Remembering Ray Noorda

Ray Noorda died earlier this week and many of you have sent me notes about his passing. He had a profound influence on many of us in the networking industry and was behind many of the technologies and trends that we now take for granted. As a member of my parents’ generation, he was a father figure and mentor to me and many others.

Noorda ran Novell during its glory years of the early 1980/90s. The Novell of yesteryear bears little resemblance to the present company. It began operations in a small Utah suburb located a few miles from the campus of Brigham Young University, and pulled much of its programming talent from the students at the computer science department there. For those of you that have never been to Provo, it is an odd place to start a high-tech company. Provo is dominated by a wall of mountains to the east and rolling hills to the west. Salt Lake City is about an hour up the freeway, past a prison and a bioweapons campus. Until Novell got going, there wasn’t much in high-tech around. Nowadays, the area is filled with former Novell engineers and staffers who have started hundreds of companies, some of which were funded by a private VC firm that Noorda set up with his Novell-created wealth. Intel had a huge presence there, and many others opened up offices to take advantage of the talent that came to the area.

I met Ray several times, and my career in networking was deeply involved with Novell for many years, as sources for my stories, products that I tested and wrote about, clients for my consulting business, and just friends that I made with the many fine people that worked there.

During Ray’s tenure, Novell owned Unix for a period of time, was the first company to get serious about TCP/IP networking, built the first dedicated PC file servers that were any good, made Ethernet networking cards into a solid commercial business, created the first extensive channel program for networking integrators, sold the first PC database servers that could be easily extended, moved network servers into the datacenter, sold integrated email servers, developed the first usable directory service, and many, many more innovations that now seem so ordinary and business-as-usual. They often had a handle on technologies before any of us really knew what to do with them. I am sure that I am forgetting about a few other things here and there.

If you look at this collection of technologies, it is an impressive list. Many of us learned about networking as Novell brought out new software and services, and went through the certifications on Novell products – certifications that were once worth something: and difficult to obtain, requiring more than just paper knowledge and protocols. I covered numerous product launches as a journalist and they were always fun because you could usually get some Novell executive to open up and give you some colorful background. One of these briefings was held at an exclusive ski lodge in the nearby mountains, which was lost on me because I don’t ski but still was a fun place to go. My first taste of Sundance was through many events that Novell held there, too.

I remember my visit to Japan to introduce that country to its version of PC Week. The visit coincided with Novell’s own Japanese launch and I surprised several American executives when my byline for that event appeared in PC Week. Our first networking shootout for PC Week between Ethernet, Arcnet, and Token Ring cemented many relationships with the parties involved in that test. We got Novell to fix the poorly performing Token Ring drivers, not that anyone cares today about Token Ring or Arcnet for that matter.

Novell stories figured prominently in those first issues of Network Computing, a magazine that I created with plenty of support from Novell in 1990 and is still publishing today. When I first opened up shop as a consultant, one of the first things I did was put a Netware server in the Guggenheim Museum to test products for Intel. I think it was a 386. And while I still have my Netware software discs, I don’t think I could set up a server without a lot of work.

Novell was the first to take advantage of the protected mode of 286 chips, beating IBM’s OS/2 to the punch by a few years. It was this file server that I installed at Transamerica Occidental Life back in the mid 1980s, which was the first LAN to be installed there, despite IBM trying to get us to use their crummy attempts. Thus began my own networking career in IT and then into journalism, where I have covered networking topics ever since.

One of my favorite conference speaking sessions was one Interop where I sat down with Drew Major, the principal architect of Netware, for an hour in front of an audience and just had a great talk about the past, present and future of networking. Drew was the real deal and for many of us the soul of networking. At one point, Interop was combined with Networld, Novell’s annual partner conference.

Ray was far from a perfect leader. His biggest weakness was miscalculating Microsoft’s rapid adoption of many of his principle network ideas into Windows 95. Windows 95 was the first Microsoft OS to incorporate a Netware client as part of the OS, and the beginning of the end for Netware. His biggest mistake was buying Word Perfect, another Utah company that fed off local talent, but bled Novell dry and took it away from its core networking competence. He had plenty of hubris when it came to protecting his intellectual property, and many of the almost comical events surrounding Caldera’s Unix lawsuits can be traced to his early litigation with Microsoft on PC DOS.

Today’s Novell is a shadow of its former self. No one cares about Netware anymore, although it is still in use here and there. Its vast and powerful reseller base is in shambles. They are still involved in Unix, having bought SUSE a few years ago. They still sell a directory service, and it still has features that are lacking in Microsoft’s Active Directory, not that anyone thinks about this either. They moved their HQ across the country.

Ray, thanks for taking this young pup for such a great ride in our industry. Those of you that would like to post your own comments and tributes to him, please go to my blog at Strominator.com or send me emails with permission to post your thoughts.

Mark Eppley of SC-integrity

Mark Eppley has been around the PC business almost since day one, when he invented a special cable to enable two computers to transfer data between them. Laplink went on to be one of the longest-selling brands in PC history, eventually selling more than 30 million copies, and Eppley became a fixture at industry conferences and events.

Now the venerable pitchman is running a new business called SC-Integrity that has nothing to do with laptops, cables, or computers – directly. Call it LoJack for finding lost tractor trailer freight loads. The problem is that more than 100 truck loads a day on average are lost or more likely stolen from America’s roads. These aren’t just some random pickup, but full 50-foot trailers that can carry anywhere from $100,000 worth of clothing to multi-million dollar loads of pharmaceuticals. And recovering these stolen goods is all being done with hi-tech that until recently wasn’t even possible.

The idea is fiendishly simple: place a tracking device of about the size of a deck of cards  deep down inside a pallet of goods that is carried by trucks around the country. The device sends out a signal every 30 seconds telling the central monitoring command center where it is located. If it goes someplace unexpected, call the cops.

“A pallet of Viagra is worth $1.2 million on the retail market, and there are 28 pallets in the average-sized trailer,” said Eppley.

The problem is that all this missing merchandise is the result of some very determined and clever crooks, and Eppley’s company is using tech to track them down and stop the losses. So far this year they have recovered more than $7 million in goods. “The problem is that trucks and their trailers are almost always recovered, but not before they have been emptied out of their freight,” he says. The FBI says that all it takes is $5,000 in cash offered to a driver, and he’ll gladly leave his motor running at a truck stop when taking a break.

“You can have professionals unload a truck in about five minutes,” says Eppley. “We get a fix every 30 seconds on our trucks. If there is a problem, we can immediately detect that within one minute and notify the proper authorities.”

Why so many missing trucks? First off, drivers are infrequently prosecuted, and when they are state laws let them get off lightly. “The problem is that in many states, vehicle theft is not a felony and many people are just prosecuted for the value of the empty trailer and not the freight, which can be at most $25,000.” Your average BMW costs more than that. Several states, including California, are passing harsher laws to make it more risky for stealing freight. But clearly, theft is on the rise, and the bad guys know how to game the system.

When Miami cracked down on freight theft earlier this year, the thieves moved north to Atlanta, who had more lenient laws. “Things do change and the crooks do move around, although a lot of the theft is centered around the port cities,” said Eppley.

And despite the popular image of Italian-surnamed thieves and the mob, Eppley paints a picture where many gangs are involved. “It is highly organized, and it is ethnic based. Everyone — Cubans, Latin groups, whatever — they all specialize and have their network of fences for the stolen goods and particular kinds of goods that they steal,” he said.

Some of the goods get sold by being incorporated back into legitimate distribution systems, he said. “There are many retailers who will buy merchandise from a distributor that they know is hot, especially clothes and shoes. This just goes back into the stores. We all end up paying for it in the costs of goods and in the vendor’s insurance premiums,” he says.

So how does it work? The devices, called SC-Tracker, are self-powered and don’t require any external antennas. Part of the challenge for the tracking device is battery life, as any of you would instantly recognize. “Our device gets a seven day minimum life on a battery charge. Our closest competitor says that they generate 700 reports, but we generate 20,000 reports over the week that the device is active.” The issue is that you have to be paying attention to where you load is going, and make sure that you can quickly get a fix on its location.

“It doesn’t work to get a report once a day or once an hour. The truck could be emptied by then. You need to be almost constantly in touch with where it is,” said Eppley. To do this requires what he calls “geo-fencing” meaning putting in a very specific route profile into their systems, so when a truck veers off that course an alarm will sound and they can figure out what caused the event. Also, typical rest periods for the driver are included, so unscheduled stops also create alarms.

They use multiple radio modes to broadcast their location, and are designed to be durable, small, and work under many adverse conditions. Like a LoJack unit, they are placed without the driver knowing where they are located inside the truck’s trailer load, otherwise thieves could easily find and remove them. “We have a hybrid solution, because no single technology will work in the environments that our customers put them in,” says Eppley.

And the solution is working. In the short time that the company has been in business, they have gathered their share of customers, who are paying them six-figure annual fees. In one noted event, their technology figured prominently in the capture of more than a million dollars in Microsoft software that was repacked on a different truck and taken to the Chicago area. It turned out that more than a dozen arrests were made, including some sheriffs from the Cook County police department.

The company has been operating in stealth mode for at least two years, but is now getting noticed and gathering steam. Eppley, who is the president of the company, co-founded it with Dennis duNann. And unlike typical hi-tech firms, you won’t find any management bios on their Web site, or other identifying information.

“We are one of the only companies that have delivered this solution. Our competitors will say that they have certain capabilities and accuracy levels, but when you get under the covers and do the tests, you don’t see the same stuff that we have.” Eppley mentions how GPS truck tracking has been around for more than a decade, but only with miniaturized technology and longer-lasting batteries and better wireless products has he been able to produce an entire solution. “All of this has only been possible in the last couple of years It is a simple concept, but has very difficult execution. We are as accurate 5 to 200 meters, depending on where you are, density of cell towers. We also are integrated with our clients’ business services and security services and have a proven ROI record too,” he says.

Carly Fiorina c.2005

What does the former CEO of HP have to tell anyone these days about how to run an IT organization? That was the question I had when I heard that Carly Fiorina was going to be in town this week, keynoting at a small conference called the Internet Telephony Expo. Given her turbulent tenure at HP, I joked with one of my colleagues that probably the best strategy for anyone at the conference was to listen to what she had to say and do the exact opposite.

And while that seemed somewhat gratuitous, after the speech I was left with a cloying feeling, like having too much MSG after a big Chinese meal. What she had to say was interesting: the nut graf, as we journos say, is that the coming digital revolution will involve transforming every piece of content and the processes that use them into portable, personal, and virtual constructs. What this means for me is a world in which we are our own IT managers, and in charge of our own digital destiny. It is a heady notion, and I for one am not sure I am ready for this level of responsibility.

At first blush, you might think this is heresy, especially coming from the guy that runs a Web site for people who do nothing but take charge of their digital domains on a daily basis. But hear me out. The job that you really have isn’t your own IT manager, but the manager for your friends and family.

Take one aspect of my digital life – my home telephone. I have been a customer of Vonage for several years, and while it hasn’t been effortless, I have enjoyed a certain freedom to never talk to a Baby Bell sales rep ever again, especially when I want to make changes to my phone features like call forwarding, voice mail and call pickup. Some of the Bells are getting this religion: last month I saw some advanced features from Verizon that allow you to make custom feature configurations via the Web like Vonage and the other IP tel providers have.

What about digital photography and music? Having all our CDs encoded on our home PC is very liberating, to be sure. I wouldn’t go back to the analog world for anything. But it has been a painful process in getting my wife on board, and it had nothing to do with technology or the bit rate the files are encoded or which music player we are using or whatever. It was all about cataloging the songs into their appropriate genres, so my wife could play blocks of music that fit her mood. You could say that as the home IT manager I forgot to do the requirements analysis, but the hard part is knowing the right questions to ask in our digital transformation.

In both cases (and I could on with other examples, but I’ll spare you), the downside is that when something goes wrong, I have to go into debug mode for my family and that isn’t a job that I relish. Particularly if I have to call the same providers that I just got freed from talking to their support reps, or spend time at night taking apart my PC.

Carly was big on transformations, which is ironic because her biggest one (in folding Compaq into HP) was far from successful. Certainly, HP has held on but has not hit any home runs then or since. Part of making transformations successful is understanding the end state of what you desire: and I think in the case of HP as well as our 100% digitally pure content world of the future, neither was a slam-dunk.

Look how much promise VoIP is, even now. While no one can argue that more businesses and individuals make use of the technology, it is far from stable and far from being universally deployed. And even in 2005, creating a single network infrastructure to operate both data and voice networks is tricky, and many IT organizations are still not up to the task of designing robust enough networks to handle both kinds of traffic.

Part of the problem is that while VoIP is a network application, it is an application that stresses networks in new and different ways that traditional IT folks don’t usually get until they are deep into the project. Second, network security takes on new levels of urgency and complexity when VoIP is running over these networks. This gets back to what I was saying about transformations.

Carly spoke about customer enablement, whereby VOIP and other disruptive digital technologies are incredibly powerful tools, helping business to compete and consumers to prosper. She mentioned how ‘this nation cannot maintain our competitive leadership without this enablement.” But I am not really sure she understands the path that we have to take to get there.

We are in the midst of a digital revolution, to be sure. But there are still many bumps along the road, and we still need better tools, too. And while “the cell phone with the camera on it has become the single most ubiquitous photography device in the world,” making use of all those digital photos and organizing them and keeping track of them is far from perfect. What we have done is created the digital equivalent of a dusty shoebox in the attic. We still need to transform the collection and display process too.

The Strategy of Conflict

I first met Tom Schelling when I was on my second job after grad school, toiling in the public policy fields of Washington, D.C. I was working at a leftish think tank, working on what would prove to be a futile effort at getting our government to adopt residential building energy efficiency standards similar to what we still have with those yellow appliance labels. One of our projects was trying to join together with business leaders on energy conservation and for this work we had contracted with Professor Schelling to lead some focus groups that brought the bunny-loving, tree-hugging, energy conservation crowd together with Big Oil, Big Banking, and Big just about everything else representing those captains of industry.

Even at that tender age, I could see that the Professor (no one really thinks of him any other way) had a lot to teach me. I went out and read his seminal work, “The Strategy of Conflict” cover to cover. I still have the book, and have gone back to it several times to refer to my favorite passages. Here is one puzzle that will delight you that I remember from the book, because I got the wrong answer.

You and a friend agree to meet in New York City on a given date in the future. But when the time comes, you both realize that you have forgotten to communicate a place and a time. Yet you end up meeting each other just fine. Remember this is in the day before cell phones, BlackBerries, and other modern communicating devices. Where and when do you meet?

I will give you the answer at the end of the column, but this is the sort of stuff that Schelling is famous for. He is one of these deep thinkers that understands not only human nature at its best, but also at its worst.

Still trying to figure out the puzzle? Remember, no communication between you and your friend is allowed. Okay, I will give you a hint. Schelling has taught countless students at Yale, Harvard and now the University of Maryland. At the time he wrote his book, he was teaching at Yale in New Haven, Conn.

Schelling shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, and is an interesting choice. He has consulted for presidents and policy makers and for those same captains of industry that we met with in my early career. His work in game theory, arms control, environmental policy, and criminal behavior is far reaching, influential and deep. As an example, you are kidnapped and you are given two choices over whom the kidnapper should call: your mother (who presumably loves you) or your mother in law (who presumably doesn’t). Schelling’s theories show that your mother-in-law is the far better choice to get your release for both you and your kidnapper, and proves this conjecture with panache, wit, and solid thinking that just about anyone can understand.

It isn’t often that a Nobel winner can write well, have deep thoughts that almost any lay person can grok, and not be such a specialist. I salute their choice, and glad to know the Professor is still teaching plenty of pupils. Go pick up his book today and see if you find it as interesting as I did.

So what was my answer to his puzzle? I thought noon at the main information concourse of Pennsylvania Station, because being from Long Island that is where I enter the city when I take the train. But Schelling’s answer is noon, under the clock in the middle of Grand Central Station. For his students at Yale, it was the one place they would guarantee of entering the city, and noon is as good a time as any for two people to meet. So I almost got it right, and you could argue that if my friend was also coming from Long Island, chances are we would have met in Penn Station rather than Grand Central.

Vint Cerf goes to Google

Fellow Detail Page | Royal SocietyThere are few people in our industry that I admire more than Vint Cerf, even though we have only met on a few occasions and briefly at best. Cerf is often cited as being one of the “fathers of the Internet” but he has done probably more than anyone still living to shape the global communications systems that we all take for granted. His career as senior vice president of technology strategy at MCI, the original competitor to AT&T – is now at an end as he takes on the new job next month as Google’s chief Internet evangelist.

For a 62-year old guy, Cerf will stay busy and still wear several hats. For the past several years, he has been a visiting scientist with NASA’s JPL to try to extend the Internet to an interplanetary system. And he also has the job of being the chairman of ICANN, the organization that is presently the central governing body of the Internet. In this part of the interview, we spoke to Cerf about his role at Google. We’ll also hear about some of his personal uses of computing, and where he sees the Internet evolving.

Q: Is a job as “Internet Evangelist” at Google the world’s best job? What exactly will you do there?

A: Haven’t performed it that role yet. To the extent that I have been proselytizing for Internet commerce for many years, the answer is yes, pretty good. I am going to be what I think of as a cross between a technical evangelist and a bumblebee. I will spend a lot of time visiting labs that Google has opened around the world in places like New York City, India, and Zurich, and make sure that the ideas are spread as widely as possible around the company. And part of my job will be keeping an eye out for new applications that we can support as well.

Q: What makes Google so unique that you chose this company?

A: Have to wait and see. I haven’t done a startup, still something that I want to do. Google has helluva good technology, and has lots of smart people and young enough to know they can’t do something and still try to do it anyway. They have also successfully monetized a substantial element of Internet applications and that is remarkable and they have done really well in terms of turning network-based services into revenue-producing opportunities. On top of everything else, Eric Schmidt is a dear old friend of mine that I have known for more than twenty years, and I have admired his work and was very pleased when he became the CEO.

Q: Is Google the last company you want to work for?

A: Do you expect me to die with my boots on? [Laughs.] I expect to be around a while, but I wouldn’t rule out doing something afterwards.

Q: When was the first time you heard about Google and what was your thought about Google then?

A: My guess is about three or four years ago, don’t really recall. I had been an Altavista fan. When Google came along, it did a better job, and I made it my home page some time ago. I find it indispensable to resolve any historical or factual issues, and even use its search functions even around the dinner table.

Q: What is your goal at Google – and what is the career goal you still want to accomplish?

A: I want to contribute to expanding the functionality that they are capable of delivering to people. They are well on their way towards creating a new infrastructure. We had infrastructures with TCP/IP and HTTP. What Google is doing is creating something that people can rely on to implement things through. I am excited about the amount of computing power that they can mount and that they can do it in a distributed way. I want to help them create an even more capable infrastructure. As far as my career goal, I have had plenty of success and fun in my career, except I really want to get the interplanetary networking system off the ground, quite literally and I have permission to spend time with JPL on that project.

Q: How is Google different from Microsoft? How are they similar?

A: Google is less than a tenth of Microsoft’s size in terms of staff, so Google is a lot more agile at this stage of the game. Google has a very distributed flavor to it — people interact with each other, and schedule things in a very federated way. I find that very refreshing. Microsoft is interested in search engines just like Google is. But I think both companies are capable of delivering different infrastructures and platforms. Google is more network-oriented than Microsoft, and is looking for ways to make networked things more useful.

Q: Is search going to become part of the OS and integrated into applications?

A: Look at what happens when you use Google desktop applications. You are seeing sorting through unstructured information. Second, sometimes having rigid directory-like structures like everything in folders and having a hierarchical structure for email can be very limiting. With Google’s Desktop, you can search across folders and do richer searches that don’t have to be uniform. You can look for emails, Web pages, documents, whatever. You don’t have to search for a single class of information.

But what you really want is to have both desktop and Net-based searches, and have a seamless ability to find information conveniently on your laptop and then if not, look outside. This would make your machine more connected to the rest of the Internet world.

Q: Gates has said that “Our search API is way better than Google’s search API.” You agree?

A: I believe that APIs in the eye of the programmer. And as such, I am not a big API fan. My focus has been on networking and protocols and making things work across the network. I am much more interested in building and designing protocols that allow things to interact with each other, even if they are designed by different parties. APIs work fine as long as I implement both sides of the interface. Protocols work the opposite way so that the bits on the wire are the same and I don’t care who implemented what protocols. Non-API network-centric way with using standardized protocols has much broader potential.

APIs are often under control of a single party, protocols – if they are real standards — aren’t and so as long as you have the right interfaces they can give quite a bit of flexibility with the two parties that have decided they want to interact with each other. They can program things however they want to so that the bits on the wire work out correctly.

Q: Microsoft is all about enabling their partners and developers. There seems to be a lot more work in this area for Google to succeed.

A: Yes, embrace and extend. That is a fair statement about Google. Google has enabled all sorts of people in all sorts of ways. How do I integrate the Google functionality into my own products? I think Google is getting better and better at that. A good example is the Google maps mechanism and how it can be integrated into other apps. I am excited about that and making it available over the Net.

Q: Will Google ever become a “find” engine rather than a “search” engine – in the sense that people will be able to find immediately what they are looking for, no matter what content it is?

A: In a funny way it might already be that, such as the Google desktop. Google is smart enough to index an enormous variety of content, and as time goes on the software will become more capable of rendering content and searching through content in a variety of different ways, and that will be exciting. Think how people behave now. They have directories of files, and email, but they tend to be separately treated as different objects. It is very sensible to treat all the objects that you deal with as more or less uniform. That is part of the hope for Google. Find ways to make all of these various objects treatable in a common way and use the same tool to search through all of them. So they are already partly there for some applications to be this “find” engine.

Q: What is your favorite Google’s product and why?

A: I was quite taken with Google Earth and Google moon. There is this thread of humor running through the company – such as the Swiss cheese background when you zoom in on Google Moon – and I find that people at Google don’t take themselves too seriously, and I like that. They are serious about their work, of course.

Cerf has played a key role in the development of the Internet, and its underlying protocols, almost from the beginning. He is among the most well-known as one of the players that began the original collection of nodes among the various academic research organizations that was the precursor to today’s network in the 1970s. And while not to diminish this achievement, his more important role was in 1989 when he convinced the federal government council to open up the network to allow exchanging emails with his mail system called MCIMail.

Of course, email has changed quite a bit since those early days. “It used to be that a message with 3000 characters was considered to be a big email message. Now with video and PowerPoint attachments, 100 MB is not unusual.” Another difference between email then and now is that now we have emails with complex formatting, HTML code and “already carrying programs around. That will make for some interesting times, and we are already seeing mobile pieces of software being transported around by email.” At least, we hope we can restrict mobile pieces of software to those that we want to have transported, unlike the current situation with viruses and other junk that goes around.

Does he ever regret connecting MCI Mail to the Internet back then? “Absolutely not, it was what broke the log jam.” Prior to then, no commercial uses or users were allowed on the network. “We had to get special permission from the federal government to connect our system. And looking back on it now, this helped to accelerate the commercialization process of the Internet. We were very deliberate and did it to get commercial opportunities into place. Back then, we didn’t think the government could afford to pay for the Internet for everyone. The only other alternative was to get a self-sustaining economic engine going, which is basically what happened.”

Certainly, the Internet is a different place today as a result. “Today’s problems are different, but also more complicated. In the early days, we were fumbling around just to get the damn thing to work. I have to envy all these eight-year-olds that come over and tell me about their new Web sites and I think, ”crap, I had to wait until I was 28 to use the Net and then we had to invent it first!” The challenges and the opportunities that it creates is just orders of magnitude than from the early days and I consider it to be quite fun.”

As an example of this progress, he mentions IP telephony and Skype in particular. “Yes, Skype and SIP are part of my vocabulary. But I have mixed feelings about Skype. If you watch the calls on a network analyzer, it looks like an attack on the target network. I would much rather have SIP standards that tell us what the ports are rather than blasting around looking like you are attacking someone’s host. I will certainly tip my hat to the Skype folks because they managed to figure out how to get it all to work with very little user intervention.”

Surprisingly, Cerf’s home collection of computing isn’t going to win any awards. He has never overclocked any of his gear, and hasn’t attempted “anything funny, other than pumping everything with a gig full of RAM whenever I can”. It is ironic for a guy that started out 40 years ago with the early computers (pre-PC era of course, we are taking IBM mainframes and calculating machines) of that day. Most of his home machines are Macs of various vintages, and he does carry an IBM Thinkpad because he has to be Windows-compatible. His home wireless networks are protected, thank you very much, and about the most interesting thing he can do is VPN into his home network so he can print stuff out remotely as reminders of what he needs to do when he returns home from a trip. That is a pretty cool idea and perhaps we should have an article posted here in the future showing how to do that. Cerf mentions he has plans to instrument his house and wine cellar eventually, to be able to track conditions.

Most of the people he deals with in his professional life are email users, although there are a handful of holdouts still. He uses Microsoft Office, and becoming less and less enamored with PowerPoint in particular. He says, “Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely, that is because of the constraints it places on your ability to present material. I find it a very limiting tool, you start to think in those LIMITED terms.” He mentions Peter Norvig’s Gettysburg address on Powerpoint (who turns out to be a Google employee coincidentally).

But the most impressive thing at Chez Cerf is his wine cellar, with several thousand bottles of wine, some quite expensive and rare. He keeps track of his collection via a spreadsheet application: “It is sort of daunting when you first walk in and want to find something to drink,” he said. He rejected using a true database, like so many of you that still use spreadsheets to organize and sort data. It is nice to know that one of the giants in our industry has such simple – and appropriate — tastes in software, if not beverages.

Cerf has met many world leaders, scientists, and movie stars and feels very fortunate to have traveled in these circles. He is very impressed with Bill Clinton. “I may be biased politically. I was watching him on Larry King, and the man thinks about things and is articulate about them and he listens. Of all the world leaders I have met, Clinton has struck me as the most intellectually capable. He has just an enormous range of knowledge and engages readily in conversation and debate.”

Cerf mentions a great Clinton anecdote. “We were at the White House, during the millennium evenings before 2000. I was giving a joint presentation with Eric Lander and we had about 250 people in the room. During the presentation I mentioned my wife’s cochlear implant at age 53. I spent a few minutes explaining it because it really is nothing short of a miracle that she can hear again after having lost her hearing at age 3. Now remember this is post-Lewinsky. After it is all over, we go to East Room for refreshments, Bill is surrounded by everybody as usual. But he wants to see the speech processor that drives the implant. Now realize that this is a device which is inside your head, and has a speech processor that is a little computer that my wife wears clipped to her bra and a wire that goes up to her implant near her ear. So Bill is talking to Sigrid, and she wants to show him, and so she reaches down her front and starting to pull this thing out. Instantly a bunch of aides come running over concerned that something is about to happen. Bill says I guess I am not allowed to see underwear around here anymore.”

Cerf has an unusual perspective, having been around the Internet for so long and having done so much. Several years ago he suggested public flogging for spammers. “It was a joke, did you think anyone was going to take it seriously?” Still, he is as frustrated as the rest of us when it comes to dealing with spam, although he says for him that filters seem to be working.

Despite this minor annoyance, he is still fascinated by networking technology. He has seen the Internet be transformed from the early days when it was just about protocols and research through the past decade where it was all about applications and ecommerce. And he still talks about the next series of challenges and opportunities for the Internet. “I mean, right now there are about a billion users, so we have five billion more to go.” Doing the math Cerf means the rest of the world that isn’t yet connected nor has a computer to do so. But his frustrations with spammers pale with advancing the Internet address space.

His one regret looking back on all these years of Internet innovations was “I probably would have picked a larger address space. Who would have thought that 4.3 billion addresses were too small back then in 1977?” As a result, he has been flogging the IPv6 horse for quite some time and says, “We need to switch to IPv6 so we have enough address space. I don’t want to continue to play Network Address Translation games. We are still pushing hard and I think MCI will have implemented v6 by the end of the year in all of its operations. In the meantime, we are getting the pants beat off us by China and Japan who are adopting v6 a lot quicker than in the US.” He thinks by the end of 2008 we can get past 50% IPv6 implementations in the US, but that may be optimistic given the state of progress.

Also on his hit list is to internationalize the domain name system to allow different character sets besides Roman letters. “This is proving harder than we hoped and quite a chore to get these different character sets like Chinese and Japanese implemented.”

Finally, he is all about standards and protocols, just as he began his Internet career. “We need to move several layers upward to establishing standards. Right now we have pretty good standards at the HTTP layer but not too much above that: XML is helping, Web services will prove helpful. But we need more authentication and more distributed services. I want infrastructure and digital objects and processes to have persistence, and to be able to migrate running programs and replicate or be preserved from one machine to another.”

Indeed, authentication could be the key to more advanced applications. “We haven’t found more than 1% of all the apps that we can do in a distributed networking environment. The better we are able to do authentication, the more interesting our computational lives will be. I am anticipating a lot of collaborative computation, such as for online entertainment. A lot of these games are played in a distributed way, and kids are able to hear each other and see each other’s avatars. Soon we will get to the point where the games will look quite realistic, like Forrest Gump, putting someone into the middle of a historical picture. We will see that kind of digital flexibility and eventually will make for news reports that can be faked. You could basically fake anybody. We will have to cope with authenticity in the future.”

Cerf certainly is one of the original thinkers for our times. It was a pleasure talking to him, and he still has plenty of interesting and original ideas to go around. We wish him well at Google.

Blake Ross from Firefox

Many of us have been loyal Firefox users for the past year, and stats from Tom’s Hardware server logs show an early interest in Firefox from our readers as well. With all the attention on Firefox, we took time to interview one of the program’s creators, Blake Ross. Ross is currently on leave from his studies at Stanford University (where I went to grad school in the distant past) to work on another startup and had lots to say about where he is taking the browser and his thoughts about competing with Microsoft.

1. What are the biggest differences between Firefox and IE in your mind, and where do you see any advantages that IE has these days?

There are plenty of feature comparisons on the Web, so I’ll spare readers the marketing charts. The most important difference lies in the intent of each product.

Microsoft is here to win. That’s great if you’re a shareholder, but how many users appreciated that attitude when spyware and pop-ups filled their screens four years ago, and Microsoft, having crushed Netscape, abandoned the market? The company is back now that competition has arisen, but where will it be in four more years?

The Mozilla Foundation isn’t fighting a war on competition; it’s fighting a war on complexity. Our users are our shareholders, and as long as the Internet is frustrating, we’ll be here.

2. I’ve had to update my copy of Firefox numerous times over the past year to handle security loopholes and exploits. How can you stay ahead of these issues in the future?

We have a number of safeguards in place. First, our Bug Bounty program pays security experts $500 for each exploit they uncover, provided they notify us early enough that we can protect our users. Second, our open nature allows us to test builds much more rigorously than our competitors. Hundreds of thousands of advanced users test each beta build for exploits before it reaches consumers. And finally, as strange as it sounds, the fact that you’re receiving those updates means the Firefox security team is doing its job. All browsers have security exploits; it’s just a reality of networked software. The real question is how long it takes the vendor to offer a patch, and Firefox excels here.

3. You talk about making the web easier to use. Given the growing complexity of browsers with plug ins, security settings, helper apps, etc. is there hope of having an easier to use experience?

Complex software is produced by lazy developers who aren’t willing to face the complexity themselves and instead shovel it onto the user. I can’t tell you how many hours some of our engineers have spent going above and beyond the plugin specs so Mom could watch her dancing Flash M&M’s without being bothered. Every additional hour you spend at the office is another hour you’re saving her down the road.

4. How do you manage your source code with a global development team?

We use CVS for source control, LXR for code cross-referencing, and blogs, mailing lists and newsgroups for team coordination.

5. What percent of the code in Firefox do you personally touch and work with on a regular basis?

Firefox is enormous, so like most of our developers, I work with a small fraction. Most of my development time now is spent on a software company I recently cofounded with another Firefox engineer. We’re always looking for talented developers.

6. What is the main development machine and OS that you use on a daily basis? Have you ever overclocked or water cooled any of your gear?

I mainly use a 19” Compaq laptop, P4 3.4 GHz with 2 GB of RAM. It’s a “laptop” in the sense that Manhattan is a suburb.

7. When I was at Stanford many years ago, CroMem was the nerd dorm (I was in the engineering grad school). Is it still that way, or have nerds taken over campus?

Stanford has plenty of nerds, but they’re cool nerds. You can change the topic to music and they won’t start singing a MIDI version of Super Mario Brothers. I wasn’t in CroMem, so I guess that means they’re everywhere now.

8. I persevere and use Firefox as my main browser, even though we run an Intranet here that uses Sharepoint and works better in IE. What can you do to be more IE-compatible in the future?

We used to have a full evangelism team that worked with IE-only companies to support Web standards. Fortunately, we’ve reached the tipping point in terms of market share where companies are now forced to open up or risk losing 10% of their clientele. So while we still make evangelism efforts, these kinds of problems are beginning to disappear naturally.

We also have a special rendering mode called “Quirks” that we use to support some IE-only programming features. Because we prefer to stick to the standards, however, this is a last resort.

9. Are there any non-open source products that you use on a regular basis?

Sure. Development model doesn’t factor into my choice of software. I use Microsoft Word, Trillian, Visual Studio, iTunes. There aren’t too many consumer-friendly open-source products, unfortunately.

10. What are some lessons learned from developing Firefox that you can share with my readers who are working on their own projects?

The things you never think about are the ones driving users nuts. For example, a developer making an e-mail client might spend 6 hours designing the compose window, and 5 minutes hooking up the “Attach” button to the Windows Browse dialog. But it’s that Browse dialog that’ll give people gray hair over time.

The fact that the dialog is a standard part of the OS is no excuse. In fact, software is often weakest where its developer settled for something prepackaged. Consistency is important, of course, and should always be a factor. But it’s your responsibility to make the best software you can, and if you’re delegating to the OS without question, your competitors already have a leg up on you. In Firefox, we threw out the Find mechanism applications have used for decades because, frankly, it sucked.

Pure Pwnage guys Jeremy and Kyle

The Web is a great place. It can turn two twenty-something slackers from Toronto into underground heroes. All it takes is some videos and viral word-of-mouth marketing. Meet Jeremy and Kyle, the stage names (or whatever you call them) of the guys behind the PurePwnage.com video series on what the life of a “pro” gamer is really like.

The duo, who are RL (that’s real life for you noobs out there) roomies, got the idea a little more than a year ago when Kyle borrowed a camera for a film school class assignment and “was looking for stuff to film and wanted to try out some editing software.” He began shooting a “pilot” with some test footage following around Jeremy and a day in his life. The video was so well received (at least, according to the duo) that they went on to make seven episodes, and more are in the works. Each episode, which last about 10 minutes, are better and more sophisticated (at least, according to my taste) than the previous one.

Jeremy in his usual garb. Kyle doesn’t appear before the camera,

The shows have amazingly good production values for something done on the cheap. “We use Adobe Premiere to edit the videos, and it shows that you don’t need a lot of money to make short films on the Internet. Our startup costs are only a few thousand dollars, and most of that went to buying a camera,” says Kyle.  And that is dollars Canadian, which is even more impressive given what you can buy there.

I spoke to the two guys, or at least two people that sounded like the guys in the videos, last week. Unlike most of the interviews I have done, the guys didn’t give me their real names, phone numbers or other identifying information, but I had fun interviewing them none the less. Part of the fun was doing real-time translation of leetspeak (the gaming lingo that Jeremy uses both in the videos and for the most part in RL too) and trying to not appear like the old fart that I really am. But that is the wonder of the Internet: you can always appear to be something that you yearn to be.

The videos are entertaining slices of life, mostly following Jeremy around with a hand-held camera as he slacks off, “owns noobs” (that means trounces unsuspecting opponents) with his game of choice, Zero Hour, and his advanced “micro” (meaning keyboarding) skills. They are funny and sad at the same time. The last episode 7 sees Jeremy in some hospital ward as he tries to break out of a catatonic state, and is jump-cut with scenes from a game where his character is being interviewed by a nurse, mirroring the actual RL scene shot in the movie. Hollywood SF could do no better, and what is impressive is how these guys have accomplished some great storytelling on a less-than-shoestring budget. It helps if you are familiar with gaming lingo but you can still enjoy the flicks for what they are, a romp around a brave new world where gamers rule.

The duo has started a cottage industry to be sure. The first month they released episode 7 more than 300,000 people downloaded it, and the audience has been doubling from episode to episode. They are using a variety of technologies to distribute their videos, and are looking to get more sophisticated by using an RSS feed and other improvements. “We don’t know where it is going to saturate,” says Kyle. “No one has ever done this before and had a reality TV show that has been this viral and spread this quickly.” And unlike the more expensive reality shows that are on broadcast TV, it is done without script doctoring or any visible writers.

Does Jeremy talk leetspeak all the time? “What are you saying?,” he asked me. “If you watch the show, well, yeah. I own, and yeah. When I meet fans in RL they seem kinda shocked when they meet me – they thought the show might not be real and when they meet me and then they are in total awe of how much I own and its good.” You dig?

Kyle is certainly more used to talking regular English, even though in the videos you rarely hear from him. The concept is similar to that of Penn and Teller, for those of you geeks old enough to remember them before their TV shows.

The guys are actually big Tom’s Hardware readers. “It is something we read whenever we are buying new hardware pretty much,” says Kyle. “But not a regular thing we read. Jeremy was looking at Tom’s when he was looking to buy a new video card.” Jeremy then piped up “Well, Kyle that was a year ago so it isn’t exactly new, but I got my 5950 and lots of stuff thanks to Tom’s.”

Jeremy builds his own PCs “Because I don’t have a job and like, you can get a lot better performance for your dollar if you build your own PC. If you are not a complete noob it is completely easy.” He doesn’t overclock that much. “I just make sure my rig is good enough to run games at like decent resolution because you don’t want to be totally noobing at 800×600 or something. I keep most of my hardware kinda default.”

The guys get lots of fan letters. “Jeremy gets a lot of marriage proposals over email. It’s actually kinda interesting. Supposedly from women. Some women send their pictures but it probably the guy’s sister or whatever. But no one is emailing me with their pictures,” Kyle says a bit peevishly.

“Obviously I am going to get most of [the proposals] because of my sexiness,” says Jeremy modestly. Indeed, one of the more humorous bits is in one episode with a series of  interviews of some girls. The girls talk about their interests in guys who are gaming addicts and their reactions to some of the gaming lingo. Kyle actually has a steady girlfriend in RL, or so he says. “As for Jeremy, you have to watch the show to see what is going on.” Jeremy obviously doesn’t want to disappoint any of his potential suitors.

“Most of my time is actually spent playing games, because I don’t have a job,” says Jeremy, reinforcing the cinema verite of their ouvre. “Pure Pwnage is actually turning into a job,” says Kyle, where he spends his non-studying time answering reading inquiries, sending off swag and editing the videos. He actually is in his last year at film school and promises that more episodes are on the way when he can get the time to produce and finish them.

Where do they get the idea for the videos? “Kyle comes over and, like he says be real funny and I’ll film you,” says Jeremy. “And then he comes back later and we watch the show. My life is pretty interesting. Most people would be shocked at how close to our real lives the show is, really. Well, some of it is exaggerated a bit.”

What does Jeremy’s real parents think of these efforts? “At first my mom was kinda embarrassed,” says Jeremy. “I don’t think she liked the idea much that all these people were watching me own, she was never too proud of that. She always thought that school and like, good jobs were like, the way to go. She is kinda traditional. She would tell me to play sports and throw a football around and like. And I would try to explain to her that mom, you would rather have me owning games all day and that I get some skills that would be applicable. As times have gone on, and both of my parents have seen what has happened, they are very supportive and looking back they are glad that I didn’t play football and instead play e-sports.”

A big part of the gaming lifestyle is going for long stretches of time without sleeping or eating. “It was like 54 hours was my longest single session,” says Jeremy. “I ate once, a couple of bathroom breaks, playing Zero Hour. By the end I was kinda seeing stuff, I decided that I should probably sleep. But don’t tell my mom that because I told her it was only 36 hours and she was pretty mad. She thought I went to school that day, but I didn’t leave my room for like two days. It was good times”

Jeremy in RL plays more than Zero Hour, which is what he is known for in the video series. “To be honest, I own most games that I have played. But typically anytime I pick up a game, I seem to just own anybody at it. Enough to make a show I guess. Everyone takes a couple of losses here and there – you are tired, you had some drinks, I don’t know.” His confidence is both charming and cute, without being a big ego trip. I think that is part of why I enjoy watching the series so much.

“I have been playing games my whole life, it is all I have really done as a hobby. Pong was my first game, I picked it up when I was about two years old, all the adults were laughing at me,” said Jeremy. He got his first Atari when he was 4 or 5.  What about Kyle? “Some of it has rubbed off on me. I like Civilization, played a lot of that, but don’t have the passion that Jeremy has for games.”

I asked Jeremy what the stupidest thing a noob has ever done to him, and he was quick to reply, “Besides entertaining the notion that he has a chance [at winning]?” Many of you might think that his braggadocio is bigger than his actual RL scores, but Jeremy maintains that he has real skills. “I never hacked myself in the game to make the world think you have skills that help you in the game. If you got the skills, you don’t need the hacks. That is what noobs do, they can’t accept the fact that they don’t have skills.”

Of course, trying to prove that he does deliver the goods may not be easy, even for this reporter. Jeremy doesn’t use the same identity in each of his games, even though he goes by the tag the_pwner in the videos. “I never used the_pwner tag in an actual game. Don’t want to break any hearts. I usually switch my names, if you get crazy stats people don’t want to play you when they see your record.”

Any suggestions for the noobs out there who are just getting started with RTS games? “Focus on your micro – make sure you use the keyboard shortcuts, don’t use your mouse,” says the pro gamer. And also watch plenty of replays of other pro’s sessions too.

Better yet, download the videos from their site.

Phil Dunkelberger from PGP

PGP the product has had a long and interesting past. It began as a piece of shareware written by Phil Zimmerman in the early 1990s called Pretty Good Privacy, a DOS-based command-line encryption utility that was used by uber-hackers to keep their emails from prying eyes and keyboards. Back then the Internet was young, the Web was still to come, and to make matters worse, the US Government quickly banned the nascent software utility, claiming that email encryption was a national security threat.

Well, eventually the government came to its senses and PGP became the gold standard for keeping emails private. A software company grew around the utility and became successful enough that the conglomerate called Network Associates bought PGP in 1997. After several releases, including support for Windows and Unix, a group of investors were formed in 2002 and purchased the assets and intellectual property back from Network Associates (which is now called McAfee) to have a successful life as PGP Corp.

The company is run by Phil Dunkelberger, who was at the helm in the days before Network Associates era in the mid 1990s. The president and CEO is a soft-spoken but very intense man that is very focused on the task at hand, making PGP into the best encryption software provider bar none. Dunkelberger has a long heritage with his technology chops, going back to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Labs in the late 1970s when they introduced the Star workstation, the precursor of the modern PC. He runs both Mac and Windows PCs today. We caught up with him recently in San Francisco, where he spoke to us about how the company was formed, where it is going, and how its channel and products have evolved.

Q. How easy was it to take PGP’s assets out of Network Associates (NAI)?

A: It was actually fairly easy for us. NAI had told the world that they were going to discontinue innovating PGP and that they weren’t going to support the products. So the end of life notice was already given when we picked up the assets from NAI.

I have seen more and more resurrected companies since we did our deal. There are a number of small and big opportunities and the traditional venture mode is changing. You can get a head start by acquiring these assets. My advice to entrepreneurs is instead of build it yourself to begin with look for proven, standards-based technology or a vertical market, and then pursue this because in our case it certainly gave us a running start.

Building a real business these days requires a lot deeper and broader set of skills than what was required five or seven years ago: your management team has to be deeper, your VCs have to be more patient. People aren’t as quick to bet on innovative companies these days. If you are entrepreneur, I would recommend that you buy an existing customer base.

Q: Do you ever use a public kiosk or public wifi network to get your own email?

A: I am pretty good about using our own security products. I don’t ever roam freely around those networks without any protection, and there are certain things that I won’t do on a public network. And if you are in a hotel in Europe if you aren’t protected you will likely get some form of malware on your machine from their networks.

Most of the time when I travel I use TMobile’s service, although I have used many others. On a recent trip to Europe I was on Vodaphone’s network at the Munich airport and Swisscom in Switzerland. I also use our own products extensively, including our own disk encryption and firewalls. Although right now I am testing Symantec’s Norton desktop firewall and several VPN clients as part of our internal quality assurance tests. All of us, and especially the executives at PGP, run a lot of different things to test our software against. It was a lucky thing that I had more than one VPN client installed, as one worked on the Lufthansa flight back from Europe and one didn’t. That was very fortuitous.

Q: How important to you personally is hard disk encryption?

A: I have had my laptop taken away from me briefly at airports for security screenings, and have the screeners pick it off the belt where I can’t see it, and that motivates me to make sure that everything on it is encrypted. Our product really is a godsend, and all my files on my laptop are encrypted. These days securing your data and not just encapsulation of the pipe is becoming more and more important, and an absolute business requirement.

Q: How does a corporation get started on setting up email security policy options?

A: We have seen this happen in variety of different ways: channel, reach, compliance and remediation, and industry-specific situations. First, it helps by having a robust channel with some focus on vertical markets where a company is under some kind of compliance and has some kind of external force pushing them to encrypt and protect their email traffic. Second, we have also seen many small businesses that are in business servicing someone big, and that big company mandates their suppliers and customers send email using PGP.  We have a large auto manufacturer in Germany that has 5,000 suppliers and that mandated all of those small businesses to send email with PGP. Both are easier entries than just going in there cold and trying to get people to realize that file attachments are an issue.

As we look at the overall trends in business, there is more awareness about security in general and encryption. For example, in California there are small real estate companies and banks that are very aware of what they have to do to secure their data.

Q: You got your start with selling command-line encryption tools. How is that market doing?

A: We re-introduced the command line encryption products the middle of last year, and the business has grown 100% a quarter for the past three quarters. It has been a very pleasant surprise. We have had days where people order $50,000 off our Web site with their own credit cards. We have everything from a large aircraft manufacturer that takes all of the manuals to banks on Wall Street using the command line product. Some of our customers are encrypting their backup files and then storing them on tapes.

Q: Who of the surviving email security vendors is your competition these days?

A: We usually have two kinds of competitors now. First are the PKI infrastructure vendors, including Microsoft, Entrust, Cisco, Juniper, Aventail and those kinds of solutions. We usually win based on usability and reliability. Then we also have traditional email vendors that are selling into particular vertical markets such as Tumbleweed and Sigaba, and we win when the solution involves more than just selling email as part of the entire solution. We tend to be a suite vendor rather than selling a single product.

Q: Your PGP Universal product is supposedly very easy to deploy. Can you give me an example?

A: Universal is ready to run on a number of platforms, you just add hardware, and it works. Our biggest solution to date was with one of the top pharmaceutical firms and we had it running in less than 30 days for over 70,000 users. One of the very valuable features of the product is something we call “learn mode” which means the product just observes the traffic but doesn’t interfere with the mail stream and is very useful to help our installers as they tune the system to a particular customer’s needs.

Q: What do you think of the Microsoft/Groove announcement?

A: I think this validates the whole idea of peer-to-peer security that we have been talking about for many years and we welcome what they are doing.

Q: Tell me more about how you have developed your channel program and how it evolved.

A: We have three tiers of resellers. The top tier has the same training that our own system engineers have, and have to be able to install all the products and understand their interaction with our various partner products as well. The next tier has specific service contracts typically for larger corporate customers and they only need to know a couple of our products. The last tier are not very solutions oriented, just sell in quantity one to five units, typically only deal with our desktop products and specialize with one or two products and not sell enterprise-level products.

Our channel has evolved over the past several years. We now have 300 resellers in 91 countries and have added 30,000 new customers in the less than three years since we began our company and taken it out of NAI. In fact, our sales now are better than any of the years when we were part of NAI.

When I was in charge of sales at Symantec, we found that you couldn’t rely on the channels to create demand for new products like PGP Universal. The channel makes money on support, service, hardware management, off-site monitoring and so forth. But we had to go out and find the market segment, recruit the resellers, and do things like build hands-on labs to train our VARs and find other partnerships that would work for us.

For example we just put on a four-day training session in Singapore, for our local partners. We get everyone involved in installing the software and understanding how the products work in a very hands-on session.

But we also established a series of technology partnerships with vendors that have major email solutions such as IronPort, SendMail and MailFrontier. These vendors all offer things like anti-spam and content filtering solutions. First they wanted to cross-train their sales teams to resell our products and as their gained experience with PGP they became OEMs and wanted to bundle their software with ours on a single box. Now they are an active channel for us and we have consolidated reporting. They sell a single solution and everyone gets a better margin and the customer gets one vendor to buy all of it from and fewer vendors to deal with for front line support.

Q: So any final thoughts?

A: We have become successful because of several things. First, encryption is just becoming a standard feature for more and more people. It operates down at the transport layer and is just like a network dial tone, what I call “encryption tone” these days. Second, we got a great start by being established and not having to recreate everything from scratch when we came out of NAI. Third, it helps that we are an open standards vendor and we publish our source code. We wish more companies would publish their code as well. Finally, we have a very good product road map and we spend a lot of time listening to our customers, asking them what they want in the next two versions of the products and so forth.

Pat Gelsinger from Intel

There are few people in the computer industry that have shaped the evolution of the microprocessor (and related technologies) as much as Pat Gelsinger. More than 25 years ago, he began his career “one step above janitor” as a Technician 2 at Intel, stuffing boards. He eventually rose to the position of the company’s first chief technology officer (CTO), before taking his current posting as executive vice president of the Digital Enterprise Group.

Read the full interview that Wolfgang Gruener and I conducted here.

Srivats Sampath and Atri Chatterjee of Mercora

Tired of listening to the same old top 40 tunes on your radio? Want to do something with all that Internet bandwidth available on your computer? Don’t want to deal with buying new music until you have really listened to it? Feeling guilty about making copies of your friends’ MP3 files? If you answered “yes” to these questions, we’ve got great news.

Tune in to my audio interview (what you thought this was text?) with the executives behind Mercora here.