Cory Forsyth » popdialer

bad Popularity Dialer

cory — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 03:48:22 +0000

Oops, the FCC gave us a citation. We're figuring out what makes sense (and what's legal!), and the dialer should be up again soon.

Popularity Dialer on Bbc world service

cory — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 12:27:09 +0000

Bbc world service, originally uploaded by bantic.

Jenny and I had an interview with the BBC World Service last week. I was at the BBC World Service Studios on the west side of NYC, she was in a studio in a public school in San Francisco, and the person interviewing us was in London.

I spent some time listening to past interviews that we had done, thought over some of the more academic aspects of the pop dialer, and in general had thought of all these erudite things to say. It's the BBC World Service, after all. And of course what happened was we were in the studio for like 20 minutes total, and at the very start our interviewer told us to keep it light and non-academic, and I never got to say any of the things that I prepared. But it was still a lot of fun.

You can hear how we did for yourself. It'll be broadcast on the BBC World Service today. I'll update this post with a link to it when I find out what it will be.
Funny story: The interviewer was under the impression that Jenny and I were a couple, and was all prepared to announce that on the radio until we set him straight.

Popularity Dialer on DailyCandy tomorrow

cory — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:07:53 +0000

The Popularity Dialer is going to be featured on DailyCandy's Everywhere edition tomorrow. I just had a nice phone call with editor Jean to confirm the types of calls and how it works. Update: Yep, it ran today. Popularity Dialer in DailyCandy. Here's a screenshot:

Popularity Dialer Redux

cory — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 16:29:23 +0000

This makes me more excited than when I discovered there was a Popularity Dialer Typosquatter (at popularitydAIler.com): The British TV station Channel 4 created a spoof video using the audio from the Female Popularity Dial. Here it is:

Popularity Dialer Video

cory — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 23:18:05 +0000

Jenny and Sai made this video about the Popularity Dialer in the spring. I finally put it up on Youtube last week so it would be up there for our KROQ interview. Check it out. The music's great.

popularity dialer on KROQ

cory — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 03:38:57 +0000

Jenny and I are going to be interviewed on KROQ tomorrow, Thursday, June 14th, at 8am Pacific time to talk about the Popularity Dialer. We'll be on the Kevin and Bean show. I used to commute 30 miles from Santa Monica to Santa Fe Springs to work at McMaster-Carr and I used to listen to Kevin and Bean all the time while I was stuck in traffic, so it's kind of an honor to get an email from Lightning. This clip from Family Guy reminds me of KROQ...

Here I come, Amazon EC2

cory — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 16:23:21 +0000

In my email this morning:

This is a brief note to confirm that we've enabled your access to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) limited beta. We hope you enjoy the service and wanted to point out a few resources that will help you get up and running quickly. Please be sure to visit the following:

I'm pretty stoked to try out Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. Selling computing power is such a smart idea. Here's a cool idea, in a similar vein, for a startup: Why not take advantage of the long tail here, and create a marketplace for unused consumer computing cycles? SETI@Home and Electric Sheep have already demonstrated that it's totally feasible to leach compute power from underused consumer computers. Why not create an app that a person could run that would be like a water meter, keeping track of how many cycles are being "borrowed" at any given time, and then pay the person a per-hour amount for that time? On the other side, sell the extra computing time to research labs and anyone else that wants to do big number-crunching offline jobs. Who wouldn't install that app if they could make a few extra bucks on it, at no real cost to them? I think the only thing that would get in the way is the fantastic cheapness of computing power. Amazon only charges $0.10/hour for the equivalent of a full 1.7GHz machine with 1GB ram. Say this hypothetical startup charges $0.01/hour to a research lab to lease 1/8th of your machine's capacity, and then splits that with you. At $0.005/hour, that's only about $3.50 a month if the computer is on 24-7. ...almost not worth the time it takes to install. On the other hand, if this hypothetical startup could manage to get an installed base of 100K users (and one would imagine it would be hard but definitely not impossible to sell someone on installing an app that pays them $3.50/month), that's over 2 million in annual profit. I'm also really excited to poke around with using EC2 to run Asterisk. Voice apps, as we found out with the Popularity Dialer, tend to need to scale much sooner in the lifecycle than traditional web apps.

Asterisk Lecture @ ITP

cory — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 23:20:26 +0000

Dennis Crowley (co-founder of Dodgeball and ITP alum) asked me to come in last night and give a little intro talk to his Ubiquitous Computing for Mobile Devices class about how Asterisk works and how some of the apps I've built (like the popularity dialer) using it work. I was honored to have been asked and had a good time preparing a slideshow and talk to give everyone. Here is a link to the Asterisk lecture. It was created using S5, an HTML-and-javascript slide presenter that I highly recommend. There's nothing like the confidence of knowing your slideshow is online and thus totally presentable anywhere, no matter whether the conference room has PowerPoint, Keynote, etc. The event kickstarted me into setting up a Trixbox server on an old laptop in my living room. It's pictured below (nestled between the fridge and my roommate's door):

The Popularity Dialer in Stuff Magazine

cory — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 12:52:22 +0000

The Popularity Dialer is in the current issue of Stuff Magazine. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's in the "Douche-O-Meter" section.