In 1998, Congress commissioned a report on the Internet. It was just delivered. Thanks, .gov!

I am so sick of people who talk big and never take action. Am I really unique in that I say “hey, we should do this” and then I start working on actually doing it?

This guy has a fun story about how he tracked down the guys who stole his credit card number and turned them in to the police. Pretty cool read.

This is fairly old now, but some students at MSU developed a simulated world platform where virus-like program/organisms fight for survival and control of limited resources. This combined with random changes to their code creates evolution. Their platform is called Avida. I ran it for a little while and it was kind of cool, but I didn’t know how to use it to it’s full potential so I couldn’t see how cool it really was.

My biggest problem with it is that they’re calling it an instance of evolution and they’re saying it could be used to develop solutions to problems we don’t know how to solve yet. I disagree. From what I read it appears they have to set up rewards artificially, and these have to trigger when certain milestones are reached. That can’t be done for problems we don’t know how to solve because we don’t know what’s closer or further from the proper solution. Also, with each step being rewarded we’re not really talking about evolution anymore, it’s much more like intelligent design. Greyhounds didn’t evolve naturally, they were bred through centuries of dog racing to be skinny and fast. These skills didn’t necessarily help them survive, but they helped them win races for their owners. That’s the difference here too: the scientists are providing the end goal and essentially “breeding” the viruses to reach the goal.

Despite my problems with it, I’ll be very interested to see where they go with their work.

I just discovered the Summer Founders program through Slashdot. I think it’s a fantastic opportunity for SkyBlue Mobile to get on it’s feet over the summer and possibly get some VC money or a customer interested. I think we stand a good chance of getting in since we’ve got a quality idea with third parties backing it’s quality and we will have a good starting position with the work to be accomplished this semester. I will definitely be pushing for the continuing team to sign up for this.

SkyBlue Mobile was the runner up in the student leapfrog category of the Wireless Innovation Contest. IIT gave us an all expense paid trip to New Orleans to attend the CTIA Wireless Conference and receive the award. While there, we made some excellent contacts with cell phone OEM’s and carriers and got some valuable advice about how to proceed toward funding/profitability.

We also had a lot of fun in New Orleans while not working. The travelers were Dan, Kumar, Alex, and myself. We arrived on the morning of Saturday the 12th after driving through the night and crashed in the motel, then went to the contest dinner that night. Afterward, we hit Bourbon St. and partied and danced for a few hours.

The next day we slept into the afternoon and were going to go see the N.O. sights when we got in a car accident. This guy from Bolivia made a left from the right lane straight into our car. That blew our plans for a few hours, and by then it was too late to see much, so we ate, dropped Kumar at a dinner for his employer, got Bruce from the airport, then walked around the French Quarter with Bruce for a while. Most everything was closed except for Bourbon St. so it wasn’t too exciting (except for the female impersonator who grabbed Bruce’s butt ). We got Kumar when he was done, went back to the motel, and talked about what was going on and what we were going to do the next day.

In the morning, we got up early and went to CTIA. We talked to all the OEM’s and carriers we could, as well as AOL for a content provider. The best contact we got was through Mr. Robert Potter, a trustee at IIT who was attending and wanted to introduce us to someone (I won’t say who to be polite). He gave us so me good advice on how best to approach our customers. We also received the award that day. It was a nice show, though I got the impression it was more important in the industry than it turned out to be. However, the award got us in contact with Telus, a carrier in Canada, and PriceWaterhouseCooper, a company in Canada who may be interested in testing our application. At a Canadian Gov’t. reception after the conference, we caught up with someone from Telus who gave us some more great advice on what we need to be able to go to carriers with a cohesive and attractive offering. That night we drove around looking for something to do and crashed the Nokia CDMA party for a little while, then went back to Bourbon St. and met lots of people from the conference (the Kyocera party was actually in a bar right there).

That’s all, the next morning (Tuesday the 15th) we got up, dropped Bruce at the airport, and came back to Chicago. I thought it was an awesome trip and I would love to go back sometime.