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.