with the online training Falafel provides the above book in PDF form as well as source code to all of the examples and additional TestComplete projects illustrating nearly every type of testing supported by TC.

Since referral commissions go in my pocket this post wouldn’t be complete without a plug right? So, if you or your company is interested in either online or onsite training on AutomatedQA’s TestComplete please contact me and I’ll be happy to provide you more information or help get you signed up!

If you’ve taken a peek at Microsoft Live Mesh would you leave a comment here and tell me what the big deal is? And what the hell is Steve Gilmor talking about? Seriously, read that article if you can get through it. I get the feeling that top bloggers like Gilmore and Scoble use all this social networking buzz like a proverbial hacky sack devised to simply keep a conversation afloat. Scoble even goes so far as say

Microsoft’s fans are delivered to the promised land.
  - Robert Scoble (link)

Where exactly is this promised land? Seriously, that’s out of touch given Mesh’s beta status, numerous missing features and a nebulous definition. Heck, I’m an MS fan and I just don’t get it. I’ve yet to come across a clear description of what Mesh really is or will be? My initial experience completely sucked. The other night I sat down for dinner with Barry Kelly and Adam Markowitz (Adam, you’ve been linked to so get that blog up!) and neither had a good understanding of Mesh and these are bright guys!

I’m actually glad or perhaps even relieved it confounds Joel as well. For now, I’ll take that as a good sign.

Anyway, .NET started out pretty nebulous and poorly defined but the end result has proven extremely satisfying so there is hope. I wonder if Microsoft felt compelled to release something in these days of exploding social networks simply to remain relevant and in the conversation which, in this case, somehow seems to have worked. IMO it seems Mesh was released so customers could try to help Microsoft to figure out exactly what to do with this technology as a number of pieces seems like a rehash of existing services.

Now, had Microsoft announced a Windows based, Amazon-like, elastic compute cloud that would have been really interesting.

So this is a new twist...

I decided to take a peek at Microsoft’s new Windows Live Mesh and upon attempting to install the client for Devices got this error message:

 
Now, I don’t know about you but I’d be hard pressed to think of someone I know running Vista who hasn’t disabled UAC. Anyway, I switch my account to Power User and install the client which gives me this message hovering over my tray:

Pressing forward I click on the Mesh icon in my tray and see this:

Now, I recognize the little colorful shield next to Configure Live Mesh Report Desktop means it requires elevated privileges. I click the link and get the above error window again. So, I exit live Mesh, click on the Start menu, type "mesh" then right click to "Run as Administrator":

I return to the above Live Mesh window and click the "Configure Live Mesh Remote Desktop" link and:

So much for living on the edge now, back to work!

Anyone else have better luck?

o, Google releases Google App Engine a cloud computing service for building web applications in Python. Very cool! Over the coming days and weeks I’m sure there will be plenty of comparisons with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud for us to consume. Cloud computing is an interesting model, one where I believe an independent dev tools company could flourish.

In fact, before leaving CodeGear I sat down with Jim Douglas to discuss ideas around web development focusing on the growing eco-system of web services that companies are publishing on what now seems like a daily basis. The discussion covered a variety of web services available as well as platforms like Facebook, all things I’ve been thinking about for a long time. To the right is a photo of a page from my developer’s journal which outlines a concept I had (in March 2006) for extending Delphi applications, including the IDE, using web services. For those of you familiar with Delphi’s ToolsAPI it’s like extending the IDE, or any Delphi application, without installing/updating binaries on the local machine. The net effect is it affords the small company the opportunity to deliver more features faster with less impact to their installed base as opposed to getting stuck on a designer. With the advent of so many different API’s from so many different companies I think there’s a good opportunity for a company to stitch these services together and provide developers an entire toolset for use within their applications.

Over the past few years we’ve really witnessed the web grow into an honest to goodness platform and I think Facebook’s salvo really helped lead the way. Initially, we’ve seen the explosion in the world of social networking which I believe is largely due to the allure of ad revenue from millions of page views fueled by viral growth.

Eventually, with things like the Elastic Compute Cloud and Google Apps Engine I believe we’ll see more mainstream web application development move "into the cloud". Today, to leverage Amazon’s services it’s like working with Legos where you need piece things together to build out a site. One example I think illustrates the difference between Amazon and Google is Amazon’s Copy Proposal for S3 read it and let it sink in. I think that illustrates a fundamental difference between how these services are likely to evolve. On the other hand Google’s App Engine appears to be a more well rounded service which will make it interesting to watch Amazon’s response.

One thing is for sure, we won’t likely see Amazon or Google or Microsoft or IBM develop tools that would allow developers to leverage services from many different companies which is where I believe there is an opening for something creative to occur. I guess time will tell who will jump at that opportunity as it’s not likely to come from one of the big name players. I think this idea is already happing in the social network arena where sites like Plaxo and FriendFeed are aggregating data from a number of different services.

Another cool thing about moving "into the cloud" is the opportunity to use whatever OS you want on your local machine. I’m using a MacBook Pro and I’d love the opportunity to boot to the other half of my hard drive and work in OSX for awhile.

Btw, just landed in my inbox:

Thanks for signing up to try Google App Engine!  Your account has been activated, so you can begin building applications!

Looks like it could be a long night!

What’s your take on cloud computing?