Silicon Valley Musings

Below is a list of the things that may be useful for the fellowship’s “toolbox” beyond a couple of servers:

Digital Certificates. For most of the fellowship’s projects, security is a big issue. When developing secure Web based applications, creating and managing certificates is always a problem. We could buy a multi-year digital vision certificate from Verisign or or Stanford’s prefered certificate authority (CA), InstantSSL. See http://www.stanford.edu/services/ssl/ for details. Cost starts around $50 per year per server.

A more interesting but more difficult idea would have the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship become a certificate authority for all its current and future projects. Each year, one of the fellows would be the CA manager and issue certificates. Cost is can be free, but will require fellow’s time.

Prepay cellular phone. Fellows may want a phone available for testing SMS text messaging, voice interfaces etc. Verizion sells a package where you “pay as you go” that doesn’t require a contract or credit check. Cost $150 for the phone and a minimum of $15 per call “refill.”

Voice over IP phone. Grandstream SIPPhone’s are now about sixty dollars a piece. Free SIPPhone software is available at http://sipphone.com/softsipphone/.

Bulk SMS Messaging. A couple companies sell access to SMS messaging gateways. You can send SMS message to almost anywhere in the world from your own custom application. You can buy blocks of SMS messages with almost no startup cost, but higher per message cost. Cheaper blocks start at around $150. See http://www.mxtelecom.com/ or http://www.clickatell.com/ for details.

USB/Firewire Hard disk enclosure. Hard disk enclosures allow you to take a stand alone hard disk and connect it externally to any PC. Its a great way to do backups or transfer large amounts of files. At the end of the fellowship, some fellows may want to take all their data home on a seperate disk. When they get home, theywould have to install the hard disk into a PC or buy their own enclosure. Cost of enclosure is under a $100. 20GB hard drive is around $50.