Awefully long time no post

Gosh, it has been so long for no posting. It seems I have really graduated from MIT;). Time for a new blog link. So, here's it is: http://benjamin-jiang.blogspot.com/

Sponsoring MIT Sloan Sales Conference

nexiwave is now a technology sponsor of MIT Sloan Sales Conference. The Sloan Sales Conference is really an awesome event. Besides all the great sessions, just for the fact of networking with industry peers is a great opportunity.

nexiwave is giving out a special promo code for anyone who goes to MIT Sloan Sales Conference. I strongly encourage everyone to sign up for this event: http://www.sloansalesconference.com/

Support from SDM Community...

I am really grateful for all the support that was received from the SDM community, both from alum and current. Thanks to Samir, Carrie, Cyndi and Shashi, of course. Really appreciate!

Of course, not to mention the support from SDM program as well.

Made it to MIT 100K Semifinal

Great night after all. Our venture, nexiwave.com, made it to MIT 100K Semifinal (5 out of 35 in Web/IT track). It has been really hard work. It's nice to get validated in some sort of way.

On a side note, I would like to congrat SDM program too. SDM has 5 teams made to MIT 100K Semifinal. That's 5 teams out of 30 teams. 17%, wow, that's great record for SDM. Congrats to Alex, Chad, Jeff, Arthur and my partner Cynthia.

Help from MIT High Performance Computing group

Kurt Keville from MIT High Performance Computing group, who also happens to be SDM09, has been helping with the SDM cluster. I really feel fortunate that Kurt said he has a few GPUs and a few small clusters that can be hooked into the cluster. Hopefully, we can attach them to the cluster soon. It should improve the performance greatly. Thanks, Kurt!

Blogs and SDM

Today, Nisheeth grabbed and chatted about using SDM blogger to promote sdm. I think it's a superb idea. I researched Yoav's blogs extensively before decided to go SDM. Actually, it provided at least as much as information as sdm.mit.edu.

To my fellow sdm bloggers, this is what I am thinking:

• Discuss our interest areas and have our blogs a little more specialized in those area: SDM Courses, SDM student life, MIT life...
  
• Have sdm.mit.edu link our blog entries;
• This should involve both present and past SDMers. Or anyone who wants to contribute back to sdm.

Nisheeth also mentioned monthly news letter to SDMers (sorry stealing your thunder a little here). That's a great idea too. We should propsoe this to Pat.

Let me know what you think...

MS Speech SDK and start-ups

My teammate of strategy class, Alex Stevenson, reminded me that there is a speech sdk available from MS. I played with it, but haven't found a way for speaker adaptation though. Will keep pushing on this front (when got time;)). Alex worked at MS before came to sloan and was on the direct2d team...

On another note, apologize for not post for so long. Too many things going on and didn't know what to post;). nexiwave is doing very good at this moment, with the first contract in hand and turning in profit-making company;-o. Other than that, I have been really working really hard: nexiwave is the main focus of course. A lot of small features, bug fixing, etc.

I am also involved with 3 more start-ups, with Barr and Jason mainly. I am glad that Barr is very interested in my facebook idea. Speaking of that, I need to do the slides for the facebook idea for the 100K entry. I am on a side-team with MBT and helping out with SENLive.

Too much to dump for one entry. Nexi time;).

Broke my promise yesterday...

Leigh had an impromptu gathering at Tavern in the Square last night and I promised I'd go. I didn't make it though, but my excuse was I was with another friend. I am sure my fellow SDMers had fun there.

btw: rushed to SDM to install the two new and final rack servers around midnight. I realized I used up all available ports in the switch. In the need of a gigabit switch again.

SENLive

This afternoon, I had a good chat with with CEO of SENLive, Jason. We discussed how I can help out with SENLive.com. Very interesting problem to solve and we made a few very interesting differentiation points. SENLive definitely has a huge market to tackle, but also not with an uphill battle though. Jason is also interested in enrolling into MIT 100K. A lot of work is ahead for this.

Spring already

Looks like Spring term is here already. I shopped for a few classes with one of the other fellow SDMer for some strategy class. Still deciding which one to take. Am I taking way too many strategy classes? Maybe I should sign up for some leadership classes instead. I do need one more class though.

The reason of being this late for the classes was because of the craziness of doing many things at the same time: a start-up to build, a family to care and ... a MIT Master degree, probably one of the most demanding University in the world;), to finish. Life is certainly the way I wanted it to be: don't want to know what for sure will happen six month from now: It seems I am slated to graduate this July, but we still haven't decided where to live yet. Oh, the craziness.

What a difference...

I had problem to find a home for the two rack servers that I bought. They are extremely cheap, but also extremely noisy. Brian Bulmer, the IT support for SDM/LFM program who had been really kind in support my effort, could only take them 20 minutes. Even for that, I gave him credit. Those two rack server are real beast. I looked up the spec for the 10 fans in the two servers. All of them are max air flow. As you might have guessed, max air flow also translates into max noise. Anyway, it has been bothering me for not able to find a home for these two servers. The reason I wanted to use these two servers was the price. Wayne Liu from SDM07 was kindly enough to offer to build machines with the current market specs. However, that would cost a lot for a single machine. For the price of today's single machine, I could get 3 or 4 racks servers. Consider we probably need 5 machines for redundancy. The cost saving is just too big to resist.

Anyway, Dave Schultz from SDM program office was very kind to let me use SDM storage room for the rack servers. There I have it, my own server room. I probably can dump 42U in there without bother anyone;). Thanks, Dave.

There is no network drop in the storage room and I had to get some wire thru the door and used a Linksys switch to share the one network connection.

After the 4 beer Chinese New Year celebration at Jeff place this evening, I figured I might as well move all the machines to the room. I did and it turned out to be a mistake. The network speed is much much slower. For the same page on nexiwave.com, from the room, it might take 3-4 seconds. If I connect it to the wall directly, it only took <0.5 second. I am thinking the Linksys is the pulpit. Anyway, I had to un-do the move. Now, the network speed is perfect again. I am thinking buying a cisco switch to replace the linksys, or... jab;)...

Google's Crawler...

Looks like Google's crawler has finally decided to crawl nexiwave.com. Maybe I should sign up hubspot to get more traffic from google....

C:\>nslookup 66.249.73.129
Server: STRAWB.MIT.EDU
Address: 18.71.0.151

Name: crawl-66-249-73-129.googlebot.com
Address: 66.249.73.129

First batch of SDM invites is out

what a holiday I had. Worked like (replace with any of your favorite curse word), a lot. Anyway, just sent out the first batch of a small group of SDMers to register the at our website for conf calls. Finally I have some time to blog a bit.

Thanks, Sergey, for being the first one to sign up.

let's see how it goes.