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CompuSchmooze™ Newspaper Columns: A Monthly Guide to Jewish Resources in Cyberspace

CompuSchmooze

The CompuSchmoozeTM name is a trademark owned bySteven L. Lubetkin, and is the name of a series of columns published monthly in the Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey. These articles and associated podcasts are Copyright © 1996-2010 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

Read the current CompuSchmooze column here.


Any commercial use of these articles or podcasts requires purchase of use rights from the copyright owner. For information on reprint rights to these articles, please send me an email message.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

 

CompuSchmooze Podcast #11 and Article for November 2005: FedEx Furniture Websites Decor Clashes with Delivery Service Lawyers

Copyright © 2005 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.





Earlier this year, José Avila III, a young computer programmer from California, moved to Arizona for a new job. José didnt want to cause his roommates in California any financial difficulty, so he kept paying his share of the rent, and that didnt leave him with extra money to decorate his new apartment.

"I do a bunch of shipping, so I had a lot of shipping boxes sitting next to me," Avila recalled. "I went for almost a month sitting on the floor working. A friend of mine sent me a picture of a desk he had made, and I took a look at that and was, like, Wow, I could do that, too, and Ive got everything right here, and I can make it a little more attractive and creative and interesting."

Avila built a desk for his 17-inch computer monitor, and then a dining room set, a bed, and a 9-1/2 foot couch. His friends suggested he post photos on the web so other friends could see his creations.

He was reluctant at first, but then says he felt his furniture might inspire people who were a little tapped financially.

"I thought about it, and maybe I could reach out to somebody that was a little depressed or sort of in a bad situation, and inspire them to go out and be creative," he said.

But there are few, if any, secrets on the Internet.

Avila told a few friends about his photos, which he posted on www.fedexfurniture.com. He decorated the site with the familiar orange-and-purple branding of FedEx.
He asked his friends not to spread it around too much. As if they would listen.

The next morning, Avila had tons of email, and the site was getting attention from the news media. Unlike Avila's friends, though, FedEx wasn't laughing.

They sent him a sternly worded legal letter claiming infringement of the companys copyrights and trademarks. They also invoked the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to pressure Avilas web hosting service to take the site offline.

Avila sought help from the Center for Internet and Society Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford University, which got FedEx to admit that it used the provisions of the DMCA inappropriately.But instead of buckling under populist pressure, FedEx stood firm in its assertion of its design copyrights and intellectual property rights.

"In constructing useful articles on which the pictorial work [FedEx designs] is displayed, Mr. Avila created a derivative work without permission of FedEx," wrote Les Bishop, FedEx Lead Counsel, Legal-Marketing & Intellectual Property, in an August 3 letter to Jennifer Granick, director of the Stanford legal clinic. The consent of the copyright owner ... is necessary..."

There's nothing better than a David and Goliath story, and so very soon, Avila was being interviewed on Good Morning America and the Today Show. FedEx seems to have won the legal skirmish, because the fedexfurniture website is offline as of this writing.

You can still get a sense of Avila's creations on the BlogDetective blog, and on the Wiredmagazine online site. You can also do a Google image search on FedEx + furniture and youll find some of the surviving photos of Avila's furniture on other websites and blogs.

In retrospect, Avila says he realizes that FedEx might have a point, but thinks they lawyered up too quickly.

"Had I been asked gently, instead of a were going to sue you into oblivion," said Avila, "I could have been persuaded."

FedEx declined to provide a representative to be interviewed for this story, but did provide a written statement.

"We salute Mr. Avila's innovative decorating style, and we're proud of the strength and durability of our boxes," reads the statement. "However, we have no choice but to protect our good name, no matter how trivial the situation seems. Mr. Avila's continued promotion of his creativity beyond his apartment requires that we ask him to simply stop his promotional efforts and respect our rights."
In an era when buzz, or unconventional word-of-mouth, marketing is used to create excitement for products to help them break through the clutter of commercials, embracing FedEx Furniture might have been better for the delivery service. But there's also a school of thought that says, I dont care what you say about me, as long as you spell my name right.


Download the podcast interview with José Avila. (18.77 mb stereo MP3 file, 13:40 mins.)

Theme Music: "Katonah," from Tone Matrix, podcast friendly music via GarageBand.com

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Saturday, November 05, 2005

 

CompuSchmooze Podcast #10: Interview with Matt Revis, Product Marketing Manager for Dragon Naturally Speaking

This is the podcast of my interview with Matt Revis, product marketing manager for Dragon Naturally Speaking, the subject of my October 2005 CompuSchmooze column.



Download the podcast file here (22.5 mb stereo MP3 file; program is 15:36.)

Podcast friendly theme music: "Trizano Bridge," by Organic!, from Odeo's Podcast NYC Podsafe Music (Yeah, we got it wrong in the podcast and said it was from GarageBand.com, but we figured out the mistake when we were preparing the show notes and looked for the link.)




Band's website is http://www.organicnyc.com/

 

CompuSchmooze Article - October 2005: Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a well-spoken program

CompuSchmooze - October 2005: Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a well-spoken program
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2005 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

It's been several years since we took a look at computerized dictation programs. I thought it might be a good time to revisit this technology, so I am writing this column without touching the keyboard very much.

I'm using a program called Dragon NaturallySpeaking Version 8, which is currently being distributed by ScanSoft (www.ScanSoft.com), better known as the manufacturers of a range of image scanning software programs and scanners such as the Strobe Pro single page scanner which we may get to in a future column.

Like its predecessors in this genre, Dragon NaturallySpeaking requires a fairly powerful processor. The manufacturer recommends at least a 500 MHz Pentium III processor, with 256 MB of RAM and 500 MB of hard drive space. The program only works on Windows XP or Windows 2000. There is a significant and noticeable improvement in its ability to recognize your words quickly and accurately since the last time I looked at this kind of software.

The last time I looked at voice recognition software, I had the amusing experience of having the words "bar mitzvah" rendered as "oat bran." I'm happy to report that in dictating the last sentence, the program rendered the words accurately on the first try.

Matt Revis of ScanSoft said the company heard customer demands for greater accuracy.

"We decided that instead of doing a whole slew of bells and whistles around the new release, were just going to put almost all of our R&D investment into speech recognition accuracy," he said. "We got close to a 30% improvement in speech recognition accuracy, and that's just made a huge difference."

Dragon creates a toolbar at the top of your screen with icons to turn the microphone on and off, and other drop-down menu picks for tools and instant training of unrecognized words. Before you actually begin working with the program, you do have to engage in a short reading exercise to train the program to recognize your voice correctly. However, the reading selections are short, and as far as I can tell, you only need to read one selection. Earlier programs like this required you to read multiple selections, taking as long as half an hour to train the program to be effective.

As you dictate, you vocalize the punctuation marks by saying their name. The program does recognize the names of the punctuation marks, but this can be a bit of a problem if you are tryingto dictate the word "period" or the word "comma." To get the word to appear, I had to tell the program spell that, which opens a window where you can say the letters making up the word, by saying choose one or choose fiveand so on.

Dragon also works with a wide range of handheld dictation recorders, essentially any digital recorder that can create audio files convertible into the standard WAV file format. I haven't had a chance to train the program to recognize dictation from my newest portable audio recorder, the Olympus DS2, but I will report on that effort in a footnote in a future column.

ScanSoft also distributes IBMs ViaVoice speech recognition program, but aims it at a less-sophisticated audience more focused on brand and more focused on price, said Revis. People who prefer Dragon are more focused on features, he said.

"The typical customer using Dragon is someone who is maybe more computer savvy, who wants to get more out of speech recognition," said Revis. "The IBM buyer is more of an impulse buyer."

There are customized versions of Dragon Naturally Speaking for medical, legal, and office professionals. Depending on which version of the product you purchase, the price ranges from $99 up to over $600 for the professional versions, but remember that these include specialized vocabulary/dictionaries for medical or legal terminology.


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