Littlefield simulator factory

The simulation run online updates every 20 minutes for 4 real days. Every 20 minutes in real time advances one complete day in simulation day. It better to study the factory and the demand and predict when you will need to take decisions so you don’t need to be all day checking the status of the factory. The decisions you can take are the acquisition of more machines (capacity), change how your product flow in your factory (balance capacity), and buying raw materials (reorder points).

Once with the initial data in our hands, we calculated an strategy and stuck to it till the very end. One problem with the OpsSimCom simulation is that the user interface is really slow and the data is dispersed in many different places. To overcome this limitation I developed several scripts to collect all the available data, display it together in a table and graph real time charts of the situation of the factory.

This is how my data collector look like

Monitoring the simulation comfortably on the TV

Even if the simulation is simple, there are many variables and it is very difficult to create a model for maximum profit. Our proved to be correct because we followed the path of the leading teams but we failed miserabily on the implementation, accidentaly buying raw materials we didn’t need and taking too much time to buy extra capacity at mid game. We finally finished on the position 22 out of 140. Ouch!

We collected the standing data during the last 180 days of the competition and created graphs displaying the progression of the different teams. You can download a complete set of charts in high resolution (SVG and PNG files, 30M) and also download an XLS file with the partial financial standing data (The collector missed to get some data points around day 225)

Chart of partial results of the simulation with the top5 teams highlighted.

She described some of her projects, for example in 2007 she twittered for two months in morse code for the Brooklyn museum. For another of her projects (‘Status update’) she sent postcards with a limitation of 140 characteres to the museum in New Haven. The museum exhibited the postcards in a wall with a configuration similar to twitter’s life stream.

She also showed what other people are doing, for example Marina Abramović’s performance art in the MOMA. This new form of art is accessible to anybody in the world, you don’t need to anymore to be living in New York, Paris, London or Berlin to become an artists. More important, the emotional message becomes bidirectional. When you visit a traditional museum you normally spend seconds looking at the art pieces, but in this new form of art the performer invites the his audience to play with the art piece, commenting about it, manipulating it and changing it into new forms. This new form of art is originated in the mid of an artist but it is not controlled by him but by the crowd.

This form of expression uses Twitter and Facebook. An Xiao asked the audience what will happen in China. Will the Chinese Artists use a VPN to reach people out of the Chinese Firewall? Will they use Chinese social media tools? Will the government allow this form of expression? The audience answered timidly, but they agreed the Chinese artists will not use Chinese social media tools.

I didn’t understand why at that time, but I do now. This same week Ai Weiwei, one of the most popular Chinese artists and the most active in twitter (here his english twitter) has disappeared. In China is difficult to set a line between artists and political dissidents. Furthermore the Chinese social media tools are closely monitored by the government. For example Ai WeiWei’s Weibo (The Chinese twitter) account was deleted hours after his owner disappeared. Social Media Art movement has not flourished yet in China because the artists tend to be politically active so they cannot use Chinese social media tools and if they use twitter, which is blocked in China, their visibility is zero.

Going back to the topic, An Xiao introduced her current perfomance. She seats in the configuration you can see in the picture. She has several barriers between her and the person. First, an intimidating gesture, second a table, and third a computer that records everything that the person do. The person in front of her communicates with An Xiao using social media messaging tools with their cell phones.

She said that in previous perfomances the communication she had with the complete unknown people had a very high level of trust and intimacy. People told her about their lives and problems in a transparent way. She thinks those communications would have never taken place in a normal conversation with a cup of coffee.

The performance reminds of the conversations we have when we talk with people that are physically close to us using social media tools instead of our voice. Far from the perfomance itself, I think it has also interesting applications as it can be an interesting way to accelerate the therapy of people with depressions as they are able to transmit what they are really feeling in an easier way.

This is a video of her presentation in Los Angeles:

An Xiao / Art Under the Influence… of Social Media @ Mindshare Los Angeles

More interesting was the Mirasol screen. I had in my hands a Mirasol screen for the first time. Mirasol is one of the most promising color e-tint technologies. They told me a big player will release a 5 inches Mirasol screen device later this year. I hope it is true because the screen has a very fast refresh rate and the size looks perfect for a full featured e-reader device running android.

The coolest thing I saw in the trade show were the laser cut and Laser welding machines. They are big, powerful and very precise. They look very scary.

Barcamp Shanghai Logo

But the most important thing is that I finally met the community in Shanghai. It takes time to do anything here when you don’t speak the local language and you don’t live at the right side of the river. The community in Shanghai is a very international mix of Hackers, Open Software fanatics, Apple zealots, masters of the electron and Social media gurus. All of them got together to share ideas and pizza.

All of them using my language.

Barcamp seating area.

Thanks to msittig for the picture.

If you create content you want to propagate the new items of your feed as soon as you publish the story. Once in the feed the story cannot be changed because the readers would identify it as a new story. Relevant stories in RSS are associated to the lifetime of the story, the most relevant stories being the latest ones. This is a given feature, but it is also a flaw. The story`s age is only one of the factors that define how important it is. The hype the story creates in form of comments and page hits is equally important. In a newspaper, you don’t have the most recent stories on the front page, but the most relevant stories of the day.

The problem with RSS is that it provides too much information. Unfiltered. Not a problem for a machine, but unmanageable for humans. This is the flaw of RSS. If a human is reading several feeds he will be soon flooded with information. These are two possible solutions:

1. Wherever there is the option to subscribe to an RSS feed you can create a personalized feed, setting a minimum relevancy threshold for the stories. There must be an algorithm to calculate relevancy based on the time since publication and the hype the story created. This is a method to add relevancy to RSS feeds based on the information each site owns.
2. The second option is only applicable for data crunching companies. The relevancy of a story is based on the amount of sources reporting on the topic. This impact factor can be calculated by a third party, which then creates a new feed with the filtered news. People could personalize their impact factor by, for example, assigning individual weights to favored news sources. I guess this is how newspapers will look in the future, as services that merge and filter personalized feeds. Guido told me that Google Reader has an option to “Sort by magic” that does a little bit of this. However it only sorts the articles but does not hide the non relevant stories from the feed.

RSS is the father of Web2.0 and a simple content delivery method that will be with us for long. I think somebody needs to come up with a smart way of automatically filtering feeds. Now the question is, how we will consume the filtered RSS. I bet RSS will have a new life on cellphones and smart TV, but that will be another story.

Carlos Moncayo

• The hair dresser lesson
  Carlos spoke about the problem he faced at the beginning, when he had a turnover rate of over 70%. One day he went to the hairdresser and noticed that the shop had many workers and they all seemed to be motivated. He asked the owner about his secret and he told him that all of them were working on a commision system. In China people have a strong entrepreneurial spirit, you can see how easy it is for them to open shops. Once Carlos introduced this system, the turnover ratio improved dramatically. His business now opertates with a 5% turnover rate.

• Every Saint has two candles
  At the head of the organization there must be a figure, a leader, but under him/her there must be two figures. This is not only to assign them different functions, but also to provide mutual support to each other. Furthermore, in case one of them leaves the company, there will be somebody who can immediately take over the tasks of the other person.

• Find your zebras. Identify your shark
  Carlos spoke about the Zebra customer. He did the exercice of modelling the perfect kind of customer they wanted to have in his company. After modelling and identifying it, they only pursued those kinds of model customers. Focusing on one type of costumer allows you to know exactly what your customer wants and needs. He also spoke about the Japanese fish boats that had problems with the freshness of the fish because the fish felt unmotivated in the big tanks inside the boat. The Japanese introduced a shark to keep the fish constantly in movement so they were still fresh by the time they reach the market. The sharks in the entrepeneur world are the competitors that force you to stay in alert.

• The water guy lesson
  Carlos’s wife ordered water bottles from different companies depending on the ads they got in the mail every week, but one day one of the water guys brought a bottle and put a sticker on it with his phone number. They never called any other company. The idea is to get closer to the customer with the aim of offering him a better service. Carlos’s company hired people to be fulltime in the offices of each one of their customers. Even if only a few customers accepted this model, his sales increased 30%.

• Cash is oxygen
  When you start with your business you have limited cash. And it runs out very fast. You need to start as light as possible and once you create movement, make sure you have reserves enough to invest and make your company flourish.

• Management reports are vital signs
  An startup is like a hospital. It is very critical to know the real economic status of your business, as close to real time as possible. Carlos and his team developed a technique to have a periodic “ideal budget” vs “real budget” report and use it to have a close control of the financial status of the company.

• 40000 vs 49
  They tried to develop software to manage the relationship with their customers. Carlos invested a big amount of money in it, however the customers never liked the product. At the end they dropped it and started using Highrise. A simpler, better product that their customers loved, for just 49$ per month.

Carlos Moncayo

Barthi Airtel knows also how to do generic commercials for the brand without focusing on any product. This commercial is stunning, really inspiring and revelating. It will make any Indian proud of being Indian.

In youtube there are more commercials of Barthi Airtel, all of them really good. I don’t know what agency created those amazing ads but If I would have an Indian company I’m sure I will try to hire them!

Apart of all the interesting work being done in our booth, I also explored the trade show and played with the new toys. I really loved Samsung’s projectors integrated on the cell phones. I can’t wait to develop something using Nokia’s QT libraries and publish it using the new Nokia store.

I attended the Mobile Awards, where lots of start ups introduced interesting projects and crazy ideas on elevator pitches (3 minutes maximum). Seems like not enough time, right? In fact 3 minutes is enough time to decide if the project and the guy introducing the startup will success or not. Some of them even started their careers as showmans. I love to attend this kind of start up events because you can feel a lot of creative energy.

You can feel the vibe and see where the industry is headed for the next years.

Only a handful of us are able to speak with regular people being respected as equals. Some are media whores, you can recognize them because they have thousands of followers on Twitter. There are some real scientists and engineers that enjoy explaining technical concepts but most of us suffer when we are speaking about technical stuff to people that lacks basic technical background.

Dilbert

Why do we need to speak with them?

You may need to explain your sales drones the magic that make your product different. It’s amazing that sales people know all the trendy buzzwords but they don’t have a clue of what they meant at a technical level.

You may need to explain your C-level people why your coders have been the last 3 months rewriting the entire architecture of the product without any visible improvement.

It’s clear that eventually you will need to speak with them.

The problems

There are three problems when discussing technology with regular people. The first one is that we can’t use our acronym based jargon but just plain language. The second problem is that we need to picture complex abstract concepts with something easy to understand. The third problem is the short attention span regular people have when listening technology.

There is no point in using acronyms the people doesn’t know about. There are lots of new ones created every day. For similar reasons you can’t use buzzwords, even the ones that have been forever on the web.

As everything is interconnected you may feel tempted to explain how something works explaining the related technology it’s based on. This is a double edge sword, people may understand you better but you will may need to explain the big bang theory and progress from there. By the time you reach your main topic everybody will be dreaming of donuts and you will be preaching in the desert.

The solution: Imagination land.

What you need to do is create a magic world where there aren’t acronyms and the technology is simple and accessible.

In this world, Internet works like the road system. Cars are Internet packets. Each car has a driver that knows their destination. There are two car brands, TCP and UDP. Both cars can go elsewhere on the Internet. They can even go off road to reach obscure destinations like this blog.

TCP cars are women’s favourites. Women always plan in advance their routes. They often get lost on the road but when they finally arrive at the destination the rest of the family is still waiting for them because they are only ones that know how to cook.

UDP cars are normally driven by males. Men don’t like planning. They get into the car and reach their destinations following traffic signals. Lots of drivers get lost but it doesn’t matter because nobody is really waiting for them at home.

On the other hand VPNs are intercity trains. There are already fixed established paths and you are not expected to go off road. Trains are streams of information. Train cars contain data, and on the locomotive is the driver, who knows where the train is headed and has the special key to open each train car.

A web server is a bakery where customers wait in line. Some years ago the bakeries had only a few cakes to choose but now all of the bakeries accept personalized orders. Behind the bakery there are big factories where lots of machines are cooking those cakes following personalized recipes. The factories are often interconnected so the product of one factory can be an ingredient on the next one. There are also giant storage places managed by third companies where all the ingredients (information) of the world is logically stored.

A firewall is the muscular guy at the entrance of popular spots. People in line are the network packets. If a network packet look suspicious the big guy will not let him in because he is not wearing today’s correct shoes. Once the disco is full the big guy act as traffic container and don’t let anybody to pass unless it’s a VoIP packet.

Spread the fun

Using this imaginary world make our world accessible to anybody. It’s easier and fun to explain, the people don’t lose their attention span, they don’t get lost under thousands of mysterious acronyms and they leave the room with an smile and a general picture of how things work.

If they are interested in the topic they will ask questions. That’s the moment in which you can switch to technical jargon language. You will saturate their attention span in minutes, they will get lost and they will not ask again. You ego will be intact.

The Spanish SMS language makes use of compressed words taking off vowels and shortening expressions. In consequence it is faster to write a message in SMS language and you can pack more information in each SMS.

This SMS language is seen as an aberration for Academics, which are seriously concerned about those simplifications finding their way onto regular Spanish. One of the most widespread problems is that nobody writes SMS messages with accents.

What not everybody knows is that if you want to write proper Spanish on your SMS messages, you will need to pay more for each message.

The technical reason

All the cells in Spain are configured to send messages of 160 characters. However, the real payload limit for an SMS message is 140 bytes. We can encode 160 characters on only 140 bytes using a 7 bit character set.

A bit after the dinosaurs ruled the world, the computers spoke to each other on complete 8 bit words. American people were not entirely happy with this solution. You have plenty of space to encode all English characters on 7 bits so using 8 bits per word was seen as a waste of space. One bit does not seem a lot, but it was actually a big deal when computers could just manage a few kilobytes of memory.

So they took off the first bit and the 7 bit characters sets were born. The most widespread is named ASCII. On 7 bit you can refer to 127 characters but instead of including foreign symbols, American people decided to use the free space for drawing symbols and to control printers. This was a decision what made easier to develop software but it also made sharing information encoded in different character sets a big headache.

On the other hand GSM was an European effort, a lot more concerned about interoperability on the entire region. Instead of using standard ASCII they decided to create a new 7 bit character set removing the useless symbols and control characters and including the special symbols of the European languages. They included German, French, Danish and Finish symbols, but they just included the Spanish symbol “ñ“, essential to write wonderful words as coño,maricastaña,ñoño, guiñapo or moño.

The GSM character set is spoken by all the GSM cellphones on earth. This is how it looks:

On the GSM character set there are all the lowercased French accents but only the lowercased Spanish é. Why they included only one Spanish accent is a mystery to me. It’s useless.

You have probably noticed that this character set has 255 spaces but I said that GSM is a 7-bit character set. It actually was at the beginning, but eventually they decided to extend the character set with a beautiful hack on the system. They allow referring the upper 127 symbols using 14 bits (one control symbol plus the upper symbol). That’s why when you write a ‘[',']‘ or € symbol on your cell it counts as 2 characters instead of one. As you see there is still lot of empty space. Why they didn’t seize the opportunity to include more symbols? No idea.

GSM is also used out of Europe. Can Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Arabic people send messages in their languages? Yes, but they don’t use standard GSM character set. They use UTF-16/UCS2 (Unicode) to encode their symbols. Unicode solve all the problems because it includes on one character set all the symbols of all the present and future real languages  you can think of. Unicode is the character set equivalent to a nuclear power plant.

Unicode requires 2 bytes per character. As we have a maximum payload of 140 bytes, all those countries using Unicode have a limitation of 70 characters per message. This is not a big deal for Korean, Chinese and Japanese people because they can transmit very dense information with their symbols. I guess Russian people have the same problem as we have with Spanish.

What is the problem? Spanish is not a dense language. Using Unicode to write Spanish means we can only use 70 character messages. 70 characters is simply too short. Remember that we already have a very compressed SMS language to deal with the 160 character limitation.

You can set up your phone to send messages in proper Spanish in Unicode. It’s very easy. Why the Spanish cells are not configured by default in Unicode? I guess it would be a nightmare for PR Operator’s department because thousands of people would start complaining about extra cost. Spanish operators charge concatenated messages as independent messages.

There was a nice alternative which was also the ethically correct solution. The operators could have changed their billing processes to allow sending sequences of two or three Unicode-written concatenated messages at the cost of one message. That would have meant that sending 160 character messages of proper Spanish in Unicode would have cost the same as one message. That nice solution would have forced the Operators to assume extra transmission  costs. Let’s say they could lose 0,00001% less. I got that number out of thin air but I don’t think it’s far from reality.

The operators chose between giving the possibility of write proper Spanish in concatenated short messages or ignore the problem and force the people to write bad Spanish.

Everybody knew what happened. In fact using SMS language was used by the operators on their marketing campaigns to attract young people. It was just cool and modern to use it. The operators forced the people to write bad cool Spanish.

So if Spaniards start using SMS-based language while singing flamenco,  remember that part of the problem was that one executive working on a Spanish operator thought that it was a good idea to sacrifice our language in exchange of a bit of extra revenue.