Sofcoast

Thoughtstream: Who's watching?

Todd Huffman shared this graph that depicts water consumption in Edmonton the day prior to the Gold Medal Hockey Game (green) and the day of the Gold Medal Hockey Game (blue).

The point for me is a counter intuitive one.  Evidently the viewing audience is lower during high stakes games and period changes than one might have expected.

So, the question is....who's watching the commercials if everyone's in the bathroom?

Cheers!

John

Signals and Drumbeats: First Responder Communications Challenges

http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/88425-police-fire-chiefs-say-plan-will-not-improve-communications-system

Police, fire chiefs say plan will not improve communications

By Kim Hart
The Hill

Police and fire chiefs from around the country are calling on Congress to make sure public safety agencies have access to enough wireless airwaves to form a nationwide communication network for first responders. 

Public safety executives say the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) National Broadband Plan undermines their ability to build a network that would allow federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to talk to each other during national disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina or the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 

The National Broadband Plan, which the FCC delivered to Congress last week, makes several recommendations intended to allow paramedics, police officers, port authority patrols and other emergency workers to create a national network to replace the current patchwork of networks that use different technologies, making it difficult for different jurisdictions to communicate.  

The biggest point of contention is over the FCC’s recommendation to auction off a chunk of spectrum previously set aside for public safety. During emergencies, public safety officials would have priority access on commercial networks. 

But top police commissioners and fire chiefs say that system will not be reliable enough. Instead, they want the FCC to give a larger piece of spectrum to the first responders, who would then lease excess capacity to commercial providers when it is not needed.

“We don’t object to public-private partnerships as long as public safety is in charge of the process,” said Charles Dowd, deputy chief of the New York City Police Department, in an interview. “Commercial networks simply aren’t built to the standards we need.”

New York’s technology dilemma illustrates the problems faced around the country. Police officers’ wireless network runs on different frequencies than that used by the Port Authority. The Metropolitan Transit Authority that monitors the subway system uses yet a different set of frequencies. Devices that can communicate on all those frequencies cost upward of $8,000 and do not have broadband capabilities, Dowd said.

Developing a nationwide network for public safety has been discussed for more than a decade but has yet to come to fruition. 

In 1997, Congress directed the FCC to give public safety agencies access to airwaves being vacated by TV broadcasters. In 2007, the FCC adopted rules to create a mandatory partnership between public safety agencies and the private sector with a section of the airwaves — known as the “D Block” — to be auctioned off. But during the federal auction in 2008, the block of spectrum failed to attract the minimum required bid.

Congress then directed the FCC to auction it to the private sector. In its broadband plan, the FCC recommended giving the proceeds of that auction to the public safety community to build an interoperable network. And the FCC would provide 10 megahertz for public safety’s own network.

“Reaching some kind of understanding is very important,” said Jamie Barnett, chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. “Public safety keeps saying they need more spectrum, but I have said they really need to talk about the funding as a key part as well. Without the federal funding, there will not be a national network because people will not be able to afford to get it to all the places we need it to be.”

The broadband plan suggests the public safety network will cost between $12 billion and $16 billion over 10 years. The FCC is recommending that Congress set aside $6.5 billion over that time period for a grant program to build the network. By assessing a fee on all U.S. broadband users, an additional $6 billion to $10 billion would go toward operating and upgrading the system. 

The plan asks Congress to authorize the FCC to collect the fee, which would likely be less than $1 per month per user.

The chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, respectively, expressed support for the FCC’s plan in a statement, saying it “offers a clear roadmap” for finally creating a national public safety network. 

The FCC’s Barnett said the national network needs to go into development very soon in order to take advantage of the commercial roll-out of 4G wireless technologies—the latest in wireless broadband.

“I know they have some distrust of the commercial carriers and they worry they won’t be able to get priority when they need it,” he said. “But we worked so hard to make this technologically sound.”

If the public safety community continues to fight the recommendations, Barnett said he worries they could lose the opportunity to receive the funding for the nationwide network.

“I’m afraid public safety will walk away without the D Block and without the funding,” he said. “It’s not just about cost savings. If we don’t grab this right now, we won’t get the interoperable network we need.”

Harlin McEwen, chairman of the Public Safety Spectrum Trust, said having the full block of spectrum is the only way to ensure first responders will have the capacity they need for the coming years. Auction proceeds, he said, will not make up for the loss of the extra piece of spectrum. 

“We have a strong difference of opinion with the FCC chairman,” Harlin told The Hill. “We’d been led to believe that he would support our efforts, but he’s aggressively going forward with the plan.”

The Police Executive Research Forum held a conference Friday in which FCC officials and public safety executives met to air their differences, but little was resolved.

Public safety groups are recommending that Congress pass a law to allocate the full block of spectrum directly to public safety agencies. Then they would invite commercial carriers to partner with them to build out the network.

McEwen said he has the support of a number of commercial firms interested in sharing the spectrum, including Motorola, Alcatel Lucent, Northrop Grumman, Harris, Verizon Wireless and AT&T. 

California officials are especially ardent about changing the FCC’s mind. Massive forest fires rip through the state every year, but evacuations are complicated by the inability of first responders to talk to one another.

“It’s mission-critical for us to have absolute control of the spectrum bands to be able to talk effectively,” said San Diego Police Chief Bill Landsdowne. “The information we put on there is not only critical, it’s confidential. We can’t have that information going over commercial airwaves.”

Signals & Drumbeats: Week ending March 20, 2010

The DNA of Sofcoast is rooted in tactical communications, unmanned systems (also known as remotely piloted systems), mobile computing and enterprise information systems.  Translated, this is our team's "background of obviousness".  From time to time we find articles, events or other bits of information that pertain to our backgrounds as well as Sofcoast's positioning, direction and focus.  When we do, we categorize and share them as "Signals and Drumbeats" posts.   Hopefully they're helpful to you in some way.

Cheers,

John Surmont

Founder/CEO

===

White House: UAS shall overcome

By Stephen Trimble on March 16, 2010 10:21 PM

Unmanned air systems (UAS) will prove they belong in the same airspace as passenger jets in 10 years, the White House says.

The 10-year roadmap quietly last week last week by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is not quite the UAS equivalent of Brown vs the Board of Education (Editor: Ahem, not that airspace integration and school desegregation are even close ). But it is the first White House-level document establishing UAS airspace integration as a policy goal.

The FAA today candidly discriminates against UAS technology in national airspace. It's not even a separate but equal policy today; it's just separate.

The new objective to integrate the national airspace is one of several goals contained in the document, entitled the National Aeronautics Research and Development Plan 2010. It is dated February, but was released on the OSTP web site on March 4.

Federal court gives HUBZone program priority

The Small Business Act makes it mandatory, not optional, to give HUBZone companies a preference over other small businesses, a judge rules

• By Matthew Weigelt
• Mar 09, 2010

A federal judge has thrown a wrench into the Obama administration’s small-business contracting policy by ruling that agencies must give priority to businesses in economically depressed areas when setting aside contracts for small businesses.

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims determined that the Small Business Act requires contracting officers to consider companies in the Small Business Administration’s Historically Underutilized Business Zone (HUBZone) program before opening contracts to firms in the 8(a) and service-disabled, veteran-owned small business set-aside programs.

The Obama administration had argued that the HUBZone preference was simply an option available to contacting officers, but not a requirement. But Federal Judge Emily Hewitt disagreed, noting the text of the provision left little room for debate.

“The court interprets the language of the HUBZone competition provision—‘shall be awarded’—to be mandatory,” the judge wrote in an opinion released March 2.

The case involved Mission Critical Solutions, a HUBZone company that had protested the Army’s award of a one-year, $3.45 million sole-source contract to Copper River Information Technology, a company owned by Alaska Natives. Mission Critical argued that the Army had failed to consider whether at least two HUBZone businesses would bid on the contract.

Hewitt’s ruling affirms the Government Accountability Office’s bid protest decisions in 2008 and 2009 that gave preference to HUBZone small businesses. The two GAO decisions contradicted SBA’s long-standing interpretation that the agency’s procurement programs should be treated equally when it comes to awarding contracts.

After last year’s case involving Mission Critical Solutions, Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told contracting officers to disregard GAO’s decision. The decision had been written by then-GAO acting general counsel Daniel Gordon, who is now the administrator for federal procurement policy at OMB.

SBA still believes in its interpretation.

“SBA has consistently interpreted the Small Business Act to provide that federal contracting officers are to choose equally among all of SBA’s procurement and business development programs, without giving one preference over the others. This is the rule of ‘parity’ between the programs,” Jonathan Swain, SBA’s associate administrator for the Office of Communication and Public Liaison, said in a statement March 9 statement.

As agency officials review the court’s decision, “SBA will continue to present its views in that matter and in all ongoing judicial proceedings involving interpretation of the Small Business Act,” he said.

This debate over priority has spurred members of Congress recently to change the HUBZone program’s language in the law from “shall” to “may.”

The Senate approved an amendment to the fiscal 2010 National Defense Authorization Act that would have taken any priority away from the HUBZone program. However, the amendment was stripped before the bill became law. Senators and House members have also introduced bills to make all the small-business programs equal, but none have made it to a vote.

“During these difficult economic times, it is imperative that small-business contractors possess an equal opportunity to compete for federal contracts on the same playing field with each other,” Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), ranking member of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, said on March 8. Snowe introduced a parity bill in July 2009.

She also said the court’s ruling “highlights the critical need to enact small-business contracting parity once and for all.”

Justice Department lawyers argued before Hewitt that reaction by Senators and House members against GAO’s Mission Critical decision justifies SBA’s and the administration’s interpretation. However Hewitt wrote, “Congress’s statements about the proper interpretation of a statute subsequent to the statute’s passage are of little persuasive authority.”

About the Author

Matthew Weigelt is acquisition editor for Federal Computer Week.                       

Signals & Drumbeats: Reaching critical mass for encouraging startups

I found this fascinating quote today:

There is absolutely no reason why startups have to concentrate in one area. Silicon Valley has Stanford and UC Berkeley, two of the top universities in the U.S. if not the world, and it also has the biggest concentration of venture capitalists anywhere in the world. However, Boston has Harvard and MIT. New York has Columbia and NYU. Chicago has Northwestern, the University of Chicago and IIT. Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon and Pitt. Los Angeles has UCLA and USC.Len Feldman, The Feldman File, Mar 2010

You should read the whole article.

Cheers,

John Surmont,

Sofcoast

Thoughtsream: Huffman's Three Principles for data sharing

Todd Huffman stopped by the corporate offices this week for a series of company planning meetings and partner presentations and discussions.  I asked him if I could post his "Three Principles for Data Sharing" outlined by Sean Gorman on the FortiusOne "Off the Map" blog September 2009 post.

Enjoy. 

Based on Todd's work in Afghanistan, he describes the “beer for data” project at the Taj.

The data sharing success boiled down to three basic principles:

1) Create immediate value for anyone contributing data: when users contribute data they should get an immediate return on that investment. In the case of the Afghan pilot that meant getting to see your contributed data on a map of high resolution satellite imagery as soon as you uploaded it. The imagery for Afghanistan was made available by NGA, then tiled and served up by a Fusion Server, graciously donated by Google.

2) Make contributor’s data available back to them with improvements: any data that goes in should be available to download back out again. Further, the data should come back better than when it went in. In the Afghan pilot this meant if you shared data in a spreadsheet format into the platform you could get it back out as KML, shapefile, Atom, JSON, spatialite etc. (Addendum to principle 2 - PDF’s are evil, and make parsing and extracting data into a sharable format complete misery.)

3) Share derivative works back with the data sharing community: urge users who create derivative works, with shared data, to contribute their data products back to the group. In the case of the Afghan pilot researchers were taking the detailed data from the field and feeding it into their sophisticated models and simulations. Researchers would then upload the results into GeoIQ to share the derivative works back with the data sharing community. This meant that agencies and individuals that shared data again got a better product back by contributing. The researchers get better data to feed their models, and a self perpetuating feedback loop is created that sustains increasing data sharing.

While these sound like simple principles, it is amazing how often they are not followed and effective data sharing is blunted. Too often data sharing - especially with government and corporations - is a black hole. Data goes in but never comes back out. Also it is rare to see the positive feedback loops of researchers sharing their work products back with the data sharing community. Too often researchers get wrapped around the axle on their products being proprietary or sensitive. While this can be the case there is huge benefit in feeding results back to gauge their veracity and accuracy. I’ve definitely seen way too many models that look great in the lab and completely fall apart in reality because researchers would not feed results back to the field for verification and error bounding. I’m hoping we’ll have more opportunities to implement these principles in future projects and we can see the success of Todd’s work in Jalalabad duplicated hundreds of times over.

Thoughtstream: Defending the brand

I am a mac user.  I've been operating Sofcoast from my macbook pro 17 inch laptop off and on since I was a defense consultant several years ago.

Lots of people complain about Apple.  I've even grumbled a little bit too from time to time because my experience with my mac until recently was more like an unhealthy relationship with a girlfriend.  When things were good they were great! When they were bad, they were really bad... just listen to the Lucinda Williams song "Joy" from the Crazy Heart soundtrack (a great movie) and you'll get a "feel" for what I'm talking about.

"...you took my joy I want it bayack!"

The point is that over the past year my previous macbook has crashed on two separate occasions, the last time was a couple of weeks ago.  The first time this happened, I took my mac to the Apple store and they fixed it and I restored my lost data from my time capsule (which is a killer product that I believe everyone needs).  This time (and once again) Mr. Jobs and his team have taught me an enormously important lesson about product quality and customer experience.  Over the past six months we've been focused on building the worlds first tactical inflatable wing. (check out this post to get some background).

Key Lessons learned from my recent experience with Apple.

1. Building stuff for others to use every day is hard. Don't compromise.
2. Customer experience creates (or destroys) value.  Be careful.

Most recently, while I was in San Diego, I experienced the second episode with my old macbook. I took the computer to the Otay Ranch Apple Store in a panic.  I showed up and gave them the computer to see what they could do. They told me they'd call me when they finished up the diagnostics.  Long story short, I left my old macbook pro at the store, bought a new macbook pro that day, took it home, restored all of my data and was back up in about 20 hours with no data loss.

It gets better.

I got a call the next day from the Apple store manager.  Apple decided to replace my old macbook pro with a new one (the one I purchased in a panic the day prior).  They refunded my full purchase price minus a small fee.  The Macbook Pro is a two thousand dollar computer. (a lot of money for an entrepreneur..)

What a harrowing and ultimately fantastic experience!

In a world where we're all connecting to each other through applications we download to our smart-phones or the content we generate and share on blog posts or social networks, the tools we interact with every day (for some every moment of the day) to connect with each other to help us access, share, connect or find information is now an embedded part of our social fabric.  It's in our DNA.  Everything we do has an experience connected with it that we can share with each other instantly through these tools.

The point is this:  In 24 hours I went from singing the Lucinda Williams song, Joy, (..."you took my joy!"), from the Crazy Heart soundtrack to singing the song "How you like me now!" from the group, "The Heavy" album titled "The House that Dirt Built".

I will never forget this. 

I guess it's because I expected to simply be "stuck" with a lemon and the replacement costs. And I wasn't. Why?  Because the store manager was empowered to "defend the brand".  He didn't want an Apple customer to have a bad experience with an Apple product.

That's a customer experience to remember.

For me this is a profound (re)discovery.

How about you?

Have you ever chose to "defend the brand"?

If so, how? Why?

If not, why not?

Cheers,

John Surmont

Founding CEO

Sofcoast, Inc.