DNS Dissident
"Subtlety doesn't matter," says Karl Auerbach about his very vocal participation in setting policy for Net domains. A year ago, Auerbach, a former researcher for Cisco Systems in San Jose, was one of five at-large directors elected to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers board, in a vote marked by technical glitches and low turnout. Before the election, Auerbach was known as a vociferous ICANN critic; since then, he's stepped up his attacks and will toss more grenades at the annual ICANN board meeting in November. His latest beef? Gaining access to the nonprofit's general ledger, which he says should be available to him according to California state law. "There's two ways to fix ICANN: Abolish it or repair it," says Auerbach. "I came in knowing I would be confrontational."
Boomslayer
Turbulence in the Nasdaq is nothing for Laura Conigliaro. Before tracking tech stocks for Goldman Sachs, Conigliaro traced threats to America's national security for the NSA. The unshakable analyst recently surprised the financial world with her report "Backing Out of the Bubble," in which she scrutinizes the sector's growth and suggests what it would have looked like without the boom. Her take isn't pretty: Without an emerging technology to drive spending and earnings, growth remains anemic - at 10 to 12 percent - even after a recovery. Wireless networks and devices might jump-start the next boom, but that's years away. This certainly isn't what investors want to hear, but Conigliaro tells it like it is. "We don't have the innovation to stimulate above-line growth," she says. "We may underfund innovation. This is dangerous if you're looking for a stimulus - it might take longer."
Go Ask A.L.I.C.E.
Brooklyn-based VoiceXML junkie Jon Baer has teamed up with PhD Richard Wallace to form the A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation (www.alicebot.org). Their mission: transform Wallace's text-based chatbot into a cross-platform, Java-based intelligent agent that plugs into any data source to dish out conversational responses. The open source group's first task is to pen the bot's latest spec, due out by year's end. The new version uses AIML, the AI markup language that Baer wrote to add speech recognition and text-to-speech functions. "Web sites are menu- and command-driven now," says Baer. "Before you know it, people will be fed up with the technology. The only thing they'll talk to is an A.L.I.C.E. bot."
Squeeze Play
Back in 1992, Jules Urbach passed on enrolling at Harvard so he could begin designing Hellcab, one of the first CD-ROM games ever made. Urbach, now 27, went on to cofound LA-based developer Groove Alliance (www.3dgroove.com), where he serves as chief technologist. The company's platform, which lets gamers play compressed, browser-based 3-D titles, has lured clients in need of slick promo products, such as Nickelodeon and Mazda. Urbach's crew just released Groove 2.0, the Swiss Army knife of online multimedia software. The stand-alone engine requires only 500K of disk space, runs up to 1,000 times faster than Shockwave, and lets users download image, audio, and video compressors that work 5 to 20 percent better than standard shrinkers. "We optimized everything we could," says Urbach. Look for the first consumer application of Groove's technology this November, in the next generation of Real Pool from Arush.
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