InGeniusBlog.com

Mitel has announced a deal with Rogers here in Canada that will have Mitel supplying its 3600 series centrally hosted IP telephony solution to the SMB market in Canada. The deal is part of a converged solution whereby Rogers will provide IP Voice, data, and Internet connectivity in addition to their cellular offerings. The service will be priced per-user rather than the amount of use.

The solution will appeal to small business that are looking to upgrade their existing key systems, and want an easy-to-manage solution for their office. Mitel’s solution allows the user to configure the IP Telephony system through a simple web interface in which they can configure options such as voicemail, and ring groups.

The deal is huge for Mitel - it launches them into the carrier market rather than their traditional business, hospitality and EDU space. On the Rogers side, the deal gives their sales people a whole new segment of business to go after rather than simply trying to sell cellular phones into business - they can now offer a full suite of business services.

Kinda makes me wish we hadn’t just switched our company Blackberry’s over to Bell…

Full Disclosure: InGenius provides telephony expertise to Mitel.

The National post reports today that Telus Corp today announced the availability of a porn service for their cellular customers. Users will be able to download images and video for $3 to $4 per item. I wonder how long it’ll be before the other providers jump on board? I’ll bet Bell is on-board soon - seeing as they have tons of content via their Expressvu satellite porn channels.
Full Disclosure: Some InGenius consultants were involved in the age verification system used by Telus…

Stopped by the Ottawa Demo camp tonight at the Clocktower Pub. Based on tonight’s turnout, I think they’re gonna have to move these to a bigger venue! The place was crowded - standing room only!

• Thintropy demoed a thin client that’s basically VNC on steroids - imagine playing a full screen video with audio on your home computer, and being able to view it at work or on your mobile. Cool - though they mentioned the need for some pretty huge bandwidth for the video. They are totally commited to open-source - and were pretty hard on MS. I think they’re missing their main market - doing a real fast VNC - you could even edit video remotely! Instead they’re focusing on hosted apps. Hmm.
• Bruce Tsuji of Carleton University demoed a cool text to speech app.
• Crowd favorites Iotum was there with their new Blackberry client & service. This client represents a new direction for Iotum - less dependency on the telcos adopting their solution - Iotum can manage the whole thing themselves, and release the app virally. The quick demo looks impressive.
• Peter Childs and Ian Graham demoed a cool shared calendar application that they’re commercializing just now. Nice to be able to share specific calendar events selectively across calendars in the system. Good for larger companies, cities, hospitals, etc.
• StraTerra demoed some software for capturing the analysis of core samples. It’s the first part of a product suite which will include the analysis of the core samples and help determine where to drill. The UI was a bit old-fashioned, but matched the existing paper forms people use now. Nice that their app converts hours of work to a few minutes effort.

We’re upgrading servers here at InGenius - something we do every few years, even if the old ones are working fine. We decided to try something a bit different this time round - maybe give a few dollars less to BillG and his gang… We decided on a 2TB NAS for our main data store instead of the ‘ole shared drives on our main server.
We ended up purchasing a 2TB Buffalo Terrastation - and here’s what we think about it…

• The hardware is a bit flimsy. It’s all plastic around the front, and it’s a bit brittle. The display is nice - though it only displays marginally useful info.
• Setup was pretty easy - right out of the box, plug it in and it works.
• It advertises AD support - but it’s REALLY lame. You can ONLY set AD permissions on directories in the root - so that directory, and all those below will have the same permissions. We had a rich set of permissions sprinkled throughout the directory tree - so we had to move directories around - so this is a big change in our workflow.
• Directories in the root can only have 12 character names! This really sucks.
• You can’t actually hot swap drives. You have to power down. Rats.
• We bought a spare drive - the exact same model as is in use in the box, and did a few experiments - we removed a drive, and then powered the box up - all data was still available, and it emailed out a warning about the failure. Cool.
• We plugged in the spare drive - it found it and commenced rebuilding the data on this drive. This took 8 hours, but all data was available at all times. Cool.
• We haven’t figured out how to integrate external USB drives - not sure if this will be useful to us.
• We called tech support re the AD issue - they were marginally helpful - not great, they couldn’t solve the issue of course - but not bad.

So would we buy it again? I’d have to say no. I think we’d hold out for a real solid, (expensive) NAS box running the storage version of Windows XP.

Update: May 30, 2007:

• The device is continuing to work OK, but not without it’s foibles. It requires the user to press a button to turn it on - so if your power goes out, and the UPS fails, the Terrastation doesn’t come back up. You have to manually start it. Then, it takes about 15 hours to test and rebuild the drives. The system is usable this whole time. We’re at 9% capacity.
• The date and time settings are a bit odd. You can get the date and time right, but not using the default NTP source. We had to fuss with this quite a bit since the dates and times are critical to our build process.
• The partial AD support is a real pain. This keeps causing us issues.
• A drive actually failed! Luckily we had our spare, popped it in, and everything kept going fine.
• The drive’s nickname at our company is”TerrorStation” - gives you some idea of the faith we have in it. We are backing this thing up like crazy!

I tend to take about 500 photos a month - so processing these and keeping up with the flow is pretty time-consuming and labour intensive. I’ve used a number of apps to help with this, including ThumbsPlus, iView (recently bought by Microsoft and rebranded as Microsoft Exression Media), and lately Apple’s Aperture.

Each of these has strong and weak points, but here’s an interesting observation - I tended to use ThumbsPlus and iView simply as image catalog and web processing applications, where-as I tend to actually use Aperture to IMPROVE the images. From simple things like cropping, to more advanced features such as changing colour, adjusting highlights and shadows, and sharpening, Aperture really helps make the photos have a lot more impact.

On the other hand, it has not been so simple to get into the Aperture “flow” (where the heck should I store the images (should they be managed?)), importing sucks and some aspects of the program are downright ugly - like the web gallery templates. All the templates suck, and they are really difficult to customize (and I’m expert with HTML and CSS!). Also, the app is horribly slow at creating web galleries. Like 3 minutes for 6 pictures (on a MacBookPro core 2 duo!). I keep hoping Apple will release an updated version of Aperture with some fixes in these areas.

On the plus side, Aperture’s helping me produce the best images I’ve ever shot…