Recruiting at USC

Since there was always a line 15 deep of potential candidates, we decided to only ask one question: “Outside of school and work what projects have you been part of for fun and your own curiosity?”. This seemed to be a powerful question, many students simply had nothing to say, and we promptly ended our interviews with them. Some got excited and talked about their personal projects and passions. In a startup, passion is a big part of what we get our energy from, so its a pretty fundamental requirement for us. The way I see it, if you spend your free time working on your craft, then it must be something you really love to do!

A quick snapshot always helps to see whats going on at any moment. There are some statistics we can run through historical data also. If you have any cool ideas, run them by me. Here is one that I really liked = Earthquake Heat Map for USGS.

Some common uses for this:

1. For fun, yell at all your friends all at once!
2. For work, send all your clients a message: “Hi this is Al Bundy, we have new extra wide stilettos on sale!”
3. Last minute plan changes. Party switched to a new place? Send a Friendcast out.
4. At your work, make sure everyone hears you.

Were thinking of lots of new features for this app, so keep it updated!

I own an iPhone and I am pretty happy with it, but something is starting to change about how I perceive Apple; It reminds me of Microsoft a few years back. I was happy with Dos, Windows 95 and Windows XP too. There was a time when Microsoft was great, they had the best gaming, the best productivity software, a relatively easy development platform and simple workplace integration with their products! But things started changing when Microsoft used their success to push their own interests, instead of focusing on the consumers interest. If you have been reading the news lately, it seems that Apple is doing exactly the same things.

I probably would never have bought Podcaster, but it irks me that I can’t because Apple told me not to. It seems like the jail break market is going to keep growing until Apple decides to give people some freedom.

Here are things that I think are critical to staying “good” in the consumer’s eyes:

1) Stop the anti-competitive behavior. If someone writes better software than you, let them. Learn from it. And stop blocking them from the app store.

2) Don’t put your consumers into unfair licenses that they must obey. Bricking their phone for not following your EULA is not right. You don’t have to provide them with tech support once they do it. But forcing them to conform!

On a side note, I’m happy Android won’t require approval for their app store! Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile don’t have restrictions either.

How Voice 2.0 has affected the industry

The telecom market has already seen massive changes in how it works. If you were watching things happen over the last 5 years, you would have seen that almost all phone systems work on the same Cat-5 cable that your data comes over. Wiring offices just became easier for everyone. What was the impact of this? Well, now we have to share bandwidth on the wire, and our network switches need to move more packets. At data centers, large VoIP systems can route traffic and handle media without expensive hardware to terminate T1 lines.

As networks get faster, it’s easier to start implementing Voice 2.0 services. Just look at the old days of choppy Yahoo and MSN Messenger calls, to today’s (somewhat better) Skype and Google Talk services! As things get faster, we’ll be adding video to the mix too!

How to use Voice 2.0

As a consumer, it’s easy. Just download Google Talk or Skype, use your cell phone, do what you always do – it’s already being implemented for you in the back end.

As a developer, it’s a bit harder. That’s what we’re going to start showing on this site! Take a look at this Voice Broadcast API. This is a quick way to start sending out voice messages. I’ll start posting some code soon so you can start using it in your applications. There are some more advanced topics, like mobilizing a distributed workforce, and the problems are becoming easier to solve! I’ve worked on a team that allowed 400 volunteers from all over the U.S. to call thousands of voters, just using their web browsers!

So, coming back to Voice 2.0, we’re ready to start the process. VoIP is probably in a better place than video right now. Here are some quick links while you are in the mood:

Voice XML
Voice Broadcast API
Distributed Telephony Architecture