Smarphones and business...

Several years ago I got my first smartphone, a Handspring Treo 650. Already a Palm addict, it was outstanding for me - my Palm Pilot had long ago replaced the calendar (that got left on a train) and contact book that I had carried around for years. I was able to now consolidate from three devicesn (laptop, phone, and PDA) that I had to have with me at all times to two. Once I got a data plan, I was able to get my email on the Treo, so I was actually able to get down to one device a lot of the time.

The Treo had a VGA camera that could shoot video, an easy-to-swap battery, and it could be mated to a Bluetooth keyboard. It also had a good collection of apps available for it, adding terrific enhancements to the included PIM applications (datebk5, goosync), Microsoft Office capability (QuickOffice, Documents To Go), and some nice games. It even had a browser, which, combined with the super-slow dataspeed, was almost worthless.

I went to work for Cisco for a while, which is an "all-Microsoft" shop (at least for the managerial class... it turns out the technical folks have better infrastructure choices), so I was obliged to use the "standard-issue" Windows smartphone, a Samsung Blackjack. The EDGE dataspeed and Internet Explorer were a big improvement on the web experience, but still pretty useless, as was the rest of the phone. I was glad to give that one back to Cisco when I left and actually went back to the Treo.

However, I'm hard on phones, and the Treo had some significant dings that were starting to affect the internal workings of the phone. So, in May, 2009 I got myself an iPhone 3G. This was just after the 3GS was introduced. There wasn't really a lot of info on the 3GS when I made the decision; it had a better camera, which wasn't really a major point for me, and a digital compass. I know which way is which, and I don't take a lot of pictures with my phone, so I got the 3G.

What I didn't know when I got the iPhone was that it didn't:

1.) Shoot video. Better resolution for still shots than the Treo or Blackjack, but no video. Huh??? Of course, the 3GS didn't either until they released an iOS upgrade, which provided video on the 3GS but not the 3G.
2.) Have enough memory. The 3G only has 128 MB of memory, while the 3GS has 256 MB and the 4 has 512 MB. These specs are not widely broadcast by Apple; you have to dig for them, but they have had a HUGE effect on my use of the phone.
3.) Work with a Bluetooth keyboard. This floored me - I never checked; I couldn't conceive that a smartphone wouldn't work with a Bluetooth keyboard. This still strikes me as the most stupid thing Apple has ever done. Worse than Finder 8.x.
4.) Have a good PIM. And they don't allow apps that usefully extend the address book and calendar. I have felt like I had an arm cut off ever since I gave up the Treo... simple, stupid things like being able to have every new calendar entry have a reminder by default just aren't there. I'll set appointments in a hurry and forget to set a reminder. Half an hour after the appointment, I'll look it up and find it there, perfectly happy, never having said a word to me. What's the use?
5.) Be "tetherable." Having a fast internet connection on your phone is fine, but it's even better if you can share it with your laptop when you need to.

Don't get me wrong - the iPhone is an amazing device. Google maps and the "REAL" Safari browser have saved my bacon a few times. Having a GPS is nice, and the multi-touch user interface is terrific. But these things seem like stuff you should have dealt with before putting all the bells and whistles on.

Then there was the problem that the iPhone being inextricably linked (until recently) to AT&T. The radios in the iPhone (all 4? 5? of them - GSM, HSPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS - am I missing any?) are very weak to preserve battery power, so I found I dropped a lot more calls on the iPhone than on the old Treo.

My last interaction with AT&T came just a few months ago, however. I had the unlimited data plan (as all iPhone users did), and AT&T brought out limited data plans. Since I had never used more than 130 MB of data in a month (I mostly use it on WiFi because the 3G data rate is so slow), I signed up for the 200 MB per month plan to save $15.

Several weeks later, I got a text from customer service letting me know I was over my allocation. By about 4 GB.

I called them as soon as I could to explain there was a mistake; I had not changed my usage, I had never used more than 130 MB of data in a month, so this was clearly a mistake. They "opened a case" to investigate, and their "investigation" showed that I had used that much data. I asked them to re-open the case, which they did, and then re-closed it. I went in to the local AT&T store to talk to them in person. They were able to bring up the logs and show me the data usage; apparently, one night my phone downloaded over 4 GB of data in about a 6-hour stint. While I was asleep. And I downloaded even more over the next couple of days.

Now, one of the features of the iPhone is that it keeps track of how much data it "sees" passing through the data connection, and that counter (which I have never reset) shows that I have send just under 500 MB and received 2.4 GB in the life of the phone. I also measured the download speed (several times, over a period of several days) from speedtest.net, and found that, at the speeds I get, it would take the better part of a day to download 4 GB of data, assuming the link was running "full speed" the entire time.

I presented all this evidence to the folks at AT&T, who said, in effect, "We don't care." They generously allowed me to retroactively upgrade to a 2 GB data plan, so I had only a $40 overage. I paid the $40 and vowed that would be the last time I did business with AT&T for cellular service. In May my contract is up, and I'll look at what Verizon can offer.

Now, I had mentioned that the memory capacity of the iPhone has become important. I had "jailbroken" my iPhone to try to overcome some of the limitations - it allowed me to shoot video and tether the phone, both of which were very good. I decided at one point to upgrade to iOS 4.1 to get some new features (including support for the Bluetooth Keyboard), figuring I could easily downgrade and re-jailbreak if needed. When I upgraded to iOS 4.1, the phone was usable, but the apps were almost all unusable. It took up so much memory, it took minutes for apps to load. One day I was looking up something on Google Maps, and, after 10 minutes, I finally just gave up - it didn't crash, it just sat there, not responding. This is something I do a lot of the iPhone, so I needed to get it back. I downgraded back to 3.1.3, and the phone is now usable, but still a lot slower than it used to be. It turns out that upgrading to 4.1 installed new data modem software (the "baseband" software) that, apparently, takes up much more memory than the old software. It also makes it impossible to "jailbreak."

Interestingly, several of my applications had updated to iOS 4.1 versions, and they disappeared when I downgraded. The iOS 3.1 versions apparently are no longer available, so I have just lost them.

So, now my iPhone is obsolete. It still works, but it's not nearly as useful as it was. In May I'll evaluate my options on Verizon. They have the iPhone 4, of course, but now that I have been so thoroughly obsoleted in 2 years with an iPhone, I'm very leery of taking that "closed platform" trip again. An open platform like Android has the advantage that a savvy user can maneuver more to reduce the effects of obsolescence; with Apple, you get what you get.

The point of all this, of course, is that I consider a smartphone a necessity of modern business. Although I have considered it, I'm very reluctant to go back to a 3 or 4-gadget existence - I'd like to keep going down the path of having to have my laptop with me less of the time rather than more. I really appreciate being able to pull out the phone and work productively on email and web-based work (as long as it doesn't involve Adobe Flash - another "closed platform" problem).

Whither next on this journey? I'll let you know...

Ah, the joys of business...

The joys are few, but the responsibilities and hassles are many!

One of the most interesting things has been dealing with suppliers. The AyrMesh Hub is a radio we buy from Ubiquiti, via one or more of their distributors. Ubiquiti is a pretty good company: they design really good stuff that's inexpensive and fairly bulletproof. However, they have a very difficult time managing their own supply chain, and the result has been that they just run out of product every so often.

Their distribution model somewhat exacerbates this: they manufacture in China, and their distributors have to buy in full container (roughly 20'x8'x8') lots. This is a LOT of little radios, and a LOT of capital tied up in them, so they manage their inventory so it's just about empty when the next container load comes in. If Ubiquiti is a couple of weeks late (due to a manufacturing glitch, or a facility problem, or parts unavailable, or any of a zillion other things that go wrong), then these products just disappear out of everyone's inventory as everyone who uses them scrambles to get them.

To this point, we have been lucky - the two times they have run out of product, we have been able to get enough inventory to tide us over, but it has been both expensive and nerve-wracking.

The other major "supplier" hassle has been web hosting... a critical "commodity" for a web-based business.

We have two websites: ayrstone.com, which runs Joomla and is all content-based, and ayrmesh.com, which is the "backbone" of the AyrMesh system and is all code-based. Ayrmesh.com, because of the nature of the information, also is dependent on SSL encryption - all connections must be SSL encrypted.

We started off with GoDaddy, and it worked pretty well. We had a couple of short outages, but, through our early days, it worked just fine. The only problem I had with GoDaddy is their clunky interface for managing all the functions of the website. It is terribly slow, not very convenient, and, every so often, it just wouldn't work (possibly because it is Javascript-heavy and will tax the browser to the max). I also found it worked best with Windows and IE, but I use Linux, iPhone, Firefox, and Safari mostly.

When we launched AyrMesh, I wanted to go with a more solid, commercial hosting provider. A friend recommended Media Temple, so I started with their basic "Grid" web hosting. The tools and interface are WONDERFUL! Their tech support is great, and, for simple web hosting, they have been very good. A few short outages, but, overall, very good. The caveat here is to note I said, "simple web hosting." Ayrstone.com has been on Media Temple's "Grid" service for a year now and has been flawless. Ayrmesh.com, however, experienced an outage for several hours one night. Something in the configuration went wrong in serving SSL pages; eventually, after I called and tweeted the support folks, they got it fixed. I was put on notice.

Some weeks later, it happened again. This time ayrmesh.com was down for about 5 hours, including a time when a reviewer was trying to install an AyrMesh system. Same mysterious problem, and no explanation from the support people that gave me any confidence that it wouldn't happen again. Apparently they just don't monitor the software that provides the SSL support for their web servers very well.

That, of course, was the last straw. The next day I rented a "Virtual Private Server" from GoDaddy (they seem to have the best deals on the web... of course, it's very difficult to compare apples to apples) and moved ayrmesh.com to it. We have had one short glitch for "scheduled maintenance" (they swear they sent me an email notifying me), but otherwise it has run perfectly.

So, for the moment, ayrstone.com is still running on Media Temple and ayrmesh.com is running on the GoDaddy server. There is plenty of room/resource on the server to move ayrstone.com there, but everything is working pretty well right now and I don't mind blowing $16 per month on Media Temple for now.

The next frontier: IP cameras. Here we step into the murky world of importing, and all the fun that comes with it. Stay tuned...

A real company is born...

Well, in case you haven't seen our ads or mentions on the web, we are truly up and running. In the last few months, we have been working on our website, particularly the Support page where all the instructions and FAQs live. We have added articles on the Community page, and worked to make sure it is more "SEO friendly" so we show up first in searches.

Most exciting, we have sold about 200 AyrMesh Hubs at this point. Some have come back because they didn't do what the purchaser had hoped, and we have even seen our first defects in the last couple of weeks. However, the VAST majority have found "happy homes" out across the U.S. and Canada - it's incredibly gratifying!

Now, while it's true that we have some revenues and expenses (hey, that's the sign of a real company, right?), there are still a few things separating us from being a REAL company:

1. When you call technical support, you talk to me.
2. When you call sales, you talk to me.
3. In fact, any number you call, if I'm not on the phone already, you talk to me.
4. I'm on the phone most of the time.
5. If you send an email to sales, support, info, or just about anything else at ayrstone.com, you're talking to me.

Of course, an awful lot of folks end up talking to my voice on the answering service, so we're going to get some people (who probably know more than I do anyway) to answer the phone.

In the meantime, AyrMesh has started showing up all over the web. Clay Mitchell has been a beta tester, and has mentioned it in his blog. Willie Vogt also wrote a good article about us on his blog, and a very nice article in Farm Progress. Finally, more and more of our customers are sending us great testimonials and reviews on our Amazon store.

It is gratifying to have gotten the company finally off the ground and moving in the right direction. However, now is when the hard work really begins.

Onwards and upwards!

And the product is out... to "friends and family"

The Ayrstone AyrMesh Hub is in its preliminary sales cycle - "Friends and Family" - especially for the folks who have supported us over the last year and a half.

The website is up as is our Amazon WebStore.

If you didn't get an invitation for our "Friends and Family" offer, leave a comment below and we'll get you one (it's a very limited-time offer, however, so let me know NOW).

For those who are familiar with the high-end wi-fi radios out there, you can see we have standardized on the Ubiquiti PicoStation HP radio (running, of course, our own firmware). It is a terrific little unit - very small, light, easy to mount in many different configurations, and quite sturdy and weather-resistant.

Right now, the focus is on helping farmers (and other folks who live in the country, of course) deploy the AyrMesh network on their homesteads. Next we'll start moving out into the fields... stay tuned!

And time marches on...

It has been a busy, busy time for the New Ag Business. This summer I drove back to Illinois and Iowa to install beta hardware to "prove out" the AyrMesh(TM) concept. It was an amazing trip, full of discovery and accomplishment, both professionally and personally.

Professionally, it was a huge relief to finally put this system into the hands of some growers so they could see the value it provides and give us feedback on it.

In each location, we installed a gateway node (on top of a house, attached to a router with broadband access) and a field node (solar powered) with a weather station and a field camera. At our Illinois location, the field station is 3/4 of a mile from the gateway; in Iowa, it is 2.4 miles from the gateway.

The systems have performed, albeit not flawlessly. There have been some small glitches, especially in the power systems. In early October, I flew back out there to update the systems and add more solar panels. We're still facing a few problems, but the radio systems have worked flawlessly since I returned.

Personally, it was a great trip - I saw my parents, drove across the Sierras and the Rockies, saw wildlife from Antelope to Pheasants, crossed the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, saw old friends and made new ones.

Now we are just putting our noses to the grindstone to get the first products ready for sale.

Backtracking a bit

It occurs to me that I have never really explained why we are starting the AyrMesh™ product line or even what it is. Better late than never...

The motivation for the AyrMesh product was born from a number of independent yet related observations:

1. Growers already have a number of wireless communication systems on the farm: RTK GPS systems, irrigation systems, two-way radios, cellular telephones, and, possibly, several others.
2. Each of these systems is independent, requiring separate base stations, clients, maintenance, and, possibly, licensing. However, they may still interfere with one another - unifying these into a single network can save money and time.
3. There are benefits to having these networks connected to the internet: access to RTK networks like the one recently installed by the state of Iowa, and being able to access things like irrigation systems via a web interface, for example.
4. Growers who have such networks find them indispensable, but they are expensive
5. For most growers, the only way to find out the condition of a field is to drive out and take a look at it.
6. For most growers, fieldwork data is kept on the flash cards in the in-cab computers on their equipment and/or on notebooks stored under the seats of the farm vehicles and is not collected and analyzed until after harvest.

Those last two points may be the most important. Point 5 really states that growers are wasting an enormous amount of time driving to fields to look them over, when time is their most precious commodity in the growing season. Point 6 means that all the decisions a grower makes during the season are made without the best possible information.

Setting up some minimal remote sensing equipment (rainfall at the very least; windspeed and direction, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure are easy to include, and, once you have those, soil temperature and moisture sensors are just as easy to plug in) in the fields will at least relieve the grower from having to drive out to the field only to find out it's too wet to work.

While good and even inexpensive weather equipment is available, no good, inexpensive weather stations exist that meet our criteria:

• Deliver information via standard Internet Protocol (IP),
• Can send weather data directly to a server via the internet and display that data as a web page,
• Have the ability to transmit weather data 5 miles or more wirelessly,
• Can be run off of a solar panel and a battery (no power outlet or AA batteries required),
• Don't require the use of a PC or server on the farm, and
• Cost less than a good used car.

We think there is also use for cameras in the field, either natural light, Infra-Red (IR), or near-IR, to help spot crop stress as quickly as possible. Of course, good weatherproof webcams can easily and inexpensively be integrated once you have the IP network available. What other data might be interesting to have collected automatically in the field?

One of the other things we have realized is that, today, all the remote sensing solutions available have the goal of getting data to the home PC. However, a grower belongs in the fields, not in the office staring at a computer. If the grower has wireless internet access in the fields, either via the field network or the cellular network, then a far better solution is to put all the data on a server on the internet where he can access it any time from anywhere - on any internet-connected device, from the computer at home to a laptop to a "nettop" to a smartphone.

This remote sensing capability brings terrific value to the grower, but, as we have learned in the corporate world and, increasingly, even in our own homes, once you have the network, it tends to find a lot more use than you had originally envisioned. We have a lot more in mind for this network... more on that later.

DEC, SGI, and now Sun...

(reposted from a post to the Sun Microsystems Alumni group)

I am rapidly coming to the belief that companies (and individuals) in the technology business want to be rich, happy, and long-lived, and the best you can do is choose about one and a half of those three.

If you want to be happy and live a long life, I think the company to emulate is Falafel's Drive In. Not what one might consider a tech company, but I don't know of anyone in the valley who hasn't eaten there, because they've been there for at least thirty years. I'm willing to bet there are no billionaires there.

What happened to each of these companies, IMHO, is that they were unhappy until they got rich. When they were rich, they wanted to be happy, and so they were. However, if you get to be rich and happy, your life expectancy goes down dramatically in this business, and so they all died (and I do consider Sun, alas, to be on life support with no real chance of recovery).

To be less abstract about it, each of them set out to build something better than was previously available - an undertaking born of unhappiness. These three companies were each successful and became rich. Once rich, they wanted to do what we are taught in business school: build barriers to competition to product our frachise. So they each used their own chips (made Intel unhappy), their own operating systems (made academics, already accustomed to the openness of BSD UNIX, unhappy), and their own parts, service, and support mechanisms (made small vendors, service providers, and do-it-yourselfers, like Google, unhappy). This meant they were rich and happy, which made unhappy people (in the case of Sun, they were Intel, Linus Torvalds, the PC vendors like Dell, and lots of others like Google) focus their unhappiness on Sun. Sun, being happy, chose to believe that toy computers and home-made operating systems could not possibly be a threat to them, just as
DEC had believed that silly workstations with their cryptic UNIX operating systems could not be a threat to minicomputers and SGI had believed that toy "personal" computers with their pokey data buses and little graphic cards could not be a threat to them.

I think there's an important discipline that good managers (as I at least imagine myself to be) have. It is easy and feels good to look at the product and thinks about how good it is and focus on all of its strengths. A good manager, IMHO, looks at a product and thinks about its shortcomings, what competitors might do to attack it, and how to make the next product make up for those weaknesses. Most importantly, one should look at the product's revenue streams and try to figure out how to cut it in half or less as quickly as possible. Why? because it's what your competitors are doing. It's a miserably unhappy existence, always leading to your company being less rich than you think it should be. But it's the only way to live a long life as a tech company.

Interestingly, the only "tech" company that seems to understand that is IBM. And I'll bet every IBM employee thinks IBM stock should be trading at $200-500 per share instead of the $100+ it's trading at now. Not very rich, not very happy, and living a long life.

As we work to get Ayrstone off the ground, I'm watching my former employers (Sun's only one of them... I have lived a charmed life in this regard) collapse, I cannot help but think about these issues and how to get around them. So this is what I believe today: if you want to live a long life, stay poor and miserable.

Nanostations, OLSR, and OpenWRT

Well, it has been an interesting period of time since my last post.

Please understand that I have been simultaneously working on the technical aspects of the Ayrstone AyrMesh(TM), updating the web page, writing the business plan, and preparing to show the product at the World Ag Expo in Tulare, CA.

So, first, the technology. While OLSR does definitely work on Ubiquiti's AirOS, the odd fact is that they have somehow messed with MadWiFi so that you cannot create a VAP running in adhoc or ahdemo mode. This, of course, effectively prevents the creation of a mesh network using AirOS.

Ubiquiti must have had some very good reason for doing this, but I have not yet had the temerity to ask them.

I decided at this point to start working with the open-source OpenWRT OS, a Linux distribution originally built for the Linksys WRT54G. It has been ported to the Atheros chipset used by Ubiquiti and runs very well on the NanoStations while providing a lot more control. I started by studing two existing meshing packages: RoBIn and NightWing. From them I was able to figure out how to build a version of OpenWRT that (1) fits in the 4 MB space on the NanoStation and (2) does what we want it to do. So far it's working very, very nicely.

A very nice added bonus is that it works perfectly on the new Ubiquiti Bullet2HP, which is better-suited to our purposes than the NanoStation. I have one of the early units, and it is working very well.

In the meantime, we showed the Ayrstone AyrMesh at the World Ag Expo and were very well-recieved there. People asked what we had and, when we explained, were simultaneously very surprised and very interested. Those who were able to fully understand the capabilities and potential of the concept were eager to try it out, although, in fairness, not everyone really understood it. This is the bane of the high-tech marketer's existance: figuring out how to explain technology so that people understand the full potential of the device - the facsimile machine being a "classic" example.

Meanwhile, we are polishing up the business plan and starting to look for funding. Anyone with a few hundred thousand that you'd like to use to buy into the next high-growth agricultural technology company, please form an orderly line...

OLSR on NanoStation 2

As noted earlier, I built the Nanostation firmware for the Nanostation 2 using the code and directions found here: https://wiki.graz.funkfeuer.at/UbntStations

You can get the code for the NanoStation 5 there, of course, and I have posted my build of the code for the NanoStation 2 here.

Please let me know if you want to try it out - bmoffitt "at" bmoffitt "dot" com

More from Radio Boy...

A friend of mine, a few Christmases back, bought me a couple of old serial books, part of the "Radio Boys" series, about a group of boys experimenting with radios (new-fangled, high-tech stuff). They make me smile every time I look over at them - from the 1920s, the language is somewhat odd, but the stories are cute.

I'm trying to find the "perfect" radio system for this product. The perfect radio system will be no-config - just power it up and it will figure out its role. Each node should automatically configure itself as a gateway, repeater, or client (or, even better, repeater-client). I know this is possible, because the Open-Mesh boxes do it. They're just not suitable for outdoor use.

So far, the Ubiquiti radios (I have been testing the NanoStation 2) have won the day - mostly open-source firmware, with a very nice SDK for developing new extensions. The only problem is that the only "meshing" protocol that comes with them is WDS with STP. It actually works pretty well, and will get the job done. However, it requires more setup than I like (not automatic configuration) and doesn't use the "best" encryption algorithm (WEP vs. WPA).

The Open-Mesh boxes run an interesting mix of software, and they can use either B.A.T.M.A.N. or OLSR as the meshing protocol. I recently changed my Open-Mesh boxes from B.A.T.M.A.N. to OLSR and noticed no difference in performance. Running either of these protocols would seem to be a possible solution, but I'd have to change my NanoStations over to OpenWRT, which I am somewhat reluctant to do.

However, I recently found a fellow in Austria who has ported OLSR to Ubiquiti's AirOS as part of a "free wi-fi network" project - see https://wiki.graz.funkfeuer.at/UbntStations.

So I downloaded the SDK, code, patches, and other files from ubnt.com and from funkfeuer.at, and made myself a firmware file for the NanoStation 2 (on about the fifth try - hey, I haven't done real software development for over 15 years!) I loaded it on to one of the Nanos, fired it up, turned it on, and it was running happily.

There are still some small glitches to be worked out before this solution is ready for prime time, so, for now, we'll keep going with WDS. However, the more I read about OLSR the more excited I am about it. The benefits for the Ayrstone customers are great.